lMlPf^lFlOT
 
 
 ROBEET ELSMEEE
 
 ROBERT ELSMERE 
 
 // t ' ^ r 
 
 j4-< & ^A^-C*-' ' 
 
 BY 
 
 MRS. HUMPHRY WARD 
 
 AUTHOR OF 'MISS BHETHERTON ' 
 
 London 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 1888 
 
 All riyhts reserved
 
 Printed by R. & K. Cl.AKK, Edinburg
 
 ta Hit 
 
 OF 
 
 MY TWO FRIENDS, 
 
 SEPARATED, IN MY THOUGHT OF THEM, BY MUCH DIVERSITY OF 
 
 CIRCUMSTANCE AND OPINION ; 
 
 LINKED, IN MY FAITH ABOUT THEM, TO EACH OTHER, 
 
 AND TO ALL THE SHINING ONES OF THE PAST, 
 
 BY THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE 
 
 SERVICE OF MAN: 
 
 THOMAS HILL GREEN 
 
 (LATE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD), 
 Died 2Qth March 1882; 
 
 AND 
 
 LAURA OCTAVIA MARY LYTTELTON, 
 
 Died Easter Eve 1886.

 
 CONTENTS 
 
 BOOK I 
 
 PAOM 
 
 WESTMORELAND . 1 
 
 BOOK II 
 SURREY . . . * . . .140 
 
 BOOK III 
 THE SQUIRE 251 
 
 BOOK IV 
 CRISIS 333 
 
 BOOK V 
 ROSE 387' 
 
 BOOK VI 
 NEW OPENINGS . 461 
 
 BOOK VII 
 GAIN AND Lost; 549
 
 NOTE 
 
 The quotations given in the present book on pp. 58, 330, and 
 536, are either literally or substantially taken from a volume of 
 Lay Sermons, called The Witness of God, by the late Professor 
 T. H. Green.
 
 BOOK I 
 
 WESTMOKELAXD
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 IT was a brilliant afternoon towards the end of May. The 
 spring had been unusually cold and late, and it was evident 
 from the general aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of 
 Long Whindale that warmth and sunshine had only just pene- 
 trated to its bare green recesses, where the few scattered trees 
 were fast rushing into their full summer dress, while at their 
 feet, and along the bank of the stream, the flowers of March and 
 April still lingered, as though they found it impossible to believe 
 that their rough brother, the east wind, had at last deserted 
 them. The narrow road, which was the only link between the 
 farmhouses sheltered by the crags at the head of the valley and 
 those far-away regions of town and civilisation suggested by the 
 smoke wreaths of Whinborough on the southern horizon, was 
 lined with masses of the white heckberry or bird-cherry, and ran, 
 an arrowy line of white, through the greenness of the sloping 
 pastures. The sides of some of the little becks runnfng down 
 into the main river and many of the plantations round the farms 
 were gay with the same tree, so that the farmhouses, gray-roofed 
 and gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed 
 here ana there to have been robbed of all their natural austerity 
 of aspect, and to be masquerading in a dainty garb of white and 
 green imposed upon them by the caprice of the spring. 
 
 During the greater part of its course the valley of Long Whin- 
 dale is tame and featureless. The hills at the lower part are 
 low and rounded, and the sheep and cattle pasture over slopes 
 unbroken either by wood or rock. The fields are bare and close 
 shaven by the flocks which feed on them ; the walls run either 
 perpendicularly in many places up the fells or horizontally along 
 them, so that, save for the wooded course of the tumbling river 
 and the bush-grown hedges of the road, the whole valley looks 
 like a green map divided bv regular lines of grayish black. But 
 as the walker penetrates farther, beyond a certain bend which 
 the stream makes half way from the head of the dale, the hills 
 grow steeper, the breadth between them contracts, the enclosure 
 lines are broken and deflected by rocks and patches of planta- 
 tion, and the few farms stand more boldly and conspicuously
 
 4 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 forward, each on its spur of land, looking up to or away from 
 the great masses of frowning crag which close in the head of the 
 valley, and which from the moment they come into sight give it 
 dignity and a wild beauty. 
 
 On one of these solitary houses, the afternoon sun, about to 
 descend before very long behind the hills dividing Long Whin- 
 dale from Shanmoor, was still lingering on this May afternoon 
 we are describing, bringing out the whitewashed porch and the 
 broad bands of white edging the windows into relief against the 
 gray stone of the main fabric, the gray roof overhanging it, and 
 the group of sycamores and Scotch firs which protected it from 
 the cold east and north. The western light struck full on a 
 copper beech, which made a welcome patch of warm colour in 
 front of a long gray line of outhouses standing level with the 
 house, and touched the heckberry blossom which marked the 
 upward course of the little lane connecting the old farm with 
 the road ; above it rose the green fell, broken here and there by 
 jutting crags, and below it the ground sank rapidly through a 
 piece of young hazel plantation, at this present moment a sheet 
 of bluebells, towards the level of the river. There was a dainty 
 and yet sober brightness about the whole picture. Summer in 
 the North is for Nature a time of expansion and of joy as it is 
 elsewhere, but there is none of that opulence, that sudden 
 splendour and superabundance, which mark it in the South. In 
 these bare green valleys there is a sort of delicate austerity 
 even in the summer ; the memory of winter seems to be still 
 lingering about these wind-swept fells, about the farmhouses, 
 with their rough serviceable walls, of the same stone as the crags 
 behind them, and the ravines, in which the shrunken becks 
 trickle musically down through the debris of innumerable 
 Decembers. The country is blithe, but soberly blithe. Nature 
 shows herself delightful to man, but there is nothing absorbing 
 or intoxicating about her. Man is still well able to defend him- 
 self against her, to live his own independent life of labour and 
 of will, and to develop the tenacity of hidden feeling, that slowly 
 growing intensity of purpose, which is so often Aviled out of him 
 by the spells of the South. 
 
 The distant aspect of Burwood Farm differed in nothing from 
 that of the few other farmhouses which dotted the fells or clus- 
 tered beside the river between it and the rocky end of the valley. 
 But as one came nearer, certain signs of difference became visible. 
 The garden, instead of being the old-fashioned medley of phloxes, 
 lavender bushes, monthly roses, gooseberry trees, herbs, and 
 pampas grass, with which the farmers' wives of Long Whindale 
 loved to nil their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in 
 turf dotted with neat flower-beds, full at the moment we are 
 writing of with orderly patches of scarlet and purple anemones, 
 wallflowers, and pansies. At the side of the house a new bow 
 window, modest enough in dimensions and make, had been 
 thrown out on to another close-shaven piece of lawn, and by its
 
 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 5 
 
 suggestion of a distant sophisticated order of things disturbed 
 the homely impression left by the untouched ivy-grown walls, 
 the unpretending porch, and wide slate window-sills of the front. 
 And evidently the line of sheds standing level with the dwelling- 
 house no longer sheltered the animals, the carts, or the tools which 
 make the small capital of a Westmoreland farmer. The windows 
 in them were new, the doors fresh painted and closely shut ; cur- 
 tains of some soft outlandish make showed themselves in what 
 had once been a stable, and the turf stretched smoothly up to a 
 narrow gravelled path in front of them, unbroken by a single 
 footmark. No, evidently the old farm, for such it undoubtedly 
 was, had been but lately, or comparatively lately, transformed 
 to new and softer uses ; that rough patriarchal life of which 
 it had once been a symbol and centre no longer bustled and 
 clattered through it. It had become the shelter of new ideals, 
 the home of another and a milder race than once possessed it. 
 
 In a stranger coming upon the house for the first time, on 
 this particular evening, the sense of a changing social order 
 and a vanishing past produced by the slight but significant 
 modifications it had undergone, would have been greatly quick- 
 ened by certain sounds which were streaming out on to the 
 evening air from one of the divisions of that long one-storied 
 addition to the main dwelling we have already described. Some 
 indefatigable musician inside was practising the violin with 
 surprising energy and vigour, and within the little garden 
 the distant murmur of the river and the gentle breathing of 
 the west wind round the fell were entirely conquered and 
 banished by these triumphant shakes and turns, or by the 
 nourishes and the broad cantabile passages of one of Spohr's 
 Andantes. For a while, as the sun sank lower and lower towards 
 the Shanmoor hills, the hidden artist had it all his, or her, own 
 way ; the valley and its green spaces seemed to be possessed by 
 this stream of eddying sound, and no other sign of life broke 
 the gray quiet of the house. But at last, just as the golden ball 
 touched the summit of the craggy fell, which makes the western 
 boundary of the dale at its higher end, the house door opened, 
 and a young girl, shawled and holding some soft burden in her 
 arms, appeared on the threshold, and stood there for a moment, 
 as though trying the quality of the air outside. Her pause of 
 inspection seemed to satisfy her, for she moved forward, leaving 
 the door open behind her, and, stepping across the lawn, settled 
 herself in a wicker chair under an apple-tree, which had only 
 just shed its blossoms on the turf below. She had hardly done 
 so when one of the distant doors opening on the gravel path 
 flew open, and another maiden, a slim creature garbed in 
 aesthetic blue, a mass of reddish brown hair flying back from 
 her face, also stepped out into the garden. 
 
 ' Agnes ! ' cried the new-comer, who had the strenuous and 
 dishevelled air natural to one just emerged from a long violin 
 practice. ' Has Catherine come back yet ? '
 
 6 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' Not that I know of. Do come here and look at pussie ; did 
 you ever see anything so comfortable 1 ' 
 
 1 You and she look about equally lazy. What have you been 
 doing all the afternoon 1 ' 
 
 ' We look what we are, my dear. Doing ? Why, I have been 
 attending to my domestic duties, arranging the flowers, mend- 
 ing my pink dress for to-morrow night, and helping to keep 
 mamma in good spirits ; she is depressed because she has been 
 finding Elizabeth out in some waste or other, and I have been 
 preaching to her to make Elizabeth uncomfortable if she likes, 
 but not to worrit herself. And after all, pussie and I have 
 come out for a rest. We've earned it, haven't we, Chattie 1 
 And, as for you, Miss Artistic, I should like to know what you've 
 been doing for the good of your kind since dinner. I suppose 
 you had tea at the vicarage ? ' 
 
 The speaker lifted inquiring eyes to her sister as she spoke, 
 her cheek plunged in the warm fur of a splendid Persian cat, 
 her whole look and voice expressing the very highest degree of 
 quiet, comfort, and self-possession. Agnes Leyburn was not 
 pretty'; the lower part of the face was a little heavy in outline 
 and moulding ; the teeth were not as they should have been, 
 and the nose was unsatisfactory. But the eyes under their long 
 lashes were shrewdness itself, and there was an individuality in 
 the voice, a cheery even-temperedness in look and tone, which 
 had a pleasing effect on the bystander. Her dress was neat and 
 dainty ; every detail of it bespoke a young woman who respected 
 both herself and the fashion. 
 
 Her sister, on the other hand, was guiltless of the smallest 
 trace of fashion. Her skirts were cut with the most engaging 
 naivete, she was much adorned with amber beads, and her red 
 brown hair had been tortured and frizzled to look as much like 
 an aureole as possible. But, on the other hand, she was a beauty, 
 though at present you felt her a beauty in disguise, a stage 
 Cinderella as it were, in very becoming rags, waiting for the 
 godmother. 
 
 'Yes, I had tea at the vicarage,' said this young person, 
 throwing herself on the grass in spite of a murmured protest 
 from Agnes, who had an inherent dislike of anything physically 
 rash, 'and I had the greatest difficulty to get away. Mrs. 
 Thornburgh is in such a flutter about this visit ! One would 
 think it was the Bishop and all his Canons, and promotion 
 depending on it, she has baked so many cakes and put out so 
 many dinner napkins ! I don't envy the young man. She will 
 have no wits left at all to entertain him with. I actually wound 
 up by adminstering some sal-volatile to her.' 
 
 ' Well, and after the sal- volatile did you get anything coherent 
 out of her on the subject of the young man ? ' 
 
 ' By degrees,' said the girl, her eyes twinkling ; ' if one can 
 only remember the thread between whiles one gets at the facts 
 somehow. In between the death of Mr. Elsmere's father and
 
 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 7 
 
 his going to college, we had, let me see, the spare room cur- 
 tains, the making of them and the cleaning of them, Sarah's 
 idiocy in sticking to her black sheep of a young man, the price 
 of tea when she married, Mr. Thornburgh s singular preference 
 of boiled mutton to roast, the poems she had written to her 
 when she was eighteen, and I can't tell you what else besides. 
 But I held fast, and every now and then I brought her up to 
 the point again, gently, but firmly, and now I think I know all 
 I want to know about the interesting stranger.' 
 
 ' My ideas about him are not many,' said Agnes, rubbing her 
 cheek gently up and down the purring cat, ' and there doesn't 
 seem to be much order in them. He is very accomplished a 
 teetotaller he has been to the Holy Land, and his hair has 
 been cut close after a fever. It sounds odd, but I am not 
 curious. I can very well wait till to-morrow evening.' 
 
 ' Oh, well, as to ideas about a person, one doesn't get that 
 sort of thing from Mrs. Thornburgh. But I know how old he 
 is, where he went to college, where his mother lives, a certain 
 number of his mother's peculiarities, which seem to be Irish 
 and curious, where his living is, how much it is worth, likewise 
 the colour of his eyes, as near as Mrs. Thornburgh can get.' 
 
 ' What a start you have been getting ! ' said Agnes lazily. 
 ' But what is it makes the poor old thing so excited ? ' 
 
 Rose sat up and began to fling the fir cones lying about her 
 at a distant mark with an energy worthy of her physical per- 
 fections and the aesthetic freedom of her attire. 
 
 ' Because, my dear, Mrs. Thornburgh at the present moment 
 is always seeing herself as the conspirator sitting match in 
 hand before a mine. Mr. Elsmere is the match we are the 
 mine !' 
 
 Agnes looked at her sister, and they both laughed, the bright 
 rippling laugh of young women perfectly aware of their own 
 value, and in no hurry to force an estimate of it on the male 
 world. 
 
 'Well,' said Rose deliberately, her delicate cheek flushed 
 with her gymnastics, her eyes sparkling, 'there is no saying. 
 " Propinquity does it " as Mrs. Thornburgh is always remind- 
 ing us. But where can Catherine be ? She went out directly 
 after lunch.' 
 
 ' She has gone out to see that youth who hurt his back at the 
 Tysons at least I heard her talking to mamma about him, and 
 she went out with a basket that looked like beef -tea.' 
 
 Rose frowned a little. 
 
 ' And I suppose I ought to have been to the school or to see 
 Mrs. Robson, instead of fiddling all the afternoon. I daresay I 
 ought only, unfortunately, I like my fiddle, and I don't like 
 stuffy cottages ; and as for the goody books, I read them so 
 badly that the old women themselves come down upon me.' 
 
 ' I seem to have been making the best of both worlds,' said 
 Agnes placidly. ' I haven't been doing anything I don't like,
 
 8 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 but I got hold of that dress she brought home to make for little 
 Emma Payne and nearly finished the skirt, so that I feel as 
 good as one when one has been twice to church on a wet Sunday. 
 Ah, there is Catherine. I heard the gate.' 
 
 As she spoke steps were heard approaching through the clump 
 of trees which sheltered the little entrance gate, and as Rose 
 sprang to her feet a tall figure in white and gray appeared 
 against the background of the sycamores, and came quickly 
 towards the sisters. 
 
 ' Dears, I am so sorry ; I am afraid you have been waiting 
 for me. But poor Mrs. Tyson wanted me so badly that I could 
 not leave her. She had no one else to help her or to be with 
 her till that eldest girl of hers came home from work.' 
 
 'It doesn't matter,' said Rose, as Catherine put her arm 
 round her shoulder ; ' mamma hasn't been fidgeting, and as for 
 Agnes, she looks as if she never wanted to move again.' 
 
 Catherine's clear eyes, which at the moment seemed to be 
 full of inward light, kindled in them by some foregoing experi- 
 ence, rested kindly, but only half consciously, on her younger 
 sister, as Agnes softly nodded and smiled to her. Evidently 
 she was a good deal older than the other two she looked about 
 six-and-twenty, a young and vigorous woman in the prime of 
 health and strength. The lines of the form were rather thin 
 and spare, but they were softened by the loose bodice and long 
 full skirt of her dress, and by the folds of a large white muslin 
 handkerchief which was crossed over her breast. The face, 
 sheltered by the plain shady hat, was also a little spoilt from 
 the point of view of beauty by the sharpness of the lines about 
 the chin and mouth, and by a slight prominence of the cheek- 
 bones, but the eyes, of a dark bluish gray, were fine, the nose 
 delicately cut, the brow smooth and beautiful, while the com- 
 plexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland 
 air and Westmoreland streams. About face and figure there 
 was a delicate austere charm, something which harmonised with 
 the bare stretches and lonely crags of the fells, something which 
 seemed to make her a true daughter of the mountains, partaker 
 at once of their gentleness and their severity. She was in her 
 place here, beside the homely Westmoreland house and under 
 the shelter of the fells. When you first saw the other sisters 
 you wondered what strange chance had brought them into that 
 remote sparely -peopled valley; they were plainly exiles, and 
 conscious exiles, from the movement and exhilarations of a 
 fuller social life. But Catherine impressed you as only a 
 refined variety of the local type ; you could have found many 
 like her, in a sense, among the sweet-faced serious women of the 
 neighbouring farms. 
 
 Now, as she and Rose stood together, her hand still resting 
 lightly on the other's shoulder, a question from Agnes banished 
 the faint smile on her lips, and left only the look of inward 
 illumination, the expression of one who had just passed, as it
 
 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 9 
 
 were, through a strenuous and heroic moment of life, and was 
 still living in the exaltation of memory. 
 
 ' So the poor fellow is worse ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. Doctor Baker, whom they have got to-day, says the 
 spine is hopelessly injured. He may live on paralysed for a few 
 months or longer, but there is no hope of cure.' 
 
 Both girls uttered a shocked exclamation. ' That fine strong 
 young man ! ' said Rose under her breath. ' Does he know ? ' 
 
 ' Yes ; when I got there the doctor had just gone, and Mrs. 
 Tyson, who was quite unprepared for anything so dreadful, 
 seemed to have almost lost her wits, poor thing ! I found her 
 in the front kitchen with her apron over her head, rocking to 
 and fro, and poor Arthur in the inner room all alone waiting 
 in suspense.' 
 
 ' And who told him ? He has been so hopeful.' 
 
 'I did,' said Catherine gently; 'they made me. He would 
 know, and she couldn't she ran out of the room. I never saw 
 anything so pitiful.' 
 
 ' Oh, Catherine ! ' exclaimed Rose's moved voice, while 
 Agnes got up, and Chattie jumped softly down from her lap, 
 unheeded. 
 
 ' How did he bear it 1 ' 
 
 ' Don't ask me,' said Catherine, while the quiet tears filled her 
 eyes and her voice broke, as the hidden feeling would have its way. 
 ' It was terrible ! I don't know how we got through that half -hour 
 his mother and I. It was like wrestling with some one in 
 agony. At last he was exhausted he let me say the Lord's 
 Prayer; I think it soothed him, but one couldn't tell. He 
 seemed half asleep when I left. Oh ! ' she cried, laying her 
 hand in a close grasp on Rose's arm, 'if you had seen his 
 eyes, and his poor hands there was such despair in them ! 
 They say, though he was so young, he was thinking of getting 
 married ; and he was so steady, such a good son ! ' 
 
 A silence fell upon the three. Catherine stood looking out 
 across the valley towards the sunset. Now that the demand 
 upon her for calmness and fortitude was removed, and that the 
 religious exaltation in which she had gone through the last 
 three hours was becoming less intense, the pure human pity of 
 the scene she had just witnessed seemed to be gaining upon her. 
 Her lip trembled, and two or three tears silently overflowed. 
 Rose turned and gently kissed her cheek, and Agnes touched 
 her hand caressingly, she smiled at them, for it was not in her 
 nature to let any sign of love pass unheeded, and in a few more 
 seconds she had mastered herself. 
 
 ' Dears, we must go in. Is mother in her room ? Oh, Rose ! 
 in that thin dress on the grass ; I oughtn't to have kept you 
 out. It is quite cold by now.' 
 
 And she hurried them in, leaving them to superintend the 
 preparations for supper downstairs while she ran up to her 
 mother.
 
 10 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 A quarter of an hour afterwards they were all gathered 
 round the supper-table, the windows open to the garden and 
 the May twilight. At Catherine's right ha.nd sat Mrs. Leyburn, 
 a tall delicate-looking woman, wrapped in a white shawl, about 
 whom there were only three things to be noticed an amiable 
 temper, a sufficient amount of weak health to excuse her all the 
 more tiresome duties of life, and an incorrigible tendency to 
 sing the praises of her daughters at all times and to all people. 
 The daughters winced under it : Catherine, because it was a 
 positive pain to her to hear herself brought forward and talked 
 about ; the others, because youth infinitely prefers to make its 
 own points in its own way. Nothing, however, could mend this 
 defect of Mrs. Leyburn's. Catherine's strength of will could 
 keep it in check sometimes, but in general it had to be borne 
 with. A sharp word would have silenced the mother's well- 
 meant chatter at any time for she was a fragile, nervous woman, 
 entirely dependent on her surroundings but none of them 
 were capable of it, and their mere refractoriness counted for 
 nothing. 
 
 The dining-room in which they were gathered had a good 
 deal of homely dignity, and was to the Leyburns full of associa- 
 tions. The oak settle near the fire, the oak sideboard running 
 along one side of the room, the black oak table with carved 
 legs at which they sat, were genuine pieces of old Westmoreland 
 work, which had belonged to their grandfather. The heavy 
 carpet covering the stone floor of what twenty years before had 
 been the kitchen of the farmhouse was a survival from a south- 
 country home, which had sheltered their lives for eight happy 
 years. Over the mantelpiece hung the portrait of the girls' 
 father, a long serious face, not unlike Wordsworth's face in out- 
 line, and bearing a strong resemblance to Catherine ; a line of 
 silhouettes adorned the mantelpiece ; on the walls were prints 
 of Winchester and Worcester Cathedrals, photographs of Greece, 
 and two old-fashioned engravings of Dante and Milton ; while 
 a bookcase, filled apparently with the father's college books 
 and college prizes and the favourite authors mostly poets, 
 philosophers, and theologians of his later years, gave a final 
 touch of habitableness to the room. The little meal and its 
 appointments the eggs, the home-made bread and preserves, 
 the tempting butter and old-fashioned silver gleaming among 
 the flowers which Rose arranged with fanciful skill in Japanese 
 pots of her own providing suggested the same family qualities 
 as the room. Frugality, a dainty personal self-respect, a family 
 consciousness, tenacious of its memories and tenderly careful of 
 all the little material objects which were to it the symbols of 
 those memories clearly all these elements entered into the 
 Leyburn tradition. 
 
 And of this tradition, with its implied assertions and denials, 
 clearly Catherine Leyburn, the elder sister, was, of all the 
 persons gathered in this little room, the most pronounced
 
 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 11 
 
 embodiment. She sat at the head of the table, the little basket 
 of her own and her mother's keys beside her. Her dress was a 
 soft black brocade, with lace collar and cuff, which had once 
 belonged to an aunt of her mother's. It was too old for her 
 both in fashion and material, but it gave her a gentle, almost 
 matronly dignity, which became her. Her long than hands, full 
 of character and delicacy, moved nimbly among the cups ; all 
 her ways were quiet and yet decided. It was evident that 
 among this little party she, and not the plaintive mother, was 
 really in authority. To-night, however, her looks were specially 
 soft. The scene she had gone through in the afternoon had left 
 her pale, with traces of patient fatigue round the eyes and 
 mouth, but all her emotion was gone, and she was devoting 
 herself to the others, responding with quick interest and ready 
 smiles to all they had to say, and contributing the little experi- 
 ences of her own day in return. 
 
 Rose sat on her left hand in yet another gown of strange tint 
 and archaic outline. Rose's gowns were legion. They were 
 manufactured by a farmer's daughter across the valley, under 
 her strict and precise supervision. She was accustomed, as she 
 boldly avowed, to shut herself up at the beginning of each season 
 of the year for two days' meditation on the subject. And now, 
 thanks to the spring warmth, she was entering at last with 
 infinite zest on the results of her April vigils. 
 
 Catherine had surveyed her as she entered the room with a 
 smile, but a smile not altogether to Rose's taste. 
 
 ' What, another, Roschen ? ' she had said, with the slightest 
 lifting of the eyebrows. ' You never confided that to me. Did 
 you think I was unworthy of anything so artistic ? ' 
 
 'Not at all,' said Rose calmly, seating herself. 'I thought 
 you were better employed.' 
 
 But a flush flew over her transparent cheek, and she presently 
 threw an irritated look at Agnes, who had been looking from 
 her to Catherine with amused eyes. 
 
 'I met Mr. Thornburgh and Mr. Elsmere driving from the 
 station,' Catherine announced presently ; ' at least there was a 
 gentleman in a clerical wideawake, with a portmanteau behind, 
 so I imagine it must have been he.' 
 
 ' Did he look promising ? ' inquired Agnes. 
 
 ' I don't think I noticed,' said Catherine simply, but with a 
 momentary change of expression. The sisters, remembering 
 how she had come in upon them with that look of one ' lifted 
 up,' understood why she had not noticed, and refrained from 
 further questions. 
 
 ' Well, it is to be hoped the young man is recovered enough 
 to stand Long Whindale festivities,' said Rose. 'Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh means to let them loose on his devoted head to-morrow 
 night.' 
 
 ' Who are coming ? ' asked Mrs. Leyburn eagerly. The occa- 
 sional tea parties of the neighbourhood were an unfailing excite-
 
 12 EGBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ment to her, simply because, by dint of the small adornings, 
 natural to the occasion, they showed her daughters to her under 
 slightly new aspects. To see Catherine, who never took any 
 thought for her appearance, forced to submit to a white dress, a 
 line of pearls round the shapely throat, a flower in the brown 
 hair, put there by Rose's imperious fingers ; to sit in a corner 
 well out of draughts, watching the effect of Rose's half -fledged 
 beauty, and drinking in the compliments of the neighbourhood 
 on Rose's playing or Agnes's conversation, or Catherine's prac- 
 tical ability these were Mrs. Leyburn's passions, and a tea 
 party always gratified them to the full. 
 
 ' Mamma asks as if really she wanted an answer,' remarked 
 Agnes drily. ' Dear mother, can't you by now make up a tea 
 party at the Thornburghs out of your head 1 ' 
 
 ' The Seatons ? ' inquired Mrs. Leyburn. 
 
 ' Mrs. Seaton and Miss Barks,' replied Rose. 'The rector 
 won't come. And I needn't say that, having moved heaven and 
 earth to get Mrs. Seaton, Mrs. Thornburgh is now miserable 
 because she has got her. Her ambition is gratified, but she 
 knows that she has spoilt the party. Well, then, Mr. Mayhew, 
 of course, his son, and his flute.' 
 
 ' You to play his accompaniments ? ' put in Agnes slily. Rose's 
 lip curled. 
 
 ' Not if Miss Barks knows it,' she said emphatically, ' nor if I 
 know it. The Bakers, of course, ourselves, and the unknown.' 
 
 ' Dr. Baker is always pleasant,' said Mrs. Leyburn, leaning 
 back and drawing her white shawl languidly round her. ' He 
 told me the other day, Catherine, that if it weren't for you he 
 should have to retire. He regards you as his junior partner. 
 "Marvellous nursing gift your eldest daughter has, Mrs. Ley- 
 burn," he said to me the other day. A most agreeable man.' 
 
 ' I wonder if I shall be able to get any candid opinions out of 
 Mr. Elsmere the day after to-morrow ? ' said Rose, musing. ' It 
 is difficult to avoid having an opinion of some sort about Mrs. 
 Seaton.' 
 
 ' Oxford dons don't gossip and are never candid,' remarked 
 Agnes severely. 
 
 ' Then Oxford dons must be very dull,' cried Rose. ' How- 
 ever,' and her countenance brightened, 'if he stays here four 
 weeks we can teach him.' 
 
 Catherine, meanwhile, sat watching the two girls with a soft 
 elder sister's indulgence. Was it in connection with their bright 
 attractive looks that the thought flitted through her head, 'I 
 wonder what the young man will be like 1 ' 
 
 ' Oh, by the way,' said Rose presently, ' I had nearly forgotten 
 Mrs. Thornburgh's two messages. I informed her, Agnes, that 
 you had given up water-colour and meant to try oils, and she 
 told me to implore you not to, because " water-colour is so much 
 more lady-like than oils." And as for you, Catherine, she sent 
 you a most special message. I was to tell you that she just
 
 CHAP, i WESTMORELAND 13 
 
 loved the way you had taken to plaiting your hair lately that 
 it was exactly like the picture of Jeanie Deans she has in the 
 drawing-room, and that she would never forgive you if you 
 didn't plait it so to-morrow night.' 
 
 Catherine flushed faintly as she got up from the table. 
 
 ' Mrs. Thornburgh has eagle-eyes,' she said, moving away to 
 give her arm to her mother, who looked fondly at her, making 
 some remark in praise of Mrs. Thornburgh's taste. 
 
 ' Rose ! ' cried Agnes indignantly, when the other two had dis- 
 appeared, 'you and Mrs. Thornburgh have not the sense you 
 were born with. What on earth did you say that to Catherine 
 for?' 
 
 Rose stared ; then her face fell a little. 
 
 ' I suppose it was foolish,' she admitted. Then she leant her 
 head on one hand and drew meditative patterns on the table- 
 cloth with the other. ' You know, Agnes,' she said presently, 
 looking up, ' there are drawbacks to having a St. Elizabeth for 
 a sister.' 
 
 Agnes discreetly made no reply, and Rose was left alone. She 
 sat dreaming a few minutes, the corners of the red mouth droop- 
 ing. Then she sprang up with a long sigh. ' A little life ! ' she 
 said half -aloud, 'a little wickedness/' and she shook her curly 
 head defiantly. 
 
 A few minutes later, in the little drawing-room on the other 
 side of the hall, Catherine and Rose stood together by the open 
 window. For the first time in a lingering spring, the air was 
 soft and balmy ; a tender grayness lay over the valley : it was 
 not night, though above the clear outlines of the fell the stars 
 were just twinkling in the pale blue. Far away under the crag 
 on the farther side of High Fell a light was shining. As 
 Catherine's eyes caught it there was a quick response in the 
 fine Madonna-like face. 
 
 ' Any news for me from the Backhouses this afternoon ? ' she 
 asked Rose. 
 
 ' No, I heard of none. How is she ? ' 
 
 ' Dying,' said Catherine simply, and stood a moment looking 
 out. Rose did not interrupt her. She knew that the house 
 from which the light was shining sheltered a tragedy ; she 
 guessed with the vagueness of nineteen that it was a tragedy of 
 passion and sin but Catherine had not been communicative on 
 the subject, ana Rose had for some time past set up a dumb 
 resistance to her sister's most characteristic ways of life and 
 thought, which prevented her now from asking questions. She 
 wished nervously to give Catherine's extraordinary moral 
 strength no greater advantage over her than she could help. 
 
 Presently, however, Catherine threw her arm round her with 
 a tender prptectingness. 
 
 ' What did you do with yourself all the afternoon, Roschen ? ' 
 
 'I practised for two hours,' said the girl shortly, 'and two 
 hours this morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.'
 
 14 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' And you didn't look into the school ? ' asked Catherine, hesi- 
 tating ; ' I know Miss Merry expected you.' 
 
 ' No, I didn't. When one can play the violin and can't teach, 
 any more than a cockatoo, what's the good of wasting one's time 
 in teaching ? ' 
 
 Catherine did not reply. A minute after Mrs. Leyburn called 
 her, and she went to sit on a stool at her mother's feet, her hands 
 resting on the elder woman's lap, the whole attitude of the tall 
 active figure one of beautiful and childlike abandonment. Mrs. 
 Leyburn wanted to confide in her about a new cap, and Cath- 
 erine took up the subject with a zest which kept her mother 
 happy till bedtime. 
 
 Why couldn't she take as much interest in my SpohrT 
 thought Rose. 
 
 Late that night, long after she had performed all a maid's 
 offices for her mother, Catherine Leyburn was busy in her own 
 room arranging a large cupboard containing medicines and ordi- 
 nary medical necessaries, a storehouse whence all the simpler 
 emergencies of their end of the valley were supplied. She had 
 put on a white flannel dressing-gown and moved noiselessly 
 about in it, the very embodiment of order, of purity, of quiet 
 energy. The little white-curtained room was bareness and neat- 
 ness itself. There were a few book-shelves along the walls, 
 holding the books which her father had given her. Over the 
 bed were two enlarged portraits of her parents, and a line of 
 queer little faded monstrosities, representing Rose and Agnes 
 in different stages of childhood. On the table beside the bed 
 was a pile of well-worn books Keble, Jeremy Taylor, the Bible 
 connected in the mind of the mistress of the room with the 
 intensest moments of the spiritual life. There was a strip of 
 carpet by the bed, a plain chair or two, a large press ; otherwise 
 no furniture that was not absolutely necessary, and no orna- 
 ments. And yet, for all its emptiness, the little room in its 
 order and spotlessness had the look and spell of a sanctuary. 
 
 When her task was finished Catherine came forward to the 
 infinitesimal dressing-table, and stood a moment before the 
 common cottage looking-glass upon it. The candle behind her 
 showed her the outlines of her head and face in shadow against 
 the white ceiling. Her soft brown hair was plaited high above 
 the broad white brow, giving to it an added stateliness, while it 
 left unmasked the pure lines of the neck. Mrs. Thornburgh and 
 her mother were quite right. Simple as the new arrangement 
 was, it could hardly have been more effective. 
 
 But the looking-glass got no smile in return for its informa- 
 tion. Catherine Leyburn was young ; she was alone ; she was 
 being very plainly told that, taken as a whole, she was, or might 
 be at any moment, a beautiful woman. And all her answer was 
 a frown and a quick movement away from the glass. Putting 
 up her hands she began to undo the plaits with haste, almost 
 with impatience ; she smoothed the whole mass then set free
 
 CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 15 
 
 into tlie severest order, plaited it closely together, and then, 
 putting out her light, threw herself on her knees beside the 
 window, which was partly open to the starlight and the moun- 
 tains. The voice of the river far away, wafted from the mist- 
 covered depths of the valley, and the faint rustling of the trees 
 just outside, were for long after the only sounds which broke 
 the silence. 
 
 When Catherine appeared at breakfast next morning her 
 hair was plainly gathered into a close knot behind, which had 
 been her way of dressing it since she was thirteen. Agnes threw 
 a quick look at Rose ; Mrs. Leyburn, as soon as she had made 
 out through her spectacles what was the matter, broke into 
 warm expostulations. 
 
 'It is more comfortable, dear mother, and takes much less 
 time,' said Catherine, reddening. 
 
 ' Poor Mrs. Thornburgh ! ' remarked Agnes drily. 
 
 ' Oh, Rose will make up ! ' said Catherine, glancing, not 
 without a spark of mischief in her gray eyes, at Rose's tortured 
 locks ; ' and mamma's new cap, which will be superb ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER H 
 
 ABOUT four o'clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be 
 marked in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh's ' high tea,' that lady was seated in the vicarage garden, 
 her spectacles on her nose, a large couvre-pied over her knees, 
 and the Whinborough newspaper on her lap. The neighbour- 
 hood of this last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence 
 of reading ; but in reality the energies of her housewifely mind 
 were taken up with quite other things. The vicar's wife was 
 plunged in a housekeeping experiment of absorbing interest. 
 All her solid preparations for the evening were over, and in her 
 own mind she decided that with them there was no possible 
 fault to be found. The cook, Sarah, had gone about her work 
 in a spirit at once lavish and fastidious, breathed into her by 
 her mistress. No better tongue, no plumper chickens, than 
 those which would grace her board to-night were to be found, 
 so Mrs. Thornburgh was persuaded, in the district. And so 
 with everything else of a substantial kind. On this head the 
 hostess felt no anxieties. 
 
 But a ' tea ' in the north country depends for distinction, not 
 on its solids or its savouries, but on its sweets. A rural hostess 
 earns her reputation, not by a discriminating eye for butcher's- 
 meat, but by her inventiveness in cakes and custards. And it 
 was just here, with regard to this 'bubble reputation^ that the 
 vicar's wife 01 Long Whindale was particularly sensitive. Was 
 she not expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the Rector of Whin- 
 borough odious woman to tea ? Was it not incumbent on her
 
 16 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 to do well, nay, to do brilliantly, in the eyes of this local 
 magnate? And how was it possible to do brilliantly in this 
 matter with a cook whose recipes were hopelessly old-fashioned, 
 and who had an exasperating belief in the sufficiency of buttered 
 ' whigs ' and home-made marmalade for all requirements ? 
 
 Stung by these thoughts, Mrs. Thornburgh had gone prowling 
 about the neighbouring town of Whinborough till the shop 
 window of a certain newly - arrived confectioner had been 
 revealed to her, stored with the most airy and appetising trifles 
 of a make and colouring quite metropolitan. She had 
 flattened her gray curls against the window for one deliberative 
 moment ; had then rushed in ; and as soon as the carrier's cart 
 of Long Whindale, which she was now anxiously awaiting, 
 should have arrived, bearing with it the produce of that 
 adventure, Mrs. Thornburgh would be a proud woman, prepared 
 to meet a legion of rectors' wives without flinching. Not, 
 indeed, in all respects a woman at peace with herself and the 
 world. In the country, where every household should be self- 
 contained, a certain discredit attaches in every well-regulated 
 mind to ' getting things in.' Mrs. Thornburgh was also nervous 
 at the thought of the bill. It would have to be met gradually 
 out of the weekly money. For ' William ' was to know nothing 
 of the matter, except so far as a few magnificent generalities 
 and the testimony of his own dazzled eyes might inform him. 
 But after all. in this as in everything else, one must suffer to be 
 distinguished. 
 
 The carrier, however, lingered. And at last the drowsiness 
 of the afternoon overcame even those pleasing expectations we 
 have described, and Mrs. Thornburgh's newspaper dropped 
 unheeded to her feet. The vicarage, under the shade of which 
 she was sitting, was a new gray stone building with wooden 
 gables, occupying the site of what had once been the earlier 
 vicarage house of Long Whindale, the primitive dwelling-house 
 of an incumbent, whose chapelry, after sundry augmentations, 
 amounted to just twenty-seven pounds a year. The modern 
 house, though it only contained sufficient accommodation for Mi-. 
 and Mrs. Thornburgh, one guest, and two maids, would have 
 seemed palatial to those rustic clerics of the past from whose 
 ministrations the lonely valley had drawn its spiritual susten- 
 ance in times gone by. They, indeed, had belonged to another 
 race a race sprung from the soil and content to spend the 
 whole of life in very close contact and very homely intercourse 
 with their mother earth. Mr. Thornburgh, who had come to 
 the valley only a few years before from a parish in one of the 
 large manufacturing towns, and who had no inherited interest 
 in the Cumbrian folk and their ways, had only a very faint idea, 
 and that a distinctly depreciatory one, of what these mythical 
 predecessors of his, with their strange social status and 
 unbecoming occupations, might be like. But there were one or 
 t\vo old men still lingering in the dale who could have told him
 
 CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 17 
 
 a great deal about them, whose memory went back to the days 
 when the relative social importance of the dale parsons was 
 exactly expressed by the characteristic Westmoreland saying : 
 ' Ef ye'll nobbut send us a gude schulemeaster, a verra' moderate 
 parson 'ull dea ! ' and whose slow minds, therefore, were filled 
 with a strong inarticulate sense of difference as they saw him 
 pass along the road, and recalled the incumbent of their child- 
 hood, dropping in for his ' crack ' and his glass of ' yale ' at this 
 or that farmhouse on any occasion of local festivity, or driving 
 his sheep to Whinborough market with his own hands like any 
 other peasant of the dale. 
 
 Within the last twenty years, however, the few remaining 
 survivors of this primitive clerical order in the Westmoreland 
 and Cumberland valleys have dropped into their quiet unre- 
 membered graves, and new men of other ways a^nd other modes 
 of speech reign in their stead. And as at Long Whindale, so 
 almost everywhere, the change has been emphasised by the 
 disappearance of the old parsonage houses with their stone 
 floors, their parlours lustrous with oak carving on chest or 
 dresser, and their encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in 
 favour of an upgrowth of new trim mansions designed to meet 
 the needs, not of peasants, but of gentlefolks. 
 
 And naturally the churches top have shared in the process of 
 transformation. The ecclesiastical revival of the last half- 
 century has worked its will even in the remotest corners of the 
 Cumbrian country, and soon not a vestige of the homely 
 worshipping -places of an earlier day will remain. Across the 
 road, in front of the Long Whindale parsonage, for instance, 
 rose a freshly built church, also peaked and gabled, with a spire 
 and two bells, and a painted east window, and Heaven knows 
 what novelties besides. The primitive whitewashed structure 
 it replaced had lasted long, and in the course of many genera- 
 tions time had clothed its moss-grown walls, its slated porch, 
 and tombstones worn with rain in a certain beauty of congruity 
 and association, linking it with the purple distances of the fells, 
 and the brawling river bending round the gray enclosure. But 
 finally, after a period of quiet and gradual decay, the ruin of 
 Long Whindale chapel had become a quick and hurrying ruin 
 that would not be arrested. When the rotten timbers of the 
 roof came dropping on the farmers' heads, and the oak benches 
 beneath offered gaps, the geography of which had to be carefully 
 learnt by the substantial persons who sat on them, lest they 
 should be overtaken by undignified disaster; when the rain 
 poured in on the Communion Table and the wind raged through 
 innumerable mortarless chinks, even the slowly-moving folk of 
 the valley came to the conclusion that ' summat 'ull hev to be 
 deun.' And by the help of the Bishop, and Queen Anne's 
 Bounty, and what not, aided by just as many half-crowns as the 
 valley found itself unable to defend against the encroachments 
 of a new and ' moiderin ' parson, ' summat ' was done, whereof 
 
 c
 
 18 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 the results namely, the new church, vicarage, and schoolhouse 
 were now conspicuous. 
 
 This radical change, however, had not been the work of Mr. 
 Thornburgh but of his predecessor, a much more pushing and 
 enterprising man, whose successful efforts to improve the church 
 accommodation in Long Whindale had moved such deep and 
 lasting astonishment in the mind of a somewhat lethargic- 
 bishop, that promotion had been readily found for him. Mr. 
 Thornburgh was neither capable of the sturdy begging which 
 had raised the church, nor was he likely on other lines to reach 
 preferment. He and his wife, who possessed much more salience 
 of character than he, were accepted in the dale as belonging to 
 the established order of things. Nobody wished them any harm, 
 and the few people they had specially befriended, naturally, 
 thought well of them. 
 
 But the old intimacy of relation which had once subsisted 
 between the clergyman of Long Whindale and his parishioners 
 was wholly gone. They had sunk in the scale ; the parson had 
 risen. The old statesmen or peasant proprietors of the valley 
 had for the most part succumbed to various destructive influ- 
 ences, some social, some economical, added to a certain amount 
 of corrosion from within ; and their place had been taken by 
 leaseholders, less drunken perhaps, and better educated, but 
 also far less shrewd and individual, and lacking in the rude 
 dignity of their predecessors. 
 
 And as the land had lost, the church had gained. The place 
 of the dalesmen knew them no more, but the church and parson- 
 age had got themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his income 
 raised, had let off his glebe to a neighbouring farmer, kept two 
 maids, and drank claret when he drank anything. His flock 
 were friendly enough, and paid their commuted tithes without 
 grumbling. But between them and a perfectly well-meaning 
 but rather dull man, who stood on his dignity and wore a black 
 coat all the week, there was no real community. Rejoice in it 
 as we may, in this final passage of Parson Primrose to social 
 regions beyond the ken of Farmer Flamborough, there are some 
 elements of loss as there are in all changes. 
 
 Wheels on the road ! Mrs. Thornburgh woke up with a start, 
 and stumbling over newspaper and couvre-pied, hurried across 
 the lawn as fast as her short squat figure would allow, gray 
 curls and cap-strings flying behind her. She heard a colloquy 
 in the distance in broad Westmoreland dialect, and as she turned 
 the corner of the house she nearly ran into her tall cook, Sarah, 
 whose impassive and saturnine countenance bore traces of un- 
 usual excitement. 
 
 'Missis, there's naw cakes. They're all left behind on t' 
 counter at Randall's. Mr. Backhouse says as how he told old 
 Jim to go fur 'em, and he niver went, and Mr. Backhouse he 
 niver found oot till he'd got past t' bridge, and than it wur too 
 late to 0:0 back.'
 
 CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 19 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh 
 pink colour slowly deserting her face as she realised the enormity 
 of the catastrophe. And was it possible that there was the 
 faintest twinkle of grim satisfaction on the face of that elderly 
 minx, Sarah? 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh, however, did not stay to explore the 
 recesses of Sarah's mind, but ran with little pattering, undig- 
 nified steps across the front garden and down the steps to 
 where Mr. Backhouse the carrier stood, bracing himself for self- 
 defence. 
 
 'Ya may weel fret, mum,' said Mr. Backhouse, interrupting 
 the flood of her reproaches, with the comparative sang-froid of 
 one who knew that, after all, he was the only carrier on the 
 road, and that the vicarage was five miles from the necessaries 
 of life ; ' it's a bad job, and I's not goin' to say it isn't. But ya 
 jest look 'ere, mum, what's a man to du wi a daft thingamy 
 like that, as caan't teak a plain order, and spiles a poor man s 
 business as caan ; t help hissel' 1 ' 
 
 And Mr. Backhouse pointed with withering scorn to a small, 
 shrunken old man, who sat dangling his legs on the shaft of 
 the cart, and whose countenance wore a singular expression of 
 mingled meekness and composure, as his partner flourished an 
 indignant finger towards him. 
 
 ' Jim,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh reproachfully, ' I did think you 
 would have taken more pains about my order ! ' 
 
 ' Yis, mum,' said the old man placidly, ' ya might 'a' thowt it. 
 I's reet sorry, bit ya caan't help these things swmtimes an' it's 
 naw gud, a hollerin' ower 'em like a mad bull. Aa tuke yur bit 
 paper to Randall's and aa laft it wi' 'em to mek up, an' than, aa, 
 weel, aa went to a frind, an' ee may hev giv' me a glass of yale, 
 aa doon't say ee dud but ee may, I ween't sweer. Hawsomiver, 
 aa niver thowt naw mair aboot it, nor mair did John, so ee 
 needn't taak till we wur jest two mile from 'ere. An' ee's a 
 gon' on sence ! My ! an' a larroping the poor beeast like ony- 
 thing ! ' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh stood aghast at the calmness of this auda- 
 cious recital. As for John, he looked on surveying his brother's 
 philosophical demeanour at first with speechless wrath, and 
 then with an inscrutable mixture of expressions, in which, how- 
 ever, any one accustomed to his weather-beaten countenance 
 would have probably read a hidden admiration. 
 
 ' Weel, aa niver ! ' he exclaimed, when Jim's explanatory 
 remarks had come to an end, swinging himself up on to his seat 
 and gathering up the reins. ' Yur a boald 'un to tell the missus 
 theer to hur feeace as how ya wur 'tossicatit whan yur owt ta 
 been duing yur larful business. Aa've doon wi' yer. Aa aims 
 to please ma coostomers, an' aa caan't abide sek wark. Yur like 
 an oald kneyfe, I can mak' nowt o' ya', nowder back nor edge.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh wrung her fat short hands in despair, mak- 
 ing little incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw him
 
 20 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 about to depart, of which John at last gathered the main pur- 
 port to be that she wished him to go back to Whinborough for 
 her precious parcel. 
 
 He shook his head compassionately over the preposterous 
 state of mind betrayed by such a demand, and with a fresh 
 burst of abuse of his brother, and an assurance to the vicar's 
 wife that he meant to ' gie that oald man nawtice when he got 
 haum ; he wasn't goan to hev his bisness spiled for nowt by an 
 oald ijiot wi' a hed as full o' yale as a hayrick's full of mice,' he 
 raised his whip and the clattering vehicle moved forward : Jim 
 meanwhile preserving through all his brother's wrath and Mrs. 
 Thornburghs waitings the same mild and even countenance, the 
 meditative and friendly aspect of the philosopher letting the 
 world go ' as e'en it will.' 
 
 So Mrs. Thornburgh was left gasping, watching the progress 
 of the lumbering cart along the bit of road leading to the hamlet 
 at the head of the valley, with so limp and crestfallen an aspect 
 that even the gaunt and secretly jubilant Sarah was moved to 
 pity. 
 
 Why, missis, we'll do very well. I'll hev some scones in 
 t'oven in naw time, an' theer's finger biscuits, an' wi' buttered 
 toast an' sum o' t' best jams, if they don't hev enuf to eat they 
 ought to.' Then, dropping her voice, she asked with a hurried 
 change of tone, ' Did ye ask un' hoo his daater is ? ' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh started. Her pastoral conscience was 
 smitten. She opened the gate and waved violently after the 
 cart. John pulled his horse up, and with a few quick steps she 
 brought herself within speaking, or rather shouting, distance. 
 
 ' How's your daughter to-day, John ? ' 
 
 The old man's face peering round the oilcloth hood of the 
 cart was darkened by a sudden cloud as he caught the words. 
 His stern lips closed. He muttered something inaudible to Mrs. 
 Thornburgh and whipped up his horse again. The cart started 
 off, and Mrs. Thornburgh was left staring into the receding eyes 
 of 'Jim the Noodle,' who, from his seat on the near shaft, 
 regarded her with a gaze which had passed from benevolence 
 into a preternatural solemnity. 
 
 'Hes sparin' oy 'is speach is John Backhouse,' said Sarah 
 grimly, as her mistress returned to her. ' Maybe ee's aboot 
 reet. It's a bad business an' ee'll not mend it wi' taakin'.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh, however, could not apply herself to the 
 case of Mary Backhouse. At any other moment it would have 
 excited in her breast the shuddering interest which, owing to 
 certain peculiar attendant circumstances, it awakened in every 
 other woman in Long Whindale. But her mind such are the 
 limitations of even clergymen's wives was now absorbed by 
 her own misfortune. Her very cap-strings seemed to hang 
 limp with depression, as she followed Sarah dejectedly into 
 the kitchen, and gave what attention she could to those second- 
 best arrangements so depressing to the idealist temper.
 
 CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 21 
 
 Poor soul ! All the charm and glitter of her little social 
 adventure was gone. When she once more emerged upon the 
 lawn, and languidly readjusted her spectacles, she was weighed 
 down by the thought that in two hours Mrs. Seaton would be 
 upon her. Nothing of this kind ever happened to Mrs. Seaton. 
 The universe obeyed her nod. No carrier conveying goods to 
 her august door ever got drunk or failed to deliver his consign- 
 ment. The thing was inconceivable. Mrs. Thornburgh was 
 well aware of it. 
 
 Should William be informed 1 Mrs. Thornburgh had a rooted 
 belief in the brutality of husbands in all domestic crises, and 
 would have preferred not to inform him. But she had also a 
 dismal certainty that the secret would burn a hole in her till it 
 was confessed bill and all. Besides frightful thought! 
 would they have to eat up all those meringues next day ? 
 
 Her reflections at last became so depressing that, with a 
 natural epicurean instinct, she tried violently to turn her mind 
 away from them. Luckily she was assisted by a sudden per- 
 ception of the roof and chimneys of Burwood, the Leyburns' 
 house, peeping above the trees to the left. At sight of them a 
 smile overspread her plump and gently wrinkled face. She fell 
 gradually into a train of thought, as feminine as that in which 
 she had been just indulging, but infinitely more pleasing. 
 
 For, with regard to the Leyburns, at this present moment 
 Mrs. Thornburgh felt herself in the great position of tutelary 
 divinity or guardian angel. At least if divinities and guardian 
 angels do not concern themselves with the questions to which 
 Mrs. Thornburgh's mind was now addressed, it would clearly 
 have been the opinion of the vicar's wife that they ought to 
 do so. 
 
 ' Who else is there to look after these girls, I should like to 
 know,' Mrs. Thornburgh inquired of herself, ' if I don't do it 1 
 As if girls married themselves !_ People may talk of their 
 independence nowadays as much as they like it always has to 
 be done for them, one way or another. Mrs. Leyburn, poor 
 lackadaisical thing 1 ! is no good whatever. No more is Catherine. 
 They both behave as if husbands tumbled into your mouth for 
 the asking. Catherine's too good for this world but if she 
 doesn't do it, I must. Why, that girl Rose is a beauty if they 
 didn't let her wear those ridiculous mustard-coloured things, 
 and do her hair fit to frighten the crows ! Agnes too so lady- 
 like and well-mannered ; she'd do credit to any man. Well, we 
 shall see, we shall see ! ' 
 
 And Mrs. Thornburgh gently shook her gray curls from side 
 to side, while her eyes, fixed on the open spare room window, 
 shone with meaning. 
 
 'So eligible, too private means, no encumbrances, and as 
 good as gold.' 
 
 She sat lost a moment in a pleasing dream. 
 
 'Shall I bring oot the tea to you theer, mum ?' called Sarah
 
 22 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 gruffly, from the garden door. 'Master and Mr. Elsmere are 
 just coomin' down t' field by t' stepping-stones.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh signalled assent and the tea-table was 
 brought. Afternoon tea was by no means a regular institution 
 at the vicarage of Long Whindale, and Sarah never supplied it 
 without signs of protest. But when a guest was in the house 
 Mrs. Thornburgh insisted upon it ; her obstinacy in the matter, 
 like her dreams of cakes and confections, being all part of her 
 determination to move with the times, in spite of the station to 
 which Providence had assigned her. 
 
 A minute afterwards the vicar, a thick-set gray -haired man 
 of sixty, accompanied by a tall younger man in clerical dress, 
 emerged upon the lawn. 
 
 ' Welcome sight ! ' cried Mr. Thornburgh ; ' Robert and I have 
 been coveting that tea for the last hour. You guessed very well, 
 Emma, to have it just ready for us.' 
 
 'Oh, that was Sarah. She saw you coming down to the 
 stepping-stones,' replied his wife, pleased, however, by any mark 
 of appreciation from her mankind, however small. ' Robert, I 
 hope you haven't been walked off your legs ?' 
 
 ' What, in this air, cousin Emma ? I could walk from sunrise 
 to sundown. Let no one call me an invalid any more. Hence- 
 forth I am a Hercules.' 
 
 And he threw himself on the rug which Mrs. Thornburgh's 
 motherly providence had spread on the grass for him, with a 
 smile and a look of supreme physical contentment, which did 
 indeed almost efface the signs of recent illness in the ruddy 
 boyish face. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh studied him ; her eye caught first of all by 
 the stubble of reddish hair which as he took off his hat stood up 
 straight and stiff all over his head with an odd wildness and 
 aggressiveness. She involuntarily thought, basing her inward 
 comment on a complexity of reasons ' Dear me, what a pity ; 
 it spoils his appearance ! ' 
 
 'I apologise, I apologise, cousin Emma, once for all,' said the 
 young man, surprising her glance, and despairingly smoothing 
 down his recalcitrant locks. 'Let us hope that mountain air 
 will quicken the pace of it before it is necessary for me to 
 present a dignified appearance at Murewell.' 
 
 He looked up at her with a merry flash in his gray eyes, and 
 her old face brightened visibly as she realised afresh that in 
 spite of the grotesqueness of his cropped hair, her guest was a 
 most attractive creature. Not that he could boast much in the 
 way of regular good looks : the mouth was large, the nose of no 
 particular outline, and in general the cutting of the face, though 
 strong and characteristic, had a bluntness and ndivetd like a 
 vigorous unfinished sketch. This bluntness of line, however, 
 was balanced by a great delicacy of tint the pink and white 
 complexion of a girl, indeed enhanced by the bright reddish 
 hair, and quick gray eyes.
 
 CHAP, ii WESTMORELAND 23 
 
 The figure was also a little out of drawing, so to speak ; it 
 was tall and loosely -jointed. The general impression was one 
 of agility and power. But if you looked closer you saw that the 
 shoulders were narrow, the arms inordinately long, and the 
 extremities too small for the general height. Robert Elsmere's 
 hand was the hand of a woman, and few people ever exchanged 
 a first greeting with its very tall owner without a little shock 
 of surprise. 
 
 Mr. Thornburgh and his guest had visited a few houses in 
 the course of their walk, and the vicar plunged for a minute or 
 two into some conversation about local matters with his wife. 
 But Mrs. Thornburgh, it was soon evident, was giving him but 
 a scatterbrained attention. Her secret was working in her 
 ample breast. Very soon she could contain it no longer, and 
 breaking in upon her husband's parish news, she tumbled it all 
 out pell-mell, with a mixture of discomfiture and defiance in- 
 finitely diverting. She could not keep a secret, but she also 
 could not bear to give William an advantage. 
 
 William certainly took his advantage. He did what his wife 
 in her irritation had precisely foreseen that he would do. He 
 first stared, then fell into a guffaw of laughter, and as soon as 
 he had recovered breath, into a series of unfeeling comments 
 which drove Mrs. Thornburgh to desperation. 
 
 ' If you will set your mind, my dear, on things we plain f oiks 
 can do perfectly well without ' et cetera, et cetera the hus- 
 band's point of view can be imagined. Mrs. Thornburgh could 
 have shaken her good man, especially as there was nothing new 
 to her in his remarks : she had known to a T beforehand exactly 
 what he would say. She took up her knitting in a great hurry, 
 the needles clicking angrily, her gray curls quivering under the 
 energy of her hands and arms, while she launched at her 
 husband various retorts as to his lack of consideration for her 
 efforts and her inconvenience, which were only very slightly 
 modified by the presence of a stranger. 
 
 Robert Elsmere meanwhile lay on the grass, his face discreetly 
 turned away .an uncontrollable smile twitching the corners of 
 his mouth. Everything was fresh and piquant up here in this 
 remote corner of the north country, whether the mountain air 
 or the wind-blown streams, or the manners and customs of the 
 inhabitants. His cousin's wife, in spite of her ambitious con- 
 ventionalities, was really the child of Nature to a refreshing 
 degree. One does not see these types, he said to himself, in the 
 cultivated monotony of Oxford or London. She was like a bit 
 of a bygone world Miss Austen's or Miss Ferrier's unearthed 
 for his amusement. He could not for the life of him help taking 
 the scenes of this remote rural existence, which was quite new 
 to him, as though they were the scenes of some comedy of 
 manners. 
 
 Presently, however, the vicar became aware that the passage 
 of arms between himself and his spouse was becoming just a
 
 24 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK T 
 
 little indecorous. He got up with a ' Hem !' intended to put an 
 end to it, and deposited his cup. 
 
 'Well, my dear, have it as you please. It all comes of your 
 determination to have Mrs. Seaton. Why couldn't you just ask 
 the Leyburns and let us enjoy ourselves ? ' 
 
 With this final shaft he departed to see that Jane, the little 
 maid whom Sarah ordered about, had not, in cleaning the study 
 for the evening's festivities, put his last sermon into the waste- 
 paper basket. His wife looked after him with eyes that spoke 
 unutterable things. 
 
 'You would never think,' she said in an agitated voice to 
 young Elsmere, 'that I had consulted Mr. Thornburgh as to 
 every invitation, that he entirely agreed with me that one must 
 be civil to Mrs. Seaton, considering that she can make anybody's 
 life a burden to them about here that isn't ; but it's no use.' 
 
 And she fell back on her knitting with redoubled energy, her 
 face full of a half -tearful intensity of meaning. Robert Elsmere 
 restrained a strong inclination to laugh, and set himself instead 
 to distract and console her. He expressed sympathy with her 
 difficulties, he talked to her about her party, he got from her 
 the names and histories of the guests. How Miss Austenish it 
 sounded : the managing rector's wife, her still more managing 
 old maid of a sister, the neighbouring clergyman who played 
 the flute, the local doctor, and a pretty daughter just out 'Very 
 pretty,' sighed Mrs. Thornburgh, who was now depressed all 
 round, ' but all flounces and frills and nothing to say ' and last 
 of all, those three sisters, the Leyburns, who seemed to be on a 
 different level, and whom he had heard mentioned so often since 
 his arrival by both husband and wife. 
 
 ' Tell me about the Miss Leyburns,' he said presently. ' You 
 and cousin William seem to have a great affection for them. Do 
 they live near ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, quite close,' cried Mrs. Thornburgh, brightening at last, 
 and like a great general, leaving one scheme in ruins, only the 
 more ardently to take up another. ' There is the house,' and she 
 
 Eointed out Burwood among its trees. Then with her eye eagerly 
 xed upon him, she fell into a more or less incoherent account 
 of her favourites. She laid on her colours thickly, and Elsmere 
 at once assumed extravagance. 
 
 ' A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds ! ' 
 he said, laughing. ' What luck ! But what on earth brought 
 them here a widow and three daughters from the south ? It 
 was an odd settlement surelyj though you have one of the love- 
 liest valleys and the purest airs in England.' 
 
 ' Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, ' I 
 think it very dull ; I always have. When one has to depend for 
 everything on a carrier that gets drunk, too ! Why, you know 
 they belong here. They're real Westmoreland people. 
 
 ' What does that mean exactly ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, their grandfather was a farmer, just like one of the
 
 CHAP, n WESTMORELAND 25 
 
 common farmers about. Only his land was his own, and theirs 
 isn't.' 
 
 'He was one of the last of the statesmen,' interposed Mr. 
 Thornburgh who, having rescued his sermon from Jane's 
 tender mercies, and put out his modest claret and sherry for 
 the evening, had strolled out again and found himself impelled 
 as usual to put some precision into his wife's statements ' one 
 of the small freeholders who have almost disappeared here as 
 elsewhere. The story of the Leyburns always seems to me 
 typical of many things.' 
 
 Robert looked inquiry, and the vicar, sitting down having 
 first picked up his wife's ball of wool as a peace-offering, which 
 was loftily accepted launched into a narrative which may be 
 here somewhat condensed. 
 
 The Leyburns' grandfather, it appeared, had been a typical 
 north-country peasant honest, with strong passions both of 
 love and hate, thinking nothing of knocking down his wife 
 with the poker, and frugal in all things save drink. Drink, 
 however, was ultimately his ruin, as it was the ruin of most of 
 the Cumberland statesmen. ' The people about here,' said the 
 vicar, ' say he drank away an acre a year. He had some fifty 
 acres, and it took about thirty years to beggar him.' 
 
 Meanwhile, this brutal, rollicking, strong-natured person had 
 sons and daughters plenty of them. Most of them, even the 
 daughters, were brutal and rollicking too. Of one of the 
 daughters, now dead, it was reported that, having on one 
 occasion discovered her father, then an old infirm man, sitting 
 calmly by the fire beside the prostrate form of his wife, whom 
 he had just felled with his crutch, she had taken off her wooden 
 shoe and given her father a clout on the head, which left his 
 gray hair streaming with blood; after which she had calmly 
 put the horse into the cart, and driven off to fetch the doctor 
 to both her parents. But among this grim and earthy crew 
 there was one exception, a ' hop out of kin,' of whom all the 
 rest made sport. This was the second son, Richard, who showed 
 such a persistent tendency to 'book-larnin',' and such a per- 
 sistent idiocy in all matters pertaining to the land, that nothing 
 was left to the father at last but to send him with many oaths 
 to the grammar school at Whinborough. From the moment 
 the boy got a footing in the school he hardly cost his father 
 another penny. He got a local bursary which paid his school 
 expenses, he never missed a remove or failed to gain a prize, 
 and finally won a close scholarship which carried him triumph- 
 antly to Queen's College. 
 
 His family watched his progress with a gaping, half -con- 
 temptuous amazement, till he announced himself as safely in- 
 stalled at Oxford, having borrowed from a Whinborough patron 
 the modest sum necessary to pay his college valuation a sum 
 which wild horses could not nave dragged out of his father, 
 now sunk over head and ears in debt and drink.
 
 26 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 From that moment they practically lost sight of him. He 
 sent the class list which contained his name among the Firsts 
 to his father ; in the same way he communicated the news of 
 his Fellowship at Queen's, his ordination and his appointment 
 to the headmastership of a south -country grammar school. 
 None of his communications were ever answered till, in the 
 very last year of his father's life, the eldest son, who had a 
 shrewder eye all round to the main chance than the rest, applied 
 to ' Dick ' for cash wherewith to meet some of the family neces- 
 sities. The money was promptly sent, together with photo- 
 graphs of Dick's wife and children. These last were not taken 
 much notice of. These Leyburns were a hard, limited, incurious 
 set, and they no longer regarded Dick as one of themselves. 
 
 4 Then came the old man's death,' said Mr. Thornburgh. ' It 
 happened the year after I took the living. Richard Leyburn 
 was sent for and came. I never saw such a scene in my life as 
 the funeral supper. It was kept up in the old style. Three of 
 Leyburn's sons were there : two of them farmers like himself, 
 one a clerk from Manchester, a daughter married to a tradesman 
 in Whinborough, a brother of the old man, who was under the 
 table bef oz-e supper was half over, and so on. Richard Leyburn 
 wrote to ask me to come, and I went to support his cloth. But 
 I was new to the place,' said the vicar, flushing a little, ' and 
 they belonged to a race that had never been used to pay much 
 respect to parsons. To see that man among the rest ! He was 
 thin and dignified ; he looked to me as if he had all the learning 
 imaginable, and he had large, absent -looking eyes, which, as 
 George, the eldest brother, said, gave you the impression of 
 some one that " had lost somethin' when he was nobbut a lad, 
 and had gone seekin' it iver sence." He was formidable to me ; 
 but between us we couldn't keep the rest of the party in order, 
 so when the orgie had gone on a certain time, we left it and 
 went out into the air. It was an August night. I remember 
 Leyburn threw back his head and drank it in. "I haven't 
 breathed this air for five-and-twenty years," he said. " I thought 
 I hated the place, and in spite of that drunken crew in there, it 
 draws me to it like a magnet. I feel, after all, that I have the 
 fells in my blood." He was a curious man, 'a refined-looking 
 melancholy creature, with a face that reminded you of Words- 
 worth, and cold donnish ways, except to his children and the 
 poor. I always thought his Me had disappointed him somehow.' 
 
 4 Yet one would think,' said Robert, opening his eyes, ' that 
 he had made a very considerable success of it ! ' 
 
 ' Well, I don't know how it was,' said the vicar, whose analysis 
 of character never went very far. ' Anyhow, next day he went 
 peering about the place and the mountains and the lands his 
 father had lost. And George, the eldest brother, who had in- 
 herited the farm, watched him without a word, in the way these 
 Westmoreland folk have, and at last offered him what remained 
 of the place for a fancy price. I told him it was a preposterous
 
 CHAP, it WESTMORELAND 27 
 
 sum. but he wouldn't bargain. "I shall bring my wife and 
 children here in the holidays," he said, " and the money will set 
 George up in California." So he paid through the nose, and 
 got possession of the old house, in which, I should think, he 
 had passed about as miserable a childhood as it was possible to 
 pass. There's no accounting for tastes.' 
 
 ' And then the next summer they all came down,' interrupted 
 Mrs. Thornburgh. She disliked a long story as she disliked 
 being read aloud to. ' Catherine was fifteen, not a bit like a 
 child. You used to see her everywhere with her father. To 
 my mind he was always exciting her brain too much, but he 
 was a man you could not say a word to. I don't care what 
 William says about his being like Wordsworth ; he just gave 
 you the blues to look at.' 
 
 ' It was so strange,' said the vicar meditatively, ' to see them 
 in that house. If you knew the things that used to go on there 
 in old days the savages that livecf there. And then to see 
 those three delicately brought-up children going in and out of 
 the parlour where old Leyburn used to sit smoking and drink- 
 ing ; and Dick Leyburn walking about in a white tie, and the 
 same men touching their hats to him who had belaboured him 
 when he was a boy at the village school it was queer.' 
 
 ' A curious little bit of social history,' said Elsmere. ' Well, 
 and then he died and the family lived on 1 ' 
 
 ' Yes, he died the year after he bought the place. And per- 
 haps the most interesting thing of all has been the development 
 of his eldest daughter. She has watched over her mother, she 
 has brought up her sisters ; but much more than that : she has 
 become a sort of Deborah in these valleys,' said the vicar, smiling. 
 ' I don't count for much, she counts for a great deal. I can't 
 get the people to tell me their secrets, she can. There is a sort 
 of natural sympathy between them and her. She nurses them, 
 she scolds them, she preaches to them, and they take it from 
 her when they won't take it from us. Perhaps it is the feeling 
 of blood. Perhaps they think it as mysterious a dispensation 
 of Providence as I do that that brutal, swearing, whisky-drink- 
 ing stock should have ended in anything so saintly and so 
 beautiful as Catherine Leyburn.' 
 
 The quiet, commonplace clergyman spoke with a sudden 
 tremor of feeling. His wife, however, looked at him with a 
 dissatisfied expi-ession. 
 
 'You always talk,' she said, 'as if there were no one but 
 Catherine. People generally like the other two much better. 
 Catherine is so stand-off.' 
 
 ' Oh, the other two are very well,' said the vicar, but in a 
 different tone. 
 
 Robert sat ruminating. Presently his host and hostess went 
 in, and the young man went sauntering up the climbing garden- 
 path to the point where only a railing divided it from the fell- 
 side. From here his eye commanded the whole of the upper end
 
 28 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 of the valley a bare, desolate recess filled with evening 
 shadow, and walled round by masses of gray and purple crag, 
 except in one spot, where a green intervening fell marked the 
 course of the pass connecting the dale with the Ullswater dis- 
 trict. Below him were church and parsonage ; beyond, the stone- 
 filled babbling river, edged by intensely green fields, which 
 melted imperceptibly into the browner stretches of the opposite 
 mountain. Most of the scene, except where the hills at the end 
 rose highest and shut out the sun, was bathed in quiet light. 
 The white patches on the farmhouses, the heckberry trees along 
 the river and the road, caught and emphasised the golden rays 
 which were flooding into the lower valley as into a broad green 
 cup. Close by, in the little vicarage orchard, were fruit trees in 
 blossom ; the air was mild and fragrant, though to the young 
 man from the warmer south there was still a bracing quality in 
 the soft western breeze which blew about him. 
 
 He stood there bathed in silent enchantment, an eager nature 
 going out to meet and absorb into itself the beauty and peace 
 of the scene. Lines of Wordsworth were on his lips ; the little 
 well-worn volume was in his pocket, but he did not need to 
 bring it out ; and his voice had all a poet's intensity of emphasis 
 as he strolled along, reciting under his breath 
 
 ' It is a beauteous evening, calm and free, 
 The holy time is quiet as a nun 
 Breathless with adoration ! ' 
 
 Presently his eye was once more caught by the roof of Bur- 
 wood, lying beneath him on its promontory of land, in the quiet 
 shelter of its protecting trees. He stopped, and a delicate sense 
 of harmonious association awoke in him. That girl, atoning as 
 it were by her one white life for all the crimes and coarseness of 
 her ancestry : the idea of her seemed to steal into the solemn 
 golden evening and give it added poetry and meaning. The 
 young man felt a sudden strong curiosity to see her. 
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 THE festal tea had begun, and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. 
 Opposite to her, on the vicar's left, sat the formidable rector's 
 wife. Poor Mrs. Thornburgh had said to herself as she entered 
 the room on the arm of Mr. Mayhew, the incumbent of the 
 neighbouring valley of Shanmoor, that the first coup d'oeil was 
 good. The flowers had been arranged in the afternoon by Hose ; 
 Sarah's exertions had made the silver shine again ; a pleasing 
 odour of good food underlay the scent of the bluebells and fern 
 and what with the snowy table-linen, and the pretty dresses ana 
 bright faces of the younger people, the room seemed to be full 
 of an incessant play of crisp and delicate colour.
 
 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 29 
 
 But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat witli a 
 little sigh of wearied satisfaction, she caught sight suddenly of 
 an eye-glass at the other end of the table slowly revolving in a 
 large and jewelled hand. The judicial eye behind the eye-glass 
 travelled round the table, lingering, as it seemed to Mrs Thorn- 
 burgh's excited consciousness, on every spot where cream or 
 jelly or meringue should have been and was not. When it 
 dropped with a harsh little click, the hostess, unable to restrain 
 herself, rushed into desperate conversation with Mr. Mayhew, 
 giving vent to incoherencies in the course of the first act of the 
 meal which did but confirm her neighbour a grim, uncommuni- 
 cative person in his own devotion to a policy of silence. Mean- 
 while the vicar was grappling on very unequal terms with Mrs. 
 Seaton. Mrs. Ley burn had fallen to young Elsmere. Catherine 
 Leyburn was paired off with Dr. Baker, Agnes with Mr. May- 
 hew's awkward son a tongue-tied youth, lately an unattached 
 student at Oxford, but now relegated, owing to an invincible 
 antipathy to Greek verbs, to his native air, till some other open- 
 ing into the great world should be discovered for him. 
 
 Hose was on Eobert Elsmere's right. Agnes had coaxed her 
 into a white dress as being the least startling garment she pos- 
 sessed, and she was like a Stothard picture with her high waist, 
 her blue sash ribbon, her slender neck and brilliant head. She 
 had already cast many curious glances at the Thornburghs' 
 guest. ' Not a prig, at any rate,' she thought to herself with 
 satisfaction, ' so Agnes is quite wrong.' 
 
 As for the young man, who was, to begin with, in that state 
 which so often follows on the long confinement of illness, when 
 the light seems brighter and scents keener and experience sharper 
 than at other times, he was inwardly confessing that Mrs. 
 Thornburgh had not been romancing. The vivid creature at 
 his elbow, with her still unsoftened angles and movements, was 
 in the first dawn of an exceptional beauty ; the plain sister had 
 struck him before supper in the course of twenty minutes' con- 
 versation as above the average in point of manners and talk. 
 As to Miss Leyburn, he had so far only exchanged a bow with 
 her, but he was watching her now, as he sat opposite to her, out 
 of his quick observant eyes. 
 
 She, too, was in white. As she turned to speak to the youth 
 at her side, Elsmere caught the fine outline of the head, the un- 
 usually clear and perfect moulding of the brow, nose, and upper 
 lip. The hollows in the cheeks struck him, and ' the way in 
 which the breadth of the forehead somewhat overbalanced the 
 delicacy of the mouth and chin. The face, though still quite 
 young, and expressing a perfect physical health, had the look of 
 having been polished and refined away to its foundations. There 
 was not an ounce of superfluous flesh on it, and not a vestige of 
 Rose's peach-like bloom. Her profile, as he saw it now, had the 
 firmness, the clear whiteness, of a profile on a Greek gem. 
 
 She was actually making that silent, awkward lad talk !
 
 30 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 Robert, who, out of his four years' experience as an Oxford tutor, 
 had an abundant compassion for and understanding of such 
 beings as young Mayhew, watched her with a pleased amuse- 
 ment, wondering how she did it. What ? Had she got him on 
 carpentering, engineering discovered his weak point 1 Water- 
 wheels, inventors, steam-engines and the lumpish lad all in a 
 glow, talking away nineteen to the dozen. What tact, what 
 kindness in her gray-blue eyes ! 
 
 But he was interrupted by Mrs. Seaton, who was perfectly 
 well aware that she had beside her a stranger of some prestige, 
 an Oxford man, and a member, besides, of a well-known Sussex 
 county family. She was a large and commanding person, clad 
 in black moire silk. She wore a velvet diadem, Honiton lace 
 lappets, and a variety of chains, beads, and bangles bestrewn 
 about her that made a tinkling as she moved. Fixing her 
 neighbour with a bland majesty of eye, she inquired of him if 
 he were ' any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere 1 ' Robert re- 
 plied that Sir Mowbray Elsmere was his father's cousin, and the 
 patron of the living to which he had just been appointed. Mrs. 
 Seaton then graciously informed him that long ago ' when I 
 was a girl in my native Hampshire ' her family and Sir Mow- 
 bray Elsmere had been on intimate terms. Her father had been 
 devoted to Sir Mowbray. ' And I,' she added, with an evident 
 though lofty desire to please, ' retain an inherited respect, sir, 
 for your name.' 
 
 Robert bowed, but it was not clear from his look that the 
 rector's wife had made an impression. His general conception 
 of his relative and patron Sir Mowbray who had been for many 
 years the family black sheep was, indeed, so far removed from 
 any notions of ' respect,' that he had some difficulty in keeping 
 his countenance under the lady's look and pose. He would have 
 been still more entertained had he known the nature of the in- 
 timacy to which she referred. Mrs. Seaton's father, in his 
 capacity of solicitor in a small country town, had acted as elec- 
 tioneering agent for Sir Mowbray (then plain Mr.) Elsmere on 
 two occasions in 18 , when his client had been triumphantly 
 returned at a bye-election ; and two years later, when a repeti- 
 tion of the tactics, so successful in the previous contest, led to a 
 petition, and to the disappearance of the heir to the Elsmere 
 property from parliamentary life. 
 
 Of these matters, however, he was ignorant, and Mrs. Seaton 
 did not enlighten him. Drawing herself up a little, and pro- 
 ceeding in a more neutral tone than before, she proceeded 
 to put him through a catechism on Oxford, alternately cross- 
 examining him and expounding to him her own views and her 
 husband's on the functions of Universities. She and the Arch- 
 deacon conceived that the Oxford authorities were mainly 
 occupied in ruining the young men's health by over-exami- 
 nation, and poisoning their minds by free-thinking opinions. 
 In her belief, if it went on, the mothers of England would refuse
 
 CHAP, iti WESTMORELAND 31 
 
 to send their sons to these ancient but deadly resorts. She 
 looked at him sternly as she spoke, as though defying him to 
 be flippant in return. And he, indeed, did his polite best to be 
 serious. 
 
 But it somewhat disconcerted him in the middle to find Miss 
 Leyburn's eyes upon him. And undeniably there was a spark 
 of laughter in them, quenched, as soon as his glance crossed 
 hers, under long lashes. How that spark had lit up the grave, 
 pale face ! He longed to provoke it again, to cross over to her 
 and say, ' What amused you ? Do you think me very young 
 and simple ? Tell me about these people.' 
 
 But, instead, he made friends with Rose. Mrs. Seaton was 
 soon engaged in giving the vicar advice on his parochial affairs, 
 an experience which generally ended by the appearance of cer- 
 tain truculent elements in one of the mildest of men. So Robert 
 was free to turn to his girl neighbour and ask her what people 
 meant by calling the Lakes rainy. 
 
 ' I understand it is pouring at Oxford. To-day your sky here 
 has been without a cloud, and your rivers are running dry.' 
 
 ' And you have mastered our climate in twenty -four hours, 
 like the tourists isn't it ? that do the Irish question in three 
 weeks ? ' 
 
 ' Not the answer of a bread-and-butter miss,' he thought to 
 himself, amused, ' and yet what a child it looks.' 
 
 He threw himself into a war of words with her, and enjoyed 
 it extremely. Her brilliant colouring, her gestures as fresh and 
 untamed as the movements of the leaping river outside, the 
 mixture in her of girlish pertness and ignorance with the pro- 
 mise of a remarkable general capacity, made her a most taking, 
 provoking creature. Mrs. Thornburgh much recovered in 
 mind since Dr. Baker had praised the pancakes by which 
 Sarah had sought to prove to her mistress the superfluity of 
 naughtiness involved in her recourse to foreign cooks watched 
 the young man and maiden with a face which grew more and 
 more radiant. The conversation in the garden had not pleased 
 her. Why should people always talk of Catherine ; Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh stood in awe of Catherine and had given her up in de- 
 spair. It was the other two whose fortunes, as possibly directed 
 by her, filled her maternal heart with sympathetic emotion. 
 
 Suddenly in the midst of her satisfaction she had a rude 
 shock. What on earth was the vicar doing ? After they had 
 got through better than any one could have hoped, thanks to a 
 discreet silence and Sarah's makeshifts, there was the master of 
 the house pouring the whole tale of his wife's aspirations and 
 disappointment into Mrs. Seaton's ear ! If it were ever allow- 
 able to rush upon your husband at table and stop his mouth 
 with a dinner napkin, Mrs. Thornburgh could at this moment 
 have performed such a feat. She nodded and coughed and 
 fidgeted in vain ! 
 
 The vicar's confidences were the result of a fit of nervous
 
 32 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 exasperation. Mrs. Seatpn had just embarked upon an account 
 of ' our charming time with Lord Fleckwood.' Now Lord Fleck- 
 wood was a distant cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great 
 magnate of the neighbourhood, not, however, a very respectable 
 magnate. Mr. Thornburgh had heard accounts of Lupton 
 Castle from Mrs. Seaton on at least half a dozen different 
 occasions. Privately he believed them all to refer to one 
 visit, an event of immemorial antiquity periodically brought 
 up to date by Mrs. Seaton's imagination. But the vicar was a 
 timid man, without the courage of his opinions, and in his 
 eagerness to stop the flow of his neighbour's eloquence he could 
 think of no better device, or more suitable rival subject, than 
 to plunge into the story of the drunken carrier, and the pastry 
 still reposing on the counter at Kandall's. 
 
 He blushed, good man, when he was well in it. His wife's 
 horrified countenance embarrassed him. But anything was 
 better than Lord Fleckwood. Mrs. Seaton listened to him 
 with the slightest smile on her formidable Up. The story was 
 pleasing to her. 
 
 ' At least, my dear sir,' she said when he paused, nodding her 
 diademed head with stately emphasis, 'Mrs. Thornburgh's in- 
 convenience may have one good result. You can now make an 
 example of the carrier. It is our special business, as my hus- 
 band always says, who are in authority, to bring their low 
 vices home to these people.' 
 
 The vicar fidgeted in his chair. What ineptitude had he 
 been guilty of now ! By way of avoiding Lord Fleckwood he 
 might have started Mrs. Seaton on teetotalism. Now if there 
 was one topic on which this awe-inspiring woman was more 
 awe-inspiring than another it was on the topic of teetotalism. 
 The vicar had already felt himself a criminal as he drank his 
 modest glass of claret under her eye. 
 
 'Oh, the drunkenness about here is pretty bad,' said Dr. 
 Baker, from the other end of the table. 'But there are plenty 
 of worse things in these valleys. Besides, what person in his 
 senses would think of trying to disestablish John Backhouse ? 
 He and his queer brother are as much a feature of the valley as 
 High Fell. We have too few originals left to be so very par- 
 ticular about trifles.' 
 
 ' Trifles 1 ' repeated Mrs. Seaton in a deep voice, throwing up 
 her eyes. But she would not venture an argument with Dr. 
 Baker. He had all the cheery self-confidence of the old estab- 
 lished local doctor, who knows himself to be a power, and 
 neither Mrs. Seaton nor her restless intriguing little husband 
 had ever yet succeeded in putting him down. 
 
 'You must see these two old characters,' said Dr. Baker to 
 Elsmere across the table. ' They are relics of a Westmoreland 
 which will soon have disappeared. Old John, who is going on 
 for seventy, is as tough an old dalesman as ever you saw. He 
 doesn't measure his cups, but he would scorn to be floored by
 
 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 33 
 
 them. I don't believe he does drink much, but if he does there 
 is probably no amount of whisky that he couldn't carry. Jim, 
 the other brother, is about five years older. He is a kind of 
 softie all alive on one side of his brain, and a noodle on the 
 other. A single glass of rum and water puts him under the 
 table. And as he never can refuse this glass, and as the temp- 
 tation generally seizes him when they are on their rounds, he is 
 always getting John into disgrace. John swears at him and 
 slangs him. No use. Jim sits still, looks well, nohow. I 
 never saw an old creature with a more singular gift of denud- 
 ing his face of all expression. John vows he shall go to the 
 " house " ; he has no legal share in the business ; the house and 
 the horse and cai't are John's. Next day you see them on the 
 cart again just as usual. In reality neither brother can do 
 without the other. And three days after, the play begins 
 again.' 
 
 'An improving spectacle for the valley,' said Mrs. Seaton 
 drily. 
 
 'Oh, my dear madam,' said the doctor, shrugging his 
 shoulders, ' we can't all be so virtuous. If old Jim is a 
 drunkard, he has got a heart of his own somewhere, and can 
 nurse a dying niece like a woman. Miss Leyburn can tell us 
 something about that.' 
 
 And he turned round to his neighbour with a complete 
 change of expression, and a voice that had a new note in it 
 of affectionate respect. Catherine coloured as if she did not 
 like being addressed on the subject, and just nodded a little 
 with gentle affirmative eyes. 
 
 ' A strange case,' said Dr. Baker, again looking at Elsmere. 
 ' It is a family that is original and old-world even in its ways of 
 dying. I have been a doctor in these parts for five-and-twenty 
 years. I have seen what you may call old Westmoreland die 
 out costume, dialect, superstitions. At least, as to dialect, the 
 people have become bi-lingual. I sometimes think they talk it 
 to each other as much as ever, but some of them won't talk it 
 to you and me at all. And as to superstitions, the only ghost 
 story I know that still has some hold on popular belief is the 
 one which attaches to this mountain here, High Fell, at the end 
 of this valley.' 
 
 He paused a moment. A salutary sense has begun to pene- 
 trate even modern provincial society, that no man may tell a 
 ghost story without leave. Rose threw a merry glance at him. 
 They two were very old friends. Dr. Baker had pulled out her 
 first teeth and given her a sixpence afterwards for each opera- 
 tion. The pull was soon forgotten ; the sixpence lived on grate- 
 fully in a child's warm memory. 
 
 'Tell it,' she said ; 'we give you leave. We won't interrupt 
 you unless you put in too many inventions.' 
 
 ' You invite me to break the first law of story-telling, Miss 
 Rose,' said the doctor, lifting a finger at her. 'Every man is 
 
 P
 
 34 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 bound to leave a story better than he found it. However, I 
 couldn't tell it if I would. I don't know what makes the poor 
 ghost walk ; and if you do, I shall say you invent. But at any 
 rate there is a ghost, and she walks along the side of High Fell 
 at midnight every Midsummer day. If you see her and she 
 passes you in silence, why you only get a fright for your pains. 
 But if she speaks to you, you die within the year. Old John 
 Backhouse is a widower with one daughter. This girl saw the 
 
 thpst last Midsummer day, and Miss Leyburn and I are now 
 oing our best to keep her alive over the next ; but with very 
 small prospect of success.' 
 
 'What is the girl dying of? fright?' asked Mrs. Seaton 
 harshly. 
 
 ' Oh no ! ' said the doctor hastily, ' not precisely. A sad story ; 
 better not inquire into it. But at the present moment the time 
 of her death seems likely to be determined by the strength of 
 her own and other people's belief in the ghost's summons.' 
 
 Mrs. Seaton's grim mouth relaxed into an ungenial smile. 
 She put up her eye-glass and looked at Catherine. 'An un- 
 pleasant household, I should imagine,' she said shortly, 'for a 
 young lady to visit.' 
 
 Doctor Baker looked at the rector's wife, and a kind of flame 
 came into his eyes. He and Mrs. Seaton were old enemies, and 
 he was a quick-tempered mercurial sort of man. 
 
 ' I presume that one's guardian angel may have to follow one 
 sometimes into unpleasant quarters,' he said hotly. ' If this girl 
 lives, it will be Miss Leyburn's doing ; if she dies, saved and 
 comforted, instead of lost in this world and the next, it will be 
 Miss Leyburn's doing too. Ah, my dear young lady, let me 
 alone ! You tie my tongue always, and I won't have it.' 
 
 And the doctor turned his weather-beaten elderly face upon 
 her with a look which was half defiance and half apology. She, 
 on her side, had flushed painfully, laying her white finger-tips 
 imploringly on his arm. Mrs. Seaton turned away with a little 
 dry cough, so did her spectacled sister at the other end of the 
 table. Mrs. Leyburn, on the other hand, sat in a little ecstasy, 
 looking at Catherine and Dr. Baker, something glistening in her 
 eyes. Robert Elsmere alone showed presence of mind. Bending 
 across to Dr. Baker, he asked him a sudden question as to the 
 history of a certain strange green mound or barrow that rose 
 out of a flat field not far from the vicarage windows. Dr. Baker 
 grasped his whiskers, threw the young man a queer glance, and 
 replied. Thenceforward he and Robert kept up a lively anti- 
 quarian talk on the traces of Norse settlement in the Cumbrian 
 valleys, which lasted till the ladies left the dining-room. 
 
 As Catherine Leyburn went out Elsmere stood holding the 
 door open. She could not help raising her eyes upon him, eyes 
 full of a half -timid, half -grateful friendliness. His own returned 
 her look with interest. 
 
 ' "A spirit, but a woman too,"' he thought to himself with a
 
 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 85 
 
 new-born thrill of sympathy, as he went back to his seat. She 
 had not yet said a direct word to him, and yet he was curiously 
 convinced that here was one of the most interesting persons, and 
 one of the persons most interesting to him, that he had ever 
 met. What mingled delicacy and strength in the hand that had 
 lain beside her on the dinner-table what potential depths of 
 feeling in the full dark-fringed eye ! 
 
 Half an hour later, when Elsmere re-entered the drawing- 
 room, he found Catherine Leyburn sitting by an open French 
 window that looked out on the lawn, and on the dim rocky face 
 of the fell. Adeline Baker, a stooping red-armed maiden, with 
 a pretty face, set off', as she imagined, by a vast amount of cheap 
 finery, was sitting beside her, studying her with a timid adora- 
 tion. The doctor's daughter regarded Catherine Leyburn, who 
 during the last five years had made herself almost as distinct a 
 figure in the popular imagination of a few Westmoreland valleys 
 as Sister Dora among her Walsall miners, as a being of a totally 
 different order from herself. She was glued to the side of her 
 idol, but her shy and awkward tongue could find hardly any- 
 thing to say to her. Catherine, however, talked away, gently 
 stroking the while the girl's rough hand which lay on her knee, 
 to the mingled pain and bliss of its owner, who was outraged by 
 the contrast between her own ungainly member and Miss Ley- 
 burn's delicate fingers. 
 
 Mrs. Seaton was on the sofa beside Mrs. Thornburgh, amply 
 avenging herself on the vicar's wife for any checks she might 
 have received at tea. Miss Barks, her sister, an old maid with 
 a face that seemed to be perpetually peering forward, light 
 colourless hair surmounted by a cap adorned with artificial 
 nasturtiums, and white-lashed eyes armed with spectacles, was 
 having her way with Mrs. Leyburn, inquiring into the house- 
 hold arrangements of Burwood with a cross-examining power 
 which made the mild widow as pulp before her. 
 
 When the gentlemen entered, Mrs. Thornburgh looked round 
 hastily. She herself had opened that door into the garden. A 
 garden on a warm summer night offers opportunities no schemer 
 should neglect. Agnes and Rose were chattering and laughing 
 on the gravel path just outside it, their white girlish figures 
 showing temptingly against the dusky background of garden 
 and fell. It somewhat disappointed the vicar s wife to see her 
 tall guest take a chair and draw it beside Catherine while 
 Adeline Baker awkwardly got up and disappeared into the 
 garden. 
 
 Elsmere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong 
 had been his sense of attraction at tea ; but like the rest of us 
 he could find nothing more telling to start with than a remark 
 about the weather. Catherine in her reply asked him if he were 
 quite recovered from the attack of low fever he was understood 
 to have been suffering from. 
 
 ' Oh yes,' he said brightly, ' I am very nearly as fit as I ever
 
 36 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK I 
 
 was, and more eager than I ever was to get to work. The idling 
 of it is the worst part of illness. However, in a month from 
 now I must be at my living, and I can only hope it will give me 
 enough to do.' 
 
 Catherine looked up at him with a quick impulse of liking. 
 What an eager face it was ! Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be 
 the note of the whole man^ of the quick eyes and mouth 2 the 
 flexible hands and energetic movements. Even the straight, 
 stubbly hair, its owner's passing torment, standing up round 
 the high open brow, seemed to help the general impression of 
 alertness and vigour. 
 
 ' Your mother, I hear, is already there ? ' said Catherine. 
 
 ' Yes. My poor mother ! ' and the young man smiled half 
 sadly. 'It is a curious situation for both of us. This living 
 which has just been bestowed on me is my father's old living. 
 It is in the gift of my cousin, Sir Mowbray Elsmere. My great- 
 uncle ' he drew himself together suddenly. ' But I don't know 
 why I should imagine that these things interest other people,' 
 he said, with a little quick, almost comical, accent of self- 
 rebuke. 
 
 ' Please go on,' cried Catherine hastily. The voice and manner 
 were singularly pleasant to her ; she wished he would not inter- 
 rupt himself for nothing. 
 
 ' Really 1 Well then, my great-uncle, old Sir William, wished 
 me to have it when I grew up. I was against it for a long time, 
 took orders j but I wanted something more stirring than a 
 country parish. One has dreams of many things. But one's 
 dreams come to nothing. I got ill at Oxford. The doctors for- 
 bade the town work. The old incumbent who had held the 
 living since my father's death died precisely at that moment. 
 I felt myself booked, and gave in to various friends ; but it is 
 second best.' 
 
 She felt a certain soreness and discomfort in his tone, as 
 though his talk represented a good deal of mental struggle in 
 the past. 
 
 'But the country is not idleness,' she said, smiling at him. 
 Her cheek was leaning lightly on her hand, her eyes had an 
 unusual animation ; and her long white dress, guiltless of any 
 ornament save a small old-fashioned locket hanging from a thin 
 old chain and a pair of hair bracelets with engraved gold clasps, 
 gave her the nobleness and simplicity of a Romney picture. 
 
 ' You do not find it so, I imagine,' he replied, bendmg forward 
 to her with a charming gesture of homage. He would have 
 liked her to talk to him of her work and her interests. He, too, 
 mentally compared her to Saint Elizabeth. He could almost 
 have fancied the dark red flowers in her white lap. But his 
 comparison had another basis of feeling than Rose's. 
 
 However, she would not talk to him of herself. The way in 
 which she turned the conversation brought home to his own 
 expansive confiding nature a certain austerity and stiffness of
 
 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 37 
 
 fibre in her which for the moment chilled him. But as he got 
 her into talk about the neighbourhood, the people and their 
 ways, the impression vanished again, so far at least as there was 
 anything repellent about it. Austerity, strength, individuality, 
 all these words indeed he was more and more driven to apply to 
 her. She was like no other woman he had ever seen. It was 
 not at all that she was more remarkable intellectually. Every 
 now and then, indeed, as their talk flowed on, he noticed in 
 what she said an absence of a good many interests and attain- 
 ments which in his ordinary south-country women friends he 
 would have assumed as a matter of course. 
 
 ' I understand French very little, and I never read any,' she 
 said to him once, quietly, as he fell to comparing some peasant 
 story she had told him with an episode in one of George Sand's 
 Berry novels. It seemed to him that she knew her Wordsworth 
 by heart. And her own mountain life, her own rich and medi- 
 tative soul, had taught her judgments and comments on her 
 favourite poet which stirred Elsmere every now and then to 
 enthusiasm so true they were and pregnant, so full often of a 
 natural magic of expression. On the other hand, when he 
 quoted a very well-known line of Shelley's she asked him where 
 it came from. She seemed to him deeper and simpler at every 
 moment ; her very limitations of sympathy and knowledge, and 
 they were evidently many, began to attract him. The thought 
 of her ancestry crossed him now and then, rousing in him now 
 wonder, and now a strange sense of congruity and harmony. 
 Clearly she was the daughter of a primitive unexhausted race. 
 And yet what purity, what refinement, what delicate perception 
 and self-restraint ! 
 
 Presently they fell on the subject of Oxford. 
 
 ' Were you ever there ? ' he asked her. 
 
 ' Once,' she said. ' I went with my father one summer term. 
 I have only a confused memory of it of the quadrangles, and a 
 long street, a great building with a dome, and such beautiful 
 trees ! ' 
 
 ' Did your father often go back ? ' 
 
 ' No ; never towards the latter part of his life ' and her clear 
 eyes clouded a little ; ' nothing made him so sad as the thought 
 of Oxford.' 
 
 She paused, as though she had strayed on to a topic where 
 expression was a little difficult. Then his face and clerical dress 
 seemed somehow to reassure her, and she began again, thougli 
 reluctantly. 
 
 ' He used to say that it was all so changed. The young fel- 
 lows he saw when he went back scorned everything he cared 
 for. Every visit to Oxford was like a stab to him. It seemed 
 to him as if the place was full of men who only wanted to 
 destroy and break down everything that was sacred to him.' 
 
 Elsmere reflected that Richard Ley burn must have left Oxford 
 about the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed
 
 38 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK I 
 
 Tractarianism, and in twenty years transformed the Uni- 
 versity. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' he said, smiling gently. ' He should have lived a 
 little longer. There is another turn of the tide since then. 
 The destructive wave has spent itself, and at Oxford now 
 many of us feel ourselves on the upward swell of a religious 
 revival.' 
 
 Catherine looked up at him with a sweet sympathetic look. 
 That dim vision of Oxford, with its gray, tree-lined walls, lay 
 very near to her heart for her father's sake. And the keen face 
 above her seemed to satisfy and respond to her inner feeling. 
 
 ' I know the High Church influence is very strong,' she said, 
 hesitating ; ' but I don't know whether father would have liked 
 that much better.' 
 
 The last words had slipped out of her, and she checked herself 
 suddenly. Robert saw that she was uncertain as to his opinions, 
 and afraid lest she might have said something discourteous. 
 
 ' It is not only the High Church influence,' he said quickly, 
 ' it is a mixture of influences from all sorts of quarters that has 
 brought about the new state of things. Some of the factors in 
 the change were hardly Christian at all, by name, but they have 
 all helped to make men think, to stir their hearts, to win them 
 back to the old ways.' 
 
 His voice had taken to itself a singular magnetism. Evidently 
 the matters they were discussing were matters in which he felt 
 a deep and loving interest. His young boyish face had grown 
 grave ; there was a striking dignity and weight in his look and 
 manner, which suddenly roused in Catherine the sense that she 
 was speaking to a man of distinction, accustomed to deal on 
 equal terms with the large things of life. She raised her eyes 
 to him for a moment, and he saw in them a beautiful, mystical 
 light responsive, lofty, full of soul. 
 
 The next moment, it apparently struck her sharply that their 
 conversation was becoming incongruous with its surroundings. 
 Behind them Mrs. Thornburgh was bustling about with candles 
 and music-stools, preparing for a performance on the flute by 
 Mr. Mayhew, the black-browed vicar of Shanmoor, and the room 
 seemed to be pervaded by Mrs. Seaton's strident voice. Her 
 strong natural reserve asserted itself, and her face settled again 
 into the slight rigidity of expression characteristic of it. She 
 rose and prepared to move farther into the room. 
 
 ' We must listen,' she said to him, smiling, over her shoulder. 
 
 And she left him, settling herself by the side of Mrs. Leyburn. 
 He had a momentary sense of rebuff. The man, quick, sensitive, 
 sympathetic, felt in the woman the presence of a strength, a 
 self-suflicingness which was not all attractive. His vanity, if he 
 had cherished any during their conversation, was not flattered 
 by its close. But as he leant against the window-frame waiting 
 for the music to begin, he could hardly keep his eyes from her. 
 He was a man who, by force of temperament, made friends
 
 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 39 
 
 readily with women, though except for a passing fancy or two 
 he had never been in love ; and his sense of difficulty with 
 regard to this stiffly-mannered, deep-eyed country girl brought 
 with it an unusual stimulus and excitement. 
 
 Miss Barks seated herself deliberately, after much fiddling 
 with bracelets and gloves, and tied back the ends of her cap 
 behind her. Mr. Mayhew took out his flute and lovingly put it 
 together. He was a powerful swarthy man, who said little and 
 was generally alarming to the ladies of the neighbourhood. To 
 propitiate him, they asked him to bring his flute, and nervously 
 praised the fierce music he made on it. Miss Barks enjoyed a 
 monopoly of his accompaniments, and there were many who 
 regarded her assiduity as a covert attack upon the widower's 
 name and position. If so, it was Greek meeting Greek, for with 
 all his taciturnity the vicar of Shanmoor was well able to defend 
 himself. 
 
 ' Has it begun ? ' said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and 
 turning he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, 
 Rose's cheeks flushed by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly 
 round her head. 
 
 She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following 
 some powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once 
 the strength of her wrists and the vicarage piano. 
 
 The girl made a little moue of disgust, and turned as though 
 to fly down the steps again. But Agnes caught her and held 
 her, and the mutinous creature had to submit to be drawn inside 
 while Mrs. Thornburgh, in obedience to complaints of draughts 
 from Mrs. Seaton, motioned to have the window shut. Rose 
 established herself against the wall, her curly head thrown back, 
 her eyes half shut, her mouth expressing an angry endurance. 
 Robert watched her with amusement. 
 
 It was certainly a remarkable duet. After an adagio opening 
 in which flute and piano were at magnificent cross purposes 
 from the beginning, the two instruments plunged into an allegro 
 very long and very fast, which became ultimately a desperate 
 race between the competing performers for the final chord. Mr. 
 Mayhew toiled away, taxing the resources of his whole vast 
 frame to keep his small instrument in a line with the piano, and 
 taxing them in vain. For the shriller and the wilder grew the 
 flute, and the greater the exertion of the dark Hercules perform- 
 ing on it, the fiercer grew the pace of the piano. Rose stamped 
 her little foot. 
 
 ' Two bars ahead last page,' she murmured, ' three bars this : 
 will no one stop her ! ' 
 
 But the pages flew past, turned assiduously by Agnes, who 
 took a sardonic delight in these performances, and every counten- 
 ance in the room seemed to take a look of sharpened anxiety as 
 to how the duet was to end, and who was to be victor. 
 
 Nobody knowing Miss Barks need to have been in any doubt 
 as to that ! Crash came the last chord, and the poor flute nearly
 
 40 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 half a page behind was left shrilly hanging in mid-air, for- 
 saken and companionless, an object of derision to gods and 
 men. 
 
 ' Ah ! I took it a little fast ! ' said the lady, triumphantly 
 looking up at the discomfited clergyman. 
 
 ' Mr. Elsmere,' said Rose, hiding herself in the window curtain 
 beside him, that she might have her laugh in safety. ' Do they 
 play like that in Oxford, or has Long Whindale a monopoly ? ' 
 
 But before he could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the 
 girl 
 
 ' Eose ! Rose ! Don't go out again ! It is your turn next ! ' 
 
 Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air. Robert, remem- 
 bering something that Mrs. Thornburgh had said to him as to 
 her musical power, supposed that she felt it an indignity to be 
 asked to play in such company. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh motioned to him to come and sit by Mrs. 
 Leyburn, a summons which he obeyed with the more alacrity, 
 as it brought him once more within reach of Mrs. Leyburn's 
 eldest daughter. 
 
 ' Are you fond of music, Mr. Elsmere ? ' asked Mrs. Leyburn 
 in her little mincing voice, making room for his chair beside 
 them. ' If you are, I am sure my youngest daughter's playing 
 will please you.' 
 
 Catherine moved abruptly. Robert, while he made some 
 pleasant answer, divined that the reserved and stately daughter 
 must be often troubled by the mother's expansiveness. 
 
 Meanwhile the room was again settling itself to listen. Mrs. 
 Seatpn was severely turning over a photograph book. In her 
 opinion the violin was an unbecoming instrument for young 
 women. Miss Barks sat upright with the studiously neutral 
 expression which befits the artist asked to listen to a rival. 
 Mr. Thornburgh sat pensive, one foot drooped over the other. 
 He was very fond of the Leyburn girls, but music seemed to 
 him, good man, one of the least comprehensible of human 
 pleasures. As for Rose, she had at last arranged herself and 
 her accompanist Agnes, after routing out from her music a 
 couple of Fantasie-Stiicke, which she had wickedly chosen as 
 presenting the most severely classical contrast to the ' rubbish ' 
 played by the preceding performers. She stood with her lithe 
 figure in its old-fashioned dress thrown out against the black 
 coats of a group of gentlemen beyond, one slim arched foot 
 advanced, the ends of the blue sash dangling, the hand and 
 arm, beautifully formed, but still wanting the roundness of 
 womanhood, raised high for action, the lightly poised head 
 thrown back with an air. Robert thought her a bewitching, 
 half -grown thing, overflowing with potentialities of future 
 brilliance and empire. 
 
 Her music astonished him. Where had a little provincial 
 maiden learned to play with this intelligence, this force, this 
 delicate command or her instrument ? He was not a musician,
 
 CHAP, in WESTMORELAND 41 
 
 and therefore could not gauge her exactly, but he was more or 
 less familiar with music and its standards, as all people become 
 nowadays who live in a highly cultivated society, and he knew 
 enough at any rate to see that what he was listening to was 
 remarkable, was out of the common range. Still more evident 
 was this, when from the humorous piece with which the sisters 
 * -led off a dance of clowns, but clowns of Arcady they slid into 
 a delicate rippling chant d'amour, the long drawn notes of the 
 violin rising and falling on the piano accompaniment with an 
 exquisite plaintiveness. Where did a Jillette, unformed, inex- 
 perienced, win the secret of so much eloquence only from the 
 natural dreams of a girl's heart as to 'the lovers waiting in the 
 hidden years ' ? 
 
 But when the music ceased, Elsmere, after a hearty clap that 
 set the room applauding likewise, turned not to the musician 
 but the figure beside Mrs. Leyburn, the sister who had sat 
 listening with an impassiveness, a sort of gentle remoteness of 
 look, which had piqued his curiosity. The mother meanwhile 
 was drinking in the compliments of Dr. Baker. 
 
 ' Excellent ! ' cried Elsmere. ' How in the name of fortune, 
 Miss Leyburn, if I may ask, has your sister managed to get on 
 so far in this remote place ? ' 
 
 ' She goes to Manchester every year to some relations we 
 have there,' said Catherine quietly ; ' I believe she has been 
 very well taught.' 
 
 ' But surely,' he said warmly, ' it is more than teaching more 
 even than talent there is something like genius in it ? ' 
 
 She did not answer very readily. 
 
 ' I don't know,' she said at last. ' Every one says it is very 
 good.' 
 
 He would have been repelled by her irresponsiveness but that 
 her last words had in them a note of lingering, of wistfulness, 
 as though the subject were connected with an inner debate not 
 yet solved which troubled her. He was puzzled, but certainly 
 not repelled. 
 
 Twenty minutes later everybody was going. The Seatons 
 went first, and the other guests lingered awhile afterwards to 
 enjoy the sense of freedom left by their departure. But at last 
 the Mayhews, father and son, set off on foot to walk home over 
 the moonlit mountains ; the doctor tucked himself and his 
 daughter into his high gig, and drove off with a sweeping 
 ironical bow to Rose, who had stood on the steps teasing him 
 to the last ; and Robert Elsmere offered to escort the Miss 
 Leyburns and their mother home. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh was left protesting to the vicar's incredu- 
 lous ears that never never as long as she lived would she 
 have Mrs. Seaton inside her doors again. 
 
 ' Her manners ' cried the vicar's wife, fuming ' her man- 
 ners would disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none 
 positively none ! '
 
 42 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK I 
 
 Then suddenly her round comfortable face brightened and 
 broadened out into a beaming smile 
 
 ' But, after all, William, say what you will and you always 
 do say the most unpleasant things you can think of it was a 
 great success. I know the Ley burns enjoyed it. And as for 
 Robert, I saw him looking looking at that little minx Rose 
 while she was playing as if he couldn't take his eyes off her. 
 What a picture she made, to be sure ! ' 
 
 The vicar, who had been standing with his back to the fire- 
 place and his hands in his pockets, received his wife's remarks 
 first of all with lifted eyebrows, and then with a low chuckle, 
 half scornful, half compassionate, which made her start in her 
 chair. 
 
 'Rose?' he said impatiently. 'Rose, my dear, where were 
 your eyes ? ' 
 
 It was very rarely indeed that on her own ground, so to speak, 
 the vicar ventured to take the whip-hand of her like this. Mrs 
 Thornburgh looked at him in amazement. 
 
 ' Do you mean to say,' he asked, in raised tones, ' that you 
 didn't notice that from the moment you first introduced Robert 
 to Catherine Leyburn, he had practically no attention for any- 
 body else ? ' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh gazed at him her memory flew back over 
 the evening and her impulsive contradiction died on her lips. 
 It was now her turn to ejaculate 
 
 ' Catherine ! ' she said feebly. ' Catherine ! how absurd ! ' 
 
 But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of 
 window after the retreating figures. Mrs. Thornburgh went 
 up to bed that night an inch taller. She had never felt herself 
 more exquisitely indispensable, more of a personage. 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 BEFORE, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or 
 failure of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to 
 inquire a little more closely into the antecedents of the man 
 who had suddenly roused so much activity in her contriving 
 mind. And, indeed, these antecedents are important to us. 
 For the interest of an uncomplicated story will entirely depend 
 upon the clearness with which the reader may have grasped the 
 general outlines of a quick soul's development. And this de- 
 velopment had already made considerable progress before Mrs. 
 Thornburgh set eyes upon her husband's cousin, Robert Elsmere. 
 Robert Elsmere, then, was well born and fairly well provided 
 with this world's goods ; up to a certain moderate point, indeed, 
 a favourite of fortune in all respects. His father belonged to 
 the younger line of an old Sussex family, and owed his pleasant 
 country living to the family instincts of his uncle, Sir William
 
 i IIAI-. TV WESTMORELAND 48 
 
 Elsmere, in whom Whig doctrines and Conservative traditions 
 were pretty evenly mixed, with a result of the usual respectable 
 and inconspicuous kind. His virtues had descended mostly to 
 his daughters, while all his various weaknesses and fatuities 
 had blossomed into vices in the person of his eldest son and 
 heir, the Sir Mowbray Elsmere of Mrs. Seaton's early recollec- 
 tions. 
 
 Edward Elsmere, rector of Murewell in Surrey, and father of 
 Robert, had died before his uncle and patron ; and his widow 
 and son had been left to face the world together. Sir William 
 Elsmere and his nephew's wife had not much in common, and 
 rarely concerned themselves with each other. Mrs. Elsmere 
 was an Irishwoman by birth, with irregular Irish ways, and a 
 passion for strange garments, which made her the dread, of the 
 conventional English squire ; and, after she left the vicarage 
 with her son, she and her husband's uncle met no more. But 
 when he died it was found that the old man's sense of kinship, 
 acting blindly and irrationally, but with a slow inevitableness 
 and certainty, had stirred in him at the last in behalf of his 
 great -nephew. He left him a money legacy, the interest of 
 which was to be administered by his mother till his majority, 
 and in a letter addressed to his heir he directed that, should the 
 boy on attaining manhood show any disposition to enter the 
 Church, all possible steps were to be taken to endow him with 
 the family living of Murewell, which had been his father's, and 
 which at the time of the old Baronet's death was occupied by 
 another connection of the family, already well stricken in years. 
 
 Mowbray Elsmere had been hardly on speaking terms with 
 his cousin Edward, and was neither amiable nor generous, but 
 his father knew that the tenacious Elsmere instinct was to be 
 depended on for the fulfilment of his wishes. And so it proved. 
 No sooner was his father dead than Sir Mowbray curtly com- 
 municated his instructions to Mrs. Elsmere, then living at the 
 town of Harden for the sake of the great public school recently 
 transported there. She was to inform him, when the right 
 moment arrived, if it was the boy's wish to enter the Church, 
 and meanwhile he referred her to his lawyers for particulars of 
 such immediate benefits as were secured to her under the late 
 Baronet's will. 
 
 At the moment when Sir Mowbray's letter reached her, Mrs. 
 Elsmere was playing a leading part in the small society to which 
 circumstances had consigned her. She was the personal friend 
 of half the masters and their wives, and of at least a quarter of 
 the school, while in the little town which stretched up the hUl 
 covered by the new school buildings, she was the helper, gossip, 
 and confidante of half the parish. Her vast hats, strange in 
 fashion and inordinate in brim, her shawls of many colours, 
 hitched now to this side now to that, her swaying gait and 
 looped-up skirts, her spectacles, and the dangling parcels in 
 which her soul delighted, were the outward signs of a per-
 
 44 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 sonality familiar to all. For under those checked shawls which 
 few women passed without an inward marvel, there beat one of 
 the warmest hearts that ever animated mortal clay, and the 
 prematurely wrinkled face, with its small quick eyes and 
 shrewd indulgent mouth, bespoke a nature as responsive as it 
 was vigorous. 
 
 Their owner was constantly in the public eye. Her house, 
 during the hours at any rate in which her boy was at school, 
 was little else than a halting -place between two journeys. 
 Visits to the poor, long watches by the sick ; committees, in 
 which her racy breadth of character gave her always an 
 important place ; discussions with the vicar, arguments with 
 the curates, a chat with this person and a walk with that these 
 were the incidents and occupations which filled her day. Life 
 was delightful to her ; action, energy, influence, were delightful 
 to her ; she could only breathe freely in the very thick of the 
 stirring, many-coloured tumult of existence. Whether it was a 
 pauper in the workhouse, or boys from the school, or a girl 
 caught in the tangle of a love-affair, it was all the same to Mrs. 
 Elsmere. Everything moved her, everything appealed to her. 
 Her life was a perpetual giving forth, and such was the inherent 
 nobility and soundness of the nature, that in spite of her curious 
 Irish fondness for the vehement romantic sides of experience, 
 she did little harm, and much good. Her tongue might be 
 over -ready and her championships indiscreet, but her hands 
 were helpful, and her heart was true. There was something 
 contagious in her enjoyment of life, and with all her strong 
 religious faith, the thought of death, of any final pause and 
 silence in the whirr of the great social machine, was to her a 
 thought of greater chill and horror than to many a less brave 
 and spiritual soul. 
 
 Till her boy was twelve years old, however, she had lived for 
 him first and foremost. She had taught him, played with him, 
 learnt with him, communicating to him through all his lessons 
 her own fire and eagerness to a degree which every now and 
 then taxed the physical powers of the child. Whenever the 
 signs of strain appeared, however, the mother would be over- 
 taken by a fit of repentant watchfulness, and for days together 
 Robert would find her the most fascinating playmate, story- 
 teller, and romp, and forget all his precocious interest in 
 history or vulgar fractions. In after years when Robert looked 
 back upon his childhood, he was often reminded of the stories 
 of Goethe's bringing -up. He could recall exactly the same 
 scenes as Goethe describes, mother and child sitting together 
 in the gloaming, the mother's dark eyes dancing with fun or 
 kindling with dramatic fire, as she carried an imaginary hero or 
 heroine through a series of the raciest adventures ; the child all 
 eagerness and sympathy, now clapping his little hands at the 
 fall of the giantj or the defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing 
 and suggesting in ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus
 
 rinr. iv WESTMORELAND 45 
 
 to the mother's inventiveness. He could see her dressing up 
 with him on wet days, reciting King Henry to his Prince Hal, 
 or Prospero to his Ariel, or simply giving free vent to her own 
 exuberant Irish fun till both he and she would sink exhausted 
 into each other's arms, and end the evening with a long croon, 
 sitting curled up together in a big armchair in front of the fire. 
 He could see himself as a child of many crazes, eager for poetry 
 one week, for natural history the next, now spending all his 
 spare time in strumming, now in drawing, and now forgetting 
 everything but the delights of tree-climbing and bird-nesting. 
 
 And through it all he had the quick memory of his mother's 
 companionship, he could recall her rueful looks whenever the 
 eager inaccurate ways, in which he reflected certain ineradicable 
 tendencies of her own, had lost him a school advantage; he 
 could remember her exhortations, with the dash in them of 
 humorous self-reproach which made them so stirring to the 
 child's affection ; and he could realise their old far-off life at 
 Murewell, the joys and the worries of it, and see her now 
 gossiping with the village folk, now wearing herself impetuously 
 to death in their service, and now roaming with him over the 
 Surrey heaths in search of all the dirty delectable things in 
 which a boy -naturalist delights. And through it all he was 
 conscious of the same vivid energetic creature, disposing with 
 some difficulty and fracas of its own excess of nervous life. 
 
 To return, however, to this same critical moment of Sir 
 Mowbray's offer. Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, 
 doing very well at school, a favourite both with boys and 
 masters. But as to whether his development would lead him in 
 the direction of taking orders, his mother had not the slightest 
 idea. She was not herself very much tempted by the prospect. 
 There were recollections connected with Murewell, and with the 
 long death in life which her husband had passed through there, 
 which were deeply painful to her ; and, moreover, her sympathy 
 with the clergy as a class was by no means sti'ong. Her 
 experience had not been large, but the feeling based on it 
 promised to have all the tenacity of a favourite prejudice. 
 Fortune had handed over the parish of Harden to a ritualist 
 vicar. Mrs. Elsmere's inherited Evangelicalism she came from 
 an Ulster county rebelled against his doctrine, but the man 
 himself was too lovable to be disliked. Mrs. Elsmere knew a 
 hero when she saw him. And in his own narrow way, the 
 small -headed emaciated vicar was a hero, and he and Mrs. 
 Elsmere had soon tasted each other's quality, and formed a 
 curious alliance, founded on true similarity in difference. 
 
 But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself 
 with all the more force on his subordinates. The Harden 
 curates were the chief crook in Mrs. Elsmere's otherwise toler- 
 able lot. Her parish activities brought her across them 
 perpetually, and she could not away with them. Their 
 cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish-
 
 46 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 woman's sense of humour at every turn. The individuals came 
 and went, but the type it seemed to her was always the same ; 
 and she made their peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory 
 as to the future of the English Church, which was a source of 
 constant amusement to the very broad-minded young men who 
 filled up the school staff. She, so ready in general to see all the 
 world's good points, was almost blind when it was a curate's 
 virtues which were in question. So that, in spite of all her 
 persistent church-going, and her love of church performances as 
 an essential part of the busy human spectacle, Mrs. Elsmere 
 had no yearning for a clerical son. The little accidents of a 
 personal experience had led to wide generalisations, as is the 
 way with us mortals, and the position of the young parson in 
 these days of increased parsonic pretensions was, to Mrs. 
 Elsmere, a position in which there was an inherent risk of 
 absurdity. She wished her son to impose upon her when it 
 came to his taking any serious step in life. She asked for 
 nothing better, indeed, than to be able, when the time came, to 
 bow the motherly knee to him in homage, and she felt a little 
 dread lest, in her flat moments, a clerical son might sometimes 
 rouse in her that sharp sense of the ludicrous which is the 
 enemy of all happy illusions. 
 
 Still, of course, the Elsmere proposal was one to be seriously 
 considered in its due time and place. Mrs. Elsmere only re- 
 flected that it would certainly be better to say nothing of it to 
 Robert until he should be at college. His impressionable tem- 
 perament, and the power he had occasionally shown of absorb- 
 ing himself in a subject till it produced in him a fit of intense 
 continuous brooding, unfavourable to health and nervous energy, 
 all warned her not to supply him, at a period of rapid mental 
 and bodily growth, with any fresh stimulus to the sense of 
 responsibility. As a boy, he had always shown himself reli- 
 giously susceptible to a certain extent, and his mother's religious 
 Likes and dislikes had invariably found in him a blind and 
 chivalrous support. He was content to be with her, to worship 
 wj.th her, and to feel that no reluctance or resistance divided 
 his heart from hers. But there had been nothing specially note- 
 worthy or precocious about his religious development, and at 
 sixteen or seventeen, in spite of his affectionate compliance, and 
 his natural reverence for all persons and beliefs in authority, 
 his mother was perfectly aware that many other things in his 
 life were more real to him than religion. And on this point, 
 at any rate, she was certainly not the person to force him. 
 
 He was such a schoolboy as a discerning master delights in 
 keen about everything, bright, docile, popular, excellent at 
 games. He was in the sixth, moreover, as soon as his age 
 allowed : that is to say, as soon as he was sixteen ; and his 
 pride in everything connected with the great body in which he 
 had already a marked and important place was unbounded. 
 Very early in his school career the literary instincts, which had
 
 CHAP, iv WESTMORELAND 47 
 
 always been present in him, and which his mother had largely 
 helped to develop by her own restless imaginative ways of 
 approaching life and the world, made themselves felt with 
 considerable force. Some time before his cousin's letter arrived, 
 he had been taken with a craze for English poetry, and, but for 
 the corrective influence of a favourite tutor would probably 
 have thrown himself into it with the same exclusive passion as 
 he had shown for subject after subject in his eager ebullient 
 childhood. His mother found him at thirteen inditing a letter 
 on the subject of The Faerie Queene to a school -friend, in 
 which, with a sincerity which made her forgive the pomposity, 
 he remarked 
 
 ' I can truly say with Pope, that this great work has afforded 
 me extraordinary pleasure. 
 
 And about the same time, a master who was much interested 
 in the boy's prospects of getting the school prize for Latin verse, 
 a subject for which he had always shown a special aptitude, 
 asked him anxiously, after an Easter holiday, what he had been 
 reading ; the boy ran his hands through his hair, and still keep- 
 ing his finger between the leaves, shut a book before him from 
 which he had been learning by heart, and which was, alas ! 
 neither Ovid nor Virgil. 
 
 ' I have just finished Belial ! ' he said, with a sigh of satisfac- 
 tion, ' and am beginning Beelzebub.' 
 
 A craze of this kind was naturally followed by a feverish 
 period of juvenile authorship, when the house was littered over 
 with stanzas from the opening canto of a great poem on Col- 
 umbus, or with moral essays in the manner of Pope, castigating 
 the vices of the time with an energy which sorely tried the 
 gravity of the mother whenever she was called upon, as she 
 invariably was, to play audience to the young poet. At the 
 same time the classics absorbed in reality their full share of this 
 fast developing power. Virgil and ./Eschylus appealed to the 
 same fibres, the same susceptibilities, as Milton and Shak- 
 speare, and the boy's quick imaginative sense appropriated 
 Greek and Latin life with the same ease which it showed in 
 possessing itself of that bygone English life whence sprung the 
 Canterbury Tales, or As You Like It. So that his tutor, who 
 was much attached to him, and who made it one of Ids main 
 objects in life to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone 
 of grammatical minutice, began about the time of Sir Mowbray's 
 letter to prophesy very smooth things indeed to his mother as 
 to his future success at college, the possibility of las getting the 
 famous St. Anselm's scholarship, and so on. 
 
 Evidently such a youth was not likely to depend for the 
 attainment of a foothold in life on a piece of family privilege. 
 The world was all before him where to choose, Mrs. Elsmere 
 thought proudly to herself, as her mother's fancy wandered 
 rashly through the coming years. And for many reasons she 
 secretly allowed herself to hope that he would find for himself
 
 48 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 some other post of ministry in a very various world than the 
 vicarage of Murewell. 
 
 So she wrote a civil letter of acknowledgment to Sir Mow- 
 bray, informing him that the intentions of his great -uncle 
 should be communicated to the boy when he should be of fit 
 age to consider them, and that meanwhile she was obliged to 
 him for pointing out the procedure by which she might lay 
 hands on the legacy bequeathed to her in trust for her son, the 
 income of which would now be doubly welcome in view of his 
 college expenses. There the matter rested, and Mrs. Elsmere, 
 during the two years which followed, thought little more about 
 it. She became more and more absorbed in her boy's immediate 
 prospects, in the care of his health, which was uneven and tried 
 somewhat by the strain of preparation for an attempt on the 
 St. Anselm's scholarship, and in the demands which his ardent 
 nature, oppressed with the weight of its own aspirations, was 
 constantly making upon her support and sympathy. 
 
 At last the moment so long expected arrived. Mrs. Elsmere 
 and her son left Harden amid a chorus of good wishes, and 
 settled themselves early in November in Oxford lodgings. 
 Robert was to have a few days' complete holiday before the 
 examination, and he and his mother spent it in exploring the 
 beautiful old town, now shrouded in the ' pensive glooms ' of 
 still, gray autumn weather. There was no sun to light up the 
 misty reaches of the river ; the trees in the Broad Walk were 
 almost bare ; the Virginian creeper no longer shone in patches 
 of delicate crimson on the college walls ; the gardens were damp 
 and forsaken. But to Mrs. Elsmere and Robert the place 
 needed neither sun nor summer 'for beauty's heightening.' 
 On both of them it laid its old irresistible spell ; the sentiment 
 haunting its quadrangles, its libraries, and its dim melodious 
 chapels, stole into the lad's heart and alternately soothed 
 and stimulated that keen individual consciousness which 
 naturally accompanies the first entrance into manhood. 
 Here, on this soil, steeped in memories, his problems, his 
 struggles were to be fought out in their turn. 'Take up thy 
 manhood,' said the inward voice, 'and show what is in thee. 
 The hour and the opportunity have come ! ' 
 
 And to this thrill of vague expectation, this young sense of 
 an expanding world, something of pathos and of sacredness was 
 added by the dumb influences of the old streets and weather- 
 beaten stones. How tenacious they were of the past ! The 
 dreaming city seemed to be still brooding in the autumn calm 
 over the long succession of her sons. The continuity, the com- 
 plexity of human experience ; the unremitting effort of the 
 race ; the stream of purpose running through it all ; these were 
 the kind of thoughts which, in more or less inchoate and frag- 
 mentary shape, pervaded the boy's sensitive mind as he rambled 
 with his mother from college to college. 
 
 Mrs. Elsmere, too, was fascinated by Oxford. But for all her
 
 CHAP, iv WESTMORELAND 49 
 
 eager interest, the historic beauty of the place aroused in her 
 an under-mood of melancholy, just as it did in Robert. Both 
 had the impressionable Celtic temperament, and both felt that 
 a critical moment was upon them, and that the Oxford air was 
 charged with fate for each of them. For the first time in their 
 lives they were to be parted. The mother's long guardianship 
 was corning to an end. Had she loved him enough 1 Had she 
 so far fulfilled the trust her dead husband had imposed upon 
 her ? Would her boy love her in the new life as he had loved 
 her in the old 1 And could her poor craving heart bear to see 
 him absorbed by fresh intei-ests and passions, in which her 
 share could be only, at the best, secondary and indirect ? 
 
 One day it was on the afternoon preceding the examination 
 she gave hurried, half-laughing utterance to some of these 
 misgivings of hers. They were walking down the Lime-walk 
 of Trinity Gardens ; beneath their feet a yellow fresh-strewn 
 carpet of leaves, brown interlacing branches overhead, and a 
 red misty sun shining through the trunks. Robert understood 
 his mother perfectly, and the way she had of hiding a storm of 
 feeling under these tremulous comedy airs. So that, instead of 
 laughing too, he took her hand and, there being no spectators 
 anywhere to be seen in the damp November garden, he raised 
 it to his lips with a few broken words of affection and gratitude 
 which very nearly overcame the self-command of both of them. 
 She dashed wildly into another subject, and then suddenly it 
 occurred to her impulsive mind that the moment had come to 
 make him acquainted with those dying intentions of Ms great- 
 uncle which we have already described. The diversion was a 
 welcome one, and the duty seemed clear. So, accordingly, she 
 made him give her all his attention while she told him the story 
 and the terms of Sir Mowbray's letter, forcing herself the while 
 to keep her own opinions and predilections as much as possible 
 out of sight. 
 
 Robert listened with interest and astonishment, the sense of 
 a new-found manhood waxing once more strong within him, as 
 his mind admitted the strange picture of himself occupying the 
 place which had been his father's ; master of the house and the 
 parish he had wandered over with childish steps, clinging to 
 the finger or the coat of the tall, stooping figure which occupied 
 the dim background of his recollections. ' Poor mother,' he said 
 thoughtfully, when she paused, ' it would be hard upon you to 
 go back to Murewell ! ' 
 
 ' Oh, you mustn't think of me when the time comes,' said Mrs. 
 Elsmere, sighing. ' I shall be a tiresome old woman, and you 
 will be a young man wanting a wife. There, put it out of your 
 head, Robert. I thought I had better tell you, for, after all, 
 the fact may concern your Oxford life. But you've got a long 
 time yet before you need begin to worry about it.' 
 
 The boy drew himself up to his full height, and tossed his 
 tumbling reddish hair back from his eyes. He was nearly six
 
 50 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 feet already, with a long thin body and head, which amply 
 justified his school nickname of 'the darning-needle.' 
 
 ' Don't you trouble either, mother,' he said, with a tone of 
 decision : 'I don't feel as if I should ever take orders.' 
 
 Mrs. Elsmere was old enough to know what importance to 
 attach to the trenchancy of eighteen, but still the words were 
 pleasant to her. 
 
 The next day Robert went up for examination, and after 
 three days of hard work, and phases of alternate hope and 
 depression, in which mother and son excited one another to no 
 useful purpose, there came the anxious crowding round the 
 college gate in the November twilight, and the sudden flight 
 of dispersing messengers bearing the news over Oxford. The 
 scholarship had been won by a precocious Etonian with an 
 extraordinary talent for 'stems/ and all that appertaineth 
 thereto. But the exhibition fell to Robert, and mother and 
 son were well content. 
 
 The boy was eager to come into residence at once, though 
 he would matriculate too late to keep the term. The college 
 authorities were willing, and on the Saturday following the 
 announcement of his success he was matriculated, saw the 
 Provost, and was informed that rooms would be found for him 
 without delay. His mother and he gaily climbed innumerable 
 stairs to inspect the garrets of which he was soon to take proud 
 possession, sallying forth from them only to enjoy an agitated 
 delightful afternoon among the shops. Expenditure, always 
 charming, becomes under these circumstances a sacred and 
 pontifical act. Never had Mrs. Elsmere bought a teapot for 
 herself with half the fervour which she now threw into the 
 purchase of Robert's ; and the young man, accustomed to a 
 rather bare home, and an Irish lack of the little elegancies of 
 life, was overwhelmed when his mother actually dragged him 
 into a printseller's, and added an engraving or two to the 
 enticing miscellaneous mass of which he was already master. 
 
 They only just left themselves time to rush back to their 
 lodgings and dress for the solemn function of a dinner with the 
 Provost. The dinner, however, was a great success. The short, 
 shy manner of their white-haired host thawed under the influ- 
 ence of Mrs. Elsmere's racy, unaffected ways, and it was not 
 long before everybody in the room had more or less made 
 friends with her, and forgiven her her marvellous drab poplin, 
 adorned with fresh pink ruchings for the occasion. As for the 
 Provost, Mrs. Elsmere had been told that he was a person of 
 whom she must inevitably stand in awe. But all her life long 
 she -had been like the youth in the fairy tale who desired to 
 learn how to shiver and could not attain unto it. Fate had 
 denied her the capacity of standing in awe of anybody, and 
 she rushed at her host as a new type, delighting in the thrill 
 which she felt creeping over her when she found herself on 
 the arm of one who had been the rallying-point of a hundred
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 51 
 
 straggles, and a centre of influence over thousands of English 
 lives. 
 
 And then followed the proud moment when Robert, in his 
 exhibitioner's gown, took her to service in the chapel on Sun- 
 day. The scores of young faces, the full unison of the hymns, 
 and finally the Provost's sermon, with its strange brusqueries 
 and simplicities of manner and phrase simplicities so sugges- 
 tive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined experience, that they 
 haunted her mind for weeks afterwards completed the general 
 impression made upon her by the Oxford life. She came out, 
 tremulous and shaken, leaning on her son's arm. She, too, like 
 the generations before her, had launched her venture into the 
 deep. Her boy was putting out from her into the ocean ; hence- 
 forth she could but watch him from the shore. Brought into 
 contact with this imposing University organisation, with all its 
 suggestions of virile energies and functions, the mother suddenly 
 felt herself insignificant and forsaken. He had been her all, 
 her own, and now on this training-ground of English youth, it 
 seemed to her that the great human society had claimed him 
 from her. 
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 IN his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and 
 most stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at 
 school. He was a youth of many friends, by virtue of a natural 
 gift of sympathy, which was no doubt often abused, and by no 
 means invariably profitable to its owner, but wherein, at any 
 rate, his power over his fellows, like the power of half the potent 
 men in the world's history, always lay rooted. He had his 
 mother's delight in living. He loved the cricket-field, he loved 
 the river ; his athletic instincts and his athletic friends were 
 always fighting in him with his literary instincts and the friends 
 who appealed primarily to the intellectual and moral side of 
 him. He made many mistakes alike in friends and in pursuits ; 
 in the freshness of a young and roving curiosity he had great 
 difficulty in submitting himself to the intellectual routine of the 
 University, a difficulty which ultimately cost him much ; but at 
 the bottom of the lad, all the time, there was a strength of will, 
 a force and even tyranny of conscience, which kept his charm 
 and pliancy from degenerating into weakness, and made it not 
 only delightful, but profitable to love him. He knew that his 
 mother was bound up in him, and his being was set to satisfy, 
 so far as he could, all her honourable ambitions. 
 
 His many undergraduate friends, strong as their influence 
 must have been in the aggregate on a nature so receptive, hardly 
 concern us here. His future life, so far as we can see, was most 
 noticeably affected by two men older than himself, and belong-
 
 52 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ing to the dons both of them fellows and tutors of St. Anselm's, 
 though on different planes of age. 
 
 The first one, Edward Langham, was Robert's tutor, and 
 about seven years older than himself. He was a man about 
 whom, on entering the college, Robert heard more than the 
 usual crop of stories. The healthy young English barbarian 
 has an aversion to the intrusion or more manner into life than 
 is absolutely necessary. Now, Langham was overburdened with 
 manner, though it was manner of the deprecating and not of 
 the arrogant order. Decisions, it seemed, of all sorts were 
 abominable to him. To help a friend he had once consented 
 to be Pro-proctor. He resigned in a month, and none of his 
 acquaintances ever afterwards dared to allude to the experi- 
 ence. If you could have got at his inmost mind, it was affirmed, 
 the persons most obnoxious there would have been found to be 
 the scout, who intrusively asked him every morning what he 
 would have for breakfast, and the college cook, who, till such a 
 course was strictly forbidden him, mounted to his room at half- 
 past nine to inquire whether he would ' dine in.' Being a scholar 
 of considerable eminence, it pleased him to assume on all ques- 
 tions an exasperating degree of ignorance ; and the wags 01 the 
 college averred that when asked if it rained, or if collections 
 took place on such and such a day, it was pain and grief to him 
 to have to affirm positively, without qualifications, that so it 
 was. 
 
 Such a man was not very likely, one would have thought, to 
 captivate an ardent, impulsive boy like Elsmere. Edward 
 Langham, however, notwithstanding undergraduate tales, was 
 a very remarkable person. In the first place, he was possessed 
 of exceptional personal beauty. His colouring was vividly 
 black and white, closely curling jet-black hair, and fine black 
 eyes contrasting with a pale, clear complexion and even, white 
 teeth. So far he had the characteristics which certain Irishmen 
 share with most Spaniards. But the Celtic or Iberian brilliance 
 was balanced by a classical delicacy and precision of feature. 
 He had the brow, the nose, the upper lip, the finely-moulded 
 chin, which belong to the more severe and spiritual Greek type. 
 Certainly of Greek blitheness and directness there was no trace. 
 The eye was wavering and profoundly melancholy ; all the move- 
 ments of the tall, finely-built frame were hesitating and doubtful. 
 It was as though the man were suffering from paralysis of some 
 moral muscle or other ; as if some of the normal springs of action 
 in him had been profoundly and permanently weakened. 
 
 He had a curious history. He was the only child of a doctor 
 in a Lincolnshire country town. His old parents had brought 
 him up in strict provincial ways, ignoring the boy's idiosyn- 
 crasies as much as possible. They did not want an exceptional 
 and abnormal son, and they tried to put down his dreamy, self- 
 conscious habits by forcing him into the common, middle-class, 
 Evangelical groove. As soon as he got to college, however, the
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 53 
 
 brooding, gifted nature had a moment of sudden and, as it 
 seemed to the old people in Gainsborough, most reprehensible ex- 
 pansion. Poems were sent to them, cut out of one or the other 
 of the leading periodicals, with their son's initials appended, 
 and articles of philosophical art-criticism, published while the 
 boy was still an undergraduate which seemed to the stern 
 father everything that was sophistical and subversive. For 
 they treated Christianity itself as an open question, and showed 
 especially scant respect for the ' Protestantism of the Protestant 
 religion.' The father warned him grimly that he was not going 
 to spend his hard-earned savings on the support of a free- 
 thinking scribbler, and the young man wrote no more till just 
 after he had taken a double first in Greats. Then the publica- 
 tion of an article in one of the leading Reviews on ' The Ideals 
 of Modern Culture ' not only brought him a furious letter from 
 home stopping all supplies, but also lost him a probable fellow- 
 ship. His college was one of the narrowest and most backward 
 in Oxford, and it was made perfectly plain to him before the 
 fellowship examination that he would not be elected. 
 
 He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a 
 vacant fellowship at bt. Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and 
 got it with flying colours. 
 
 Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and 
 favourable mental development was secured to him. Not at all. 
 The moment of his quarrel with his father and his college had, 
 in fact, represented a moment of energy, of comparative success, 
 which never recurred. It was as though this outburst of action 
 and liberty had disappointed him, as if some deep-rooted in- 
 stinct cold, critical, reflective had reasserted itself, condemn- 
 ing him and his censors equally. The uselessness of utterance, 
 the futility of enthusiasm, the inaccessibility of the ideal, the 
 practical absurdity of trying to realise any of the mind's inward 
 dreams : these were the kind of considerations which descended 
 upon him, slowly and fatally, crushing down the newly spring- 
 ing growths of action or of passion. It was as though life had 
 demonstrated to him the essential truth of a childish saying of 
 his own which had startled and displeased his Calvinist mother 
 years before. ' Mother,' the delicate, large-eyed child had said 
 to her one day in a fit of physical weariness, ' how is it I dislike 
 the things I dislike so much more than I like the things I 
 like?' 
 
 So he wrote no more 2 he quarrelled no more, he meddled with 
 the great passionate things of life and expression no more. On 
 his taking up residence in St. Anselm's, indeed, and on his being 
 appointed first lecturer and then tutor, he had a momentary 
 pleasure in the thought of teaching. His mind was a storehouse 
 of thought and fact, and to the man brought up at a dull pro- 
 vincial day-school and never allowed to associate freely with his 
 kind, the bright lads fresh from Eton and Harrow about him 
 were singularly attractive. But a few terms were enough to
 
 54 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 scatter this illusion too. He could not be simple, he could not 
 be spontaneous ; he was tormented by self -consciousness, and it 
 was impossible to him to talk and behave as those talk and 
 behave who have been brought up more or less in the big world 
 from the beginning. So this dream, too, faded, for youth asks, 
 before all things, simplicity and spontaneity in those who would 
 take possession of it. His lectures, which were at first brilliant 
 enough to attract numbers of men from other colleges, became 
 gradually mere dry, ingenious skeletons, without life or feeling. 
 It was possible to learn a great deal from him ; it was not pos- 
 sible to catch from him any contagion of that amor intellectualis 
 which had flamed at one moment so high within him. He ceased 
 to compose ; but as the intellectual faculty must have some em- 
 ployment, he became a translator, a contributor to dictionaries, 
 a microscopic student of texts, not in the interest of anything 
 beyond, but simply as a kind of mental stone-breaking. 
 
 The only survival of that moment of glow and colour in his 
 life was his love of music and the theatre. Almost every year 
 he disappeared to France to haunt the Paris theatres for a fort- 
 night to Berlin or Bayreuth to drink his fill of music. He 
 talked neither of music nor of acting ; he made no one sharer of 
 his enjoyment, if he did enjoy. It was simply his way of cheat- 
 ing his creative faculty, which, though it had grown impotent, 
 was still there, still restless. Altogether a melancholy, pitiable 
 man at once thorough-going sceptic and thorough-going idealist, 
 the victim of that critical sense which says No to every impulse, 
 and is always restlessly, and yet hopelessly, seeking the future 
 through the neglected and outraged present. 
 
 And yet the man's instincts, at this period of his life at any 
 rate, were habitually kindly and affectionate. He knew nothing 
 of women, and was not liked by them, but it was not his fault 
 if he made no impression on the youth about him. It seemed to 
 him that he was always seeking in their eyes and faces for some 
 light of sympathy which was" always escaping him, and which 
 he was powerless to compel. He met it for the first time in 
 Robert Elsmere. The susceptible, poetical boy was struck at 
 some favourable moment by that romantic side of the ineffective 
 tutor his silence, his melancholy, his personal beauty which 
 no one else, with perhaps one or two exceptions among the 
 older men, cared to take into account ; or touched perhaps by 
 some note in him, surprised in passing, of weariness or shrink- 
 ing, as compared with the contemptuous tone of the College 
 towards him. He showed his liking impetuously, boyishly, as 
 his way was, and thenceforward during his University career 
 Langham became his slave. He had no ambition for himself ; 
 his motto might have been that dismal one ' The small things 
 of life are odious to me, and the habit of them enslaves me : the 
 great things of life are eternally attractive to me, and indolence 
 and fear put them by ; ' but for the University chances of this 
 lanky, red-haired youth with his eagerness, his boundless curi-
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 55 
 
 osity, his genius for all sorts of lovable mistakes he disquieted 
 himself greatly. He tried to discipline the roving mind, to infuse 
 into the boy's literary temper the delicacy, the precision, the 
 subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of work 
 supplied exactly that antidote which Elsmere's main faults of 
 haste and carelessness required. He was always holding up 
 before him the inexhaustible patience and labour involved 
 in all true knowledge ; and it was to the germs of critical judg- 
 ment so implanted in him that Elsmere owed many of the later 
 growths of his development growths with which we have not 
 yet to concern ourselves. 
 
 And in return, the tutor allowed himself rarely, very rarely, 
 a moment of utterance from the depths of his real self. One 
 evening in the summer term following the boy's matriculation, 
 Elsmere brought him an essay after Hall, and they sat on talk- 
 ing afterwards. It was a rainy, cheerless evening ; the first 
 contest of the Boats week had been rowed in cold wind and 
 sleet ; a dreary blast whistled through the College. Suddenly 
 Langham reached out his hand for an open letter. ' I have had 
 an offer, Elsmere,' he said abruptly. 
 
 And he put it into his hand. It was the offer of an important 
 Scotch professorship, coming from the man most influential in 
 assigning it. The last occupant of the post had been a scholar 
 of European eminence. Langham's contributions to a great 
 foreign review, and certain Oxford recommendations, were the 
 basis of the present overture, which, coming from one who was 
 himself a classic of the classics, was couched in terms flattering 
 to any young man's vanity. 
 
 Robert looked up with a joyful exclamation when he had 
 finished the letter. 
 
 ' I congratulate you, sir.' 
 
 ' I have refused it,' said Langham abruptly. 
 
 His companion sat open-mouthed. Young as he was, he 
 knew perfectly well that this particular appointment was one 
 of the blue ribbons of British scholarship. 
 
 ' Do you think ' said the other in a tone of singular vibra- 
 tion, which had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation 
 ' do you think / am the man to get and keep a hold on a ram- 
 pagious class of hundreds of Scotch lads ? Do you think / am 
 the man to carry on what Reid began Reid, that old fighter, 
 that preacher of all sorts of jubilant dogmas 1 ' 
 
 He looked at Elsmere under his straight black brows im- 
 periously. The youth felt the nervous tension in the elder man's 
 voice and manner, was startled by a confidence never before 
 bestowed upon him, close as that unequal bond between them 
 had been growing during the six months of his Oxford life, and 
 plucking up courage hurled at him a number of frank, young 
 expostulations, which really put into friendly shape all that 
 was being said about Langham in his College and in the Uni- 
 versity. Why was he so self-distrustful, so absurdly diffident
 
 56 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 of responsibility, so bent on hiding his great gifts under a 
 bushel 1 
 
 The tutor smiled sadly, and, sitting down, buried his head in 
 his hands and said nothing for a while. Then he looked up and 
 stretched out a hand towards a book which lay on a table near. 
 It was the Reveries of Senancour. 'My answer is written 
 /tere,' he said. ' It will seem to you now, Elsmere, mere Mid- 
 summer madness. May it always seem so to you. Forgive me. 
 The pressure of solitude sometimes is too great.' 
 
 Elsmere looked up with one of his flashing, affectionate 
 smiles, and took the book from Langham's hand. He found on 
 the open page a marked passage : 
 
 ' Oh swiftly passing seasons of life ! There was a time when 
 men seemed to be sincere ; when thought was nourished on 
 friendship, kindness, love ; when dawn still kept its brilliance, 
 and the night its peace. / can, the soul said to itself, and I 
 will ; I will do all that is right all that is natural. But soon 
 resistance, difficulty, unforeseen, coming we know not whence, 
 arrest us, undeceive us, and the human yoke grows heavy on 
 our necks. Thenceforward we become merely sharers in the 
 common woe. Hemmed in on all sides, we feel our faculties 
 only to realise their impotence : we have time and strength 
 to do what we must, never what we will. Men go on repeating 
 the words work, genius, success. Fools ! Will all these resound- 
 ing projects, though they enable us to cheat ourselves, enable 
 us to cheat the icy fate which rules us and our globe, wandering 
 forsaken through the vast silence of the heavens ? ' 
 
 Robert looked up startled, the book dropping from his hand. 
 The words sent a chill to the heart of one born to hope, to will, 
 to crave. 
 
 Suddenly Langham dashed the volume from him, almost with 
 violence. 
 
 ' Forget that drivel, Elsmere. It was a crime to show it to 
 you. It is not sane ; neither perhaps am I. But I am not 
 going to Scotland. They would request me to resign in a week.' 
 
 Long after Elsmere, who had stayed talking a while on other 
 things, had gone, Langham sat on brooding over the empty 
 grate. 
 
 ' Corrupter of youth ! ' he said to himself once bitterly. And 
 perhaps it was to a certain remorse in the tutor's mind that 
 Elsmere owed an experience of great importance to his after 
 life. 
 
 The name of a certain Mr. Grey had for some time before his 
 entry at Oxford been more or less familiar to Robert's ears as 
 that of a person of great influence and consideration at St. 
 Anselm's. His tutor at Harden had spoken of him in the boy's 
 hearing as one of the most remarkable men of the generation, 
 and had several times impressed upon his pupil that nothing 
 could be so desirable for him as to secure the friendship of such 
 a man. It was on the occasion of his first interview with the
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 57 
 
 Provost, after the scholarship examination, that Robert was 
 first brought face to face with Mr. Grey. He could remember 
 a short dark man standing beside the Provost, who had been 
 introduced to him by that name, but the nervousness of the 
 moment had been so great that the boy had been quite incapable 
 of giving him any special attention. 
 
 During his first term and a half of residence, Robert occa- 
 sionally met Mr. Grey in the quadrangle or in the street, and 
 the tutor, remembering the thin, bright-faced youth, would 
 return his salutations kindly, and sometimes stop to speak to 
 him, to ask him if he were comfortably settled in his rooms, or 
 make a remark about the boats. But the acquaintance did not 
 seem likely to progress, for Mr. Grey was a Greats tutor, and 
 Robert naturally had nothing to do with him as far as work 
 was concerned. 
 
 However, a day or two after the conversation we have 
 described, Robert, going to Langham's rooms late in the after- 
 noon to return a book which had been lent to him, perceived 
 two figures standing talking on the hearth-rug, and by the 
 western light beating in recognised the thick-set frame and 
 broad brow of Mr. Grey. 
 
 ' Come in, Elsmere,' said Langham, as he stood hesitating on 
 the threshold. ' You have met Mr. Grey before, I think ? ' 
 
 ' We first met at an anxious moment,' said Mr. Grey, smiling 
 and shaking hands with the boy. ' A first interview with the 
 Provost is always formidable. I remember it too well myself. 
 You did very well, I remember, Mr. Elsmere. Well, Langham, 
 I must be off'. I shall be late for my meeting as it is. I think 
 we have settled our business. Good-night.' 
 
 Langham stood a moment after the door closed, eyeing young 
 Elsmere. There was a curious struggle going on in the tutor's 
 mind. 
 
 'Elsmere,' he said at last abruptly, 'would you like to go 
 to-night and hear Grey preach 1 ' 
 
 ' Preach ! ' exclaimed the lad. ' I thought he was a layman.' 
 
 'So he is. It will be a lay sermon. It was always the 
 custom here with the clerical tutors to address their men once 
 a term before Communion Sunday, and some years ago, when 
 Grey first became tutor, he determined, though he was a lay- 
 man, to carry on the practice. It was an extraordinary effort, 
 for ne is a man to whom words on such a subject are the coining 
 of his heart's blood, and he has repeated it very rarely. It is 
 two years now since his last address.' 
 
 ' Of course I should like to go,' said Robert with eagerness. 
 ' Is it open ? ' 
 
 ' Strictly it is for his Greats pupils, but I can take you in. 
 It is hardly meant for freshmen ; but well, you are far enough 
 on to make it interesting to you.' 
 
 ' The lad will take to Grey's influence like a fish to water,' 
 thought the tutor to himself when he was alone, not without
 
 58 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 a strange reluctance. ' Well, no one can say I have not given 
 him his opportunity to be " earnest." ' 
 
 The sarcasm of the last word was the kind of sarcasm which 
 a man of his type in an earlier generation might have applied 
 to the ' earnestness ' of an Arnoldian Rugby. 
 
 At eight o'clock that evening Robert found himself crossing 
 the quadrangle with Langham on the way to one of the larger 
 lecture rooms, which was to be the scene of the address. The 
 room when they got in was already nearly full, all the working 
 fellows of the college were present, and a body of some thirty 
 men besides, most of them already far on in their University 
 career. A minute or two afterwards Mr. Grey entered. The 
 door opening on to the quadrangle, where the trees, undeterred 
 by east wind, were just bursting into leaf, was shut ; and the 
 little assembly knelt, while Mr. Grey's voice with its broad 
 intonation, in which a strong native homeliness lingered under 
 the gentleness of accent, recited the collect ' Lord of all power 
 and might,' a silent pause following the last words. Then the 
 audience settled itself, and Mr. Grey, standing by a small deal 
 table with the gaslight behind him, began his address. 
 
 All the main points of the experience which followed stamped 
 themselves on Robert's mind with extraordinary intensity. 
 Nor did he ever lose the memory of the outward scene. In after 
 years, memory could always recall to him at will the face and 
 figure of the speaker, the massive head, the deep eyes sunk 
 under the brows, the Midland accent, the make of limb and 
 feature which seemed to have some suggestion in them of the 
 rude strength and simplicity of a peasant ancestry ; and then 
 the nobility, the fire, the spiritual beauty flashing through it 
 all ! Here, indeed, was a man on whom his fellows might lean, 
 a man in whom the generation of spiritual force was so strong 
 and continuous that it overflowed of necessity into the poorer, 
 barrener lives around him, kindling and enriching. Robert felt 
 himself seized and penetrated, filled with a fervour and an 
 admiration which he was too young and immature to analyse, 
 but which was to be none the less potent and lasting. 
 
 Much of the sermon itself, indeed, was beyond him. It was 
 on the meaning of St. Paul's great conception, ' Death unto sin 
 and a new birth unto righteousness.' What did the Apostle 
 mean by a death to sin and self ? What were the precise ideas 
 attached to the words ' risen with Christ ' 1 Are this death* and 
 this resurrection necessarily dependent upon certain alleged 
 historical events? Or are they not primarily, and were they 
 not, even in the mind of St. Paul, two aspects of a spiritual 
 process perpetually re-enacted in the soul of man, and consti- 
 tuting the veritable revelation of God? Which is the stable 
 and lasting witness of the Father : the spiritual history of the 
 individual and the world, or the envelope of miracle to which 
 hitherto mankind has attributed so much importance? 
 
 Mr. Grey's treatment of these questions was clothed, through-
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 59 
 
 out a large portion of the lecture, in metaphysical language, 
 which no boy fresh from school, however intellectually quick, 
 could be expected to follow with any precision. It was not, 
 therefore, the argument, or the logical structure of the sermon, 
 which so profoundly affected young Elsmere. It was the 
 speaker himself, and the occasional passages in which, address- 
 ing himself to the practical needs of his hearers, he put before 
 them the claims and conditions of the higher life with a pregnant 
 simplicity and rugged beauty of phrase. Conceit, selfishness, 
 vice how, as he spoke of them, they seemed to wither from his 
 presence ! How the ' pitiful, earthy self ' with its passions and 
 its cravings sank into nothingness beside the 'great ideas' and 
 the 'great causes' for which, as Christians and as men, he claimed 
 their devotion. 
 
 To the boy sitting among the crowd at. the back of the room, 
 his face supported in his hands and his gleaming eyes fixed on 
 the speaker, it seemed as if all the poetry and history through 
 which a restless curiosity and ideality had carried him so far, 
 took a new meaning from this experience. It was by men like 
 this that the moral progress of the world had been shaped and 
 inspired ; he felt brought near to the great primal forces breath- 
 ing through the divine workshop; and in place of natural 
 disposition and reverent compliance, there sprang up in him 
 suddenly an actual burning certainty of belief. Axioms are 
 not axioms,' said poor Keats, 'till they have been proved upon 
 our pulses ; ' and the old familiar figure of the Divine combat, 
 of the struggle in which man and God are one, was proved once 
 more upon a human pulse on that May night, in the hush of 
 that quiet lecture room. 
 
 As the little moving crowd of men dispersed over the main 
 quadrangle to their respective staircases, Langham and Robert 
 stood together a moment in the windy darkness, lit by the 
 occasional glimmering of a cloudy moon. 
 
 ' Thank you, thank you, sir ! ' said the lad, eager and yet 
 afraid to speak, lest he should break the spell of memory. ' I 
 should be sorry indeed to have missed that ! ' 
 
 ' Yes, it was fine, extraordinarily fine, the best he has ever 
 given, I think. Good-night.' 
 
 And Langham turned away, his head sunk on his breast, 
 his hands behind him. Robert went to his room conscious 
 of a momentary check of feeling. But it soon passed, and 
 he sat up late, thinking of the sermon, or pouring out in a 
 letter to his mother the new hero-worship of which his mind 
 was full. 
 
 A few days later, as it happened, came an invitation to the 
 junior exhibitioner to spend an evening at Mr. Grey's house. 
 Elsmere went in a state of curious eagerness and trepidation, 
 and came away with a number of fresh impressions which, when 
 he had put them into order, did but quicken his new-born sense 
 of devotion. The quiet unpretending house with its exquisite
 
 60 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 neatness and its abundance of books, the family life, with the 
 heart-happiness underneath, and the gentle trust and courtesy 
 on the surface, the little touches of austerity which betrayed 
 themselves here and there in the household ways all these 
 surroundings stole into the lad's imagination, touched in him 
 responsive fibres of taste and feeling. 
 
 But there was some surprise, too, mingled with the charm. 
 He came, still shaken, as it were, by the power of the sermon, 
 expecting to see in the preacher of it the outward and visible 
 signs of a leadership which, as he already knew, was a great 
 force in Oxford life. His mood was that of the disciple only 
 eager to be enrolled. And what he found was a quiet, friendly, 
 host, surrounded by a group of men talking the ordinary 
 pleasant Oxford chit-chat the river, the schools, the Union, 
 the football matches, and so on. Every now and then, as 
 Elsmere stood at the edge of the circle listening, the rugged 
 face in the centre of it would break into a smile, or some boyish 
 speaker would elicit the low spontaneous laugh in which there 
 was such a sound of human fellowship, such a genuine note of 
 self-forgetfulness. Sometimes the conversation strayed into 
 politics, and then Mr. Grey, an eager politician, would throw 
 back his head, and talk with more sparkle and rapidity, flashing 
 occasionally into grim humour which seemed to throw light on 
 the innate strength and pugnacity of the peasant and Puritan 
 breed from which he sprang. Nothing could be more unlike 
 the inspired philosopher, the mystic surrounded by an adoring 
 school, whom Robert had been picturing to himself in his walk 
 up to the house, through the soft May twilight. 
 
 It was not long before the tutor had learned to take much 
 kindly notice of the ardent and yet modest exhibitioner, in 
 whose future it was impossible not to feel a sympathetic 
 interest. 
 
 ' You will always find us on Sunday afternoons, before chapel,' 
 he said to him one day as they parted after watching a football 
 match in the damp mists of the Park, and the boy's flush of 
 pleasure showed how much he valued the permission. 
 
 For three years those Sunday half -hours were the great charm 
 of Robert Elsmere's life. When he came to look back upon 
 them, he could remember nothing very definite. A few inter- 
 esting scraps of talk about books ; a good deal of talk about 
 politics, showing in the tutor a living interest in the needs and 
 training of that broadening democracy on which the future of 
 England rests ; a few graphic sayings about individuals ; above 
 all, a constant readiness on the host's part to listen, to sit quiet, 
 with the slight unconscious look of fatigue which was so eloquent 
 of a strenuous intellectual life, taking kindly heed of anything 
 that sincerity, even a stupid awkward sincerity, had got to say 
 these were the sort of impressions they had left behind them. 
 reinforced always, indeed, by the one continuous impression of 
 a great soul speaking with difficulty and labour, but still clearly,
 
 OHAP. v WESTMORELAND 61 
 
 still effectually, through an unblemished series of noble acts and 
 efforts. 
 
 Term after term passed away. Mrs. Elsmere became more 
 and more proud of her boy, and more and more assured that her 
 years of intelligent devotion to him had won her his entire love 
 and confidence, ' so long as they both should live : ' she came up 
 to see him once or twice, making Langham almost flee the 
 University because she would be grateful to him in public, and 
 attending the boat-races in festive attire to which she had 
 devoted the most anxious attention for Robert's sake, and which 
 made her, dear, good, impracticable soul, the observed of all 
 observers. When she came she and Robert talked all day, so 
 far as lectures allowed, and most of the night, after their own 
 eager, improvident fashion ; and she soon gathered, with that 
 solemn, half -tragic sense of change which besets a mother's 
 heart at such a moment, that there were many new forces at 
 work in her boy's mind, deep under-currents of feeling, stirred 
 in him by the Oxford influences, which must before long rise 
 powerfully to the surface. 
 
 He was passing from a bright buoyant lad into a man, and a 
 man of ardour and conviction. And the chief instrument in the 
 transformation was Mr. Grey. 
 
 Elsmere got his first in Moderations easily. But the Final 
 Schools were a different matter. In the first days of his return 
 to Oxford, in the October of his third year, while he was still 
 making up his lecture list, and taking a general oversight of the 
 work demanded from him, before plunging definitely into it, he 
 was oppressed with a sense that the two years lying before him 
 constituted a problem which would be harder to solve than any 
 which had yet been set him. It seemed to him in a moment 
 which was one of some slackness and reaction, that he had been 
 growing too fast. He had been making friends besides in far 
 too many camps, and the thought, half attractive, half repellent, 
 of all those midnight discussions over smouldering fires, which 
 Oxford was preparing for him, those fascinating moments of 
 intellectual fence with minds as eager and as crude as his own, 
 and of all the delightful dipping into the very latest literature, 
 which such moments encouraged and involved, seemed to convey 
 a sort of warning to the boy's will that it was not equal to the 
 situation. He was neither dull enough nor great enough for a 
 striking Oxford success. How was he to prevent himself from 
 attempting impossibilities and achieving a final mediocrity ? 
 He felt a dismal certainty that he should never be able to con- 
 trol the strayings of will and curiosity, now into this path, now 
 into that ; and a still stronger and genuine certainty that it is 
 not by such digression that a man gets up the Ethics or the 
 Annals. 
 
 Langham watched him with a half irritable attention. In 
 spite ot the paralysis of all natural ambitions in himself, he was 
 illogically keen that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the
 
 62 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 place. He, the most laborious, the most disinterested of 
 scholars, turned himself almost into a crammer for Elsmere's 
 benefit. He abused the lad's multifarious reading, declared it 
 was no better than dram-drinking, and even preached to him an 
 ingenious variety of mechanical aids to memory and short cuts 
 to knowledge, till Robert would turn round upon him with some 
 triumphant retort drawn from his own utterances at some 
 sincerer and less discreet moment. In vain. Langham felt a 
 dismal certainty before many weeks were over that Elsmere 
 would miss his first in Greats. He was too curious, too rest- 
 less, too passionate about many things. Above all he was 
 beginning, in the tutor's opinion, to concern himself disastrously 
 early with that most overwhelming and most brain-confusing 
 of all human interests the interest of religion. Grey had made 
 him ' earnest ' with a vengeance. 
 
 Elsmere was now attending Grey's philosophical lectures, 
 following them with enthusiasm, and making use of them, as so 
 often happens, for the defence and fortification of views quite 
 other than his teacher's. The whole basis of Grey's thought was 
 ardently idealist and Hegelian. He had broken with the popu- 
 lar Christianity, but for him, God, consciousness, duty, were the 
 only realities. None of the various forms of materialist thought 
 escaped his challenge ; no genuine utterance of the spiritual 
 life of man but was sure of his sympathy. It was known that 
 after having prepared himself for the Christian ministry he had 
 remained a layman because it had become impossible to him to 
 accept miracle ; and it was evident that the commoner type of 
 Churchmen regarded him as an antagonist all the more dangerous 
 because he was so sympathetic. But the negative and critical 
 side of him was what in reality told least upon his pupils. He 
 was reserved, he talked with difficulty, and his respect for the 
 immaturity of the young lives near him was complete. So that 
 what he sowed others often reaped, or to quote the expression 
 of a well-known rationalist about him : ' The Tories were always 
 carrying off his honey to their hive.' Elsmere, for instance, 
 took in all that Grey had to give, drank in all the ideal fervour, 
 the spiritual enthusiasm of the great tutor, and then, as Grey 
 himself would have done some twenty years earlier, carried his 
 religious passion so stimulated into the service of the great 
 positive tradition around him. 
 
 And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage 
 from philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received 
 Christian system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most 
 natural thing in the world that a young man of Elsmere's 
 temperament should rally to the Church. The place was pass- 
 ing through one of those periodical crises of reaction against an 
 overdriven rationalism, which show themselves with tolerable 
 regularity in any great centre of intellectual activity. It had 
 begun to be recognised with a great burst of enthusiasm and 
 astonishment, that, after all, Mill and Herbert Spencer had not
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 63 
 
 said the last word on all things in. heaven and earth. And now 
 there was exaggerated recoil. A fresh wave of religious romanti- 
 cism was fast gathering strength : the spirit of Newman had 
 reappeared in the place which Newman had loved and left ; 
 religion was becoming once more popular among the most 
 trivial souls, and a deep reality among a large proportion of the 
 nobler on.es. 
 
 With this movement of opinion Kobert had very soon found 
 himself in close and sympathetic contact. The meagre impres- 
 sion left upon his boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succes- 
 sion of the Harden curates, and by his mother's shafts of wit at 
 their expense, was soon driven out of him by the stateliness and 
 comely beauty of the Church order as it was revealed to him at 
 Oxford. The religious air, the solemn beauty of the place itself, 
 its innumerable associations with an organised and venerable 
 faith, the great public functions and expressions of that faith, 
 possessed the boy's imagination more and more. As he sat in 
 the undergraduates' gallery at St. Mary's on the Sundays, when 
 the great High Church preacher of the moment occupied the 
 
 Silpit, and looked down on the crowded building, full of grave 
 ack-gowned figures, and framed in one continuous belt of 
 closely packed boyish faces ; as he listened to the preacher's 
 vibrating voice, rising and falling with the orator's instinct for 
 musical effect ; or as he stood up with the great surrounding 
 body of undergraduates to send the melody of some Latin hymn 
 rolling into the far recesses of the choir, the sight and the ex- 
 perience touched his inmost feeling, and satisfied all the poetical 
 and dramatic instincts of a passionate nature. The system 
 behind the sight took stronger and stronger hold upon him ; he 
 began to wish ardently and continuously to become a part of it, 
 to cast in his lot definitely with it. 
 
 One May evening he was wandering by himself along the 
 towing-path which skirts the upper river, a prey to many 
 thoughts, to forebodings about the schools which were to begin 
 in three weeks, and to speculations as to how his mother would 
 take the news of the second class, which he himself felt to be 
 inevitable. Suddenly, for no apparent reason, there flashed 
 into his mind the little conversation with his mother, which had 
 taken place nearly four years before, in the garden at Trinity. 
 He remembered the antagonism which the idea of a clerical life 
 for him had raised in both of them, and a smile at his own 
 ignorance and his mother's prejudice passed over his quick 
 young face. He sat down on the grassy bank, a mass of reeds 
 at his feet, the shadows of the poplars behind him lying across 
 the still river ; and opposite, the wide green expanse of the 
 great town-meadow, dotted with white patches of geese and 
 herds of grazing horses. There, with a sense of something 
 solemn and critical passing over him, he began to dream out his 
 future life. 
 
 And when he rose half an hour afterwards, and turned his
 
 64 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 steps homewards, he knew with an inward tremor of heart 
 that the next great step of the way was practically taken. For 
 there by the gliding river, and in view of the distant Oxford 
 spires, which his fancy took to witness the act, he had vowed 
 himself in prayer and self-abasement to the ministry of the 
 Church. 
 
 During the three weeks that followed he made some frantic 
 efforts to make up lost ground. He had not been idle for a 
 single day, but he had been unwise, an intellectual spendthrift, 
 living in a continuous succession of enthusiasms, and now at the 
 critical moment his stock of nerve and energy was at a low ebb. 
 He went in depressed and tired, his friends watching anxiously 
 for the result. On the day of the Logic paper, as he emerged 
 into the Schools quadrangle, he felt his arm caught by Mr. Grey. 
 
 ' Come with me for a walk, Elsmere ; you look as if some air 
 would do you good.' 
 
 Robert acquiesced, and the two men turned into the passage 
 way leading out on to Radcliffe Square. 
 
 ' I have done for myself, sir,' said the youth with a sigh, half 
 impatience, half depression. ' It seems to me to-day that I had 
 neither mind nor memory. If I get a second I shall be lueky.' 
 ' Oh, you will get your second whatever happens,' said Mr. 
 Grey quietly, ' and you mustn't be too much cast down about it 
 if you don't get your first.' 
 
 This implied acceptance of his partial defeat, coming from 
 another's lips, struck the excitable Robert like a lash. It was 
 only what he had been saying to himself, but in the most pessi- 
 mist forecasts we make for ourselves, there is always an under 
 protest of hope. 
 
 ' I have been wasting my time here lately,' he said, hurriedly 
 raising his college cap from his brows as ii' it oppressed them, 
 and pushing his hair back with a weary restless gesture. 
 
 ' No,' said Mr. Grey, turning his kind frank eyes upon him. 
 ' As far as general training goes, you have not wasted your time 
 at all. There are many clever men who don't get a first class, 
 and yet it is good for them to be here so long as they are not 
 loungers and idlers, of course. And you have not been a lounger ; 
 you have been headstrong, and a little over-confident, perhaps,' 
 the speaker's smile took all the sting out of the words ' but 
 you have grown into a man, and you are fit now for man's work. 
 Don't let yourself be depressed, Elsmere. You will do better in 
 life than you have done in examination.' 
 
 The young man was deeply touched. This tone of personal 
 comment and admonition was very rare with Mr. Grey. He 
 felt a sudden consciousness of a shared burden which was in- 
 finitely soothing, and though he made no answer, his face lost 
 something of its harassed look as the two walked on together 
 down Oriel Street and into Merton Meadows. 
 
 ' Have you any immediate plans ? ' said Mr. Grey, as they 
 turned into the Broad Walk, now in the full leafage of June,
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 65 
 
 and rustling under a brisk western wind blowing from the 
 river. 
 
 'No : at least I suppose it will be no good my trying for a 
 fellowship. But I meant to tell you, sir, of one thing I have 
 made up my mind to take orders.' 
 
 'You have? When?' 
 
 ' Quite lately. So that fixes me, I suppose, to come back for 
 divinity lectures in the autumn.' 
 
 Mr. Grey said nothing for a while, and they strolled in and 
 out of the great shadows thrown by the elms across their path. 
 
 ' You feel no difficulties in the way 1 ' he asked at last, with a 
 certain quick brusqueness of manner. 
 
 ' No,' said Eobert eagerly. ' I never had any. Perhaps,' he 
 added, with a sudden humility, ' it is because I have never gone 
 deep enough. What I believe might have been worth more if I 
 had had more struggle ; but it has all seemed so plain.' 
 
 The young voice speaking with hesitation and reserve, and 
 yet with a deep inner conviction, was pleasant to hear. Mr. 
 Grey turned towards it, and the great eyes under the furrowed 
 brow had a peculiar gentleness of expression. 
 
 ' You will probably be very happy in the life,' he said. ' The 
 Church wants men of your sort.' 
 
 But through all the sympathy of the tone Robert was con- 
 scious of a veil between them. He knew, of course, pretty much 
 what it was, and with a sudden impulse he felt that he would 
 have given worlds to break through it and talk frankly with 
 this man whom he revered beyond all others, wide as was the 
 intellectual difference between them. But the tutor's reticence 
 and the younger man's respect prevented it. 
 
 When the unlucky second class was actually proclaimed to 
 the world, Langham took it to heart perhaps more than either 
 Elsmere or his mother. No one knew better than he what 
 Elsmere's gifts were. It was absurd that he should not have 
 made more of them in sight of the public. ' Le cle'rical-isme, 
 voila Vennemi ! ' was about the gist of Langham's mood during 
 the days that followed on the class list. 
 
 Elsmere, however, did not divulge his intention of taking 
 orders to him till ten days afterwards, when he had carried off 
 Langham to stay at Harden, and he and his old tutor were 
 smoking in his mother's little garden one moonlit night. 
 
 When he had finished his statement Langham stood still a 
 moment watching the wreaths of smoke as they curled and 
 vanished. The curious interest in Elsmere's career, which 
 during a certain number of months had made him almost 
 practical, almost energetic, had disappeared. He was his own 
 languid, paradoxical self. 
 
 ' yVell, after all,' he said at last, very slowly, 'the difficulty 
 lies in preaching anything. One may as well preach a respect- 
 able mythology as anything else.' 
 
 ' What do you mean by a mythology ? ' cried Robert hotly. 
 
 F
 
 66 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 'Simply ideas, or experiences, personified,' said Langham, 
 puffing away. 'I take it they are the subject-matter of all 
 theologies.' 
 
 'I don't understand you,' said Robert, flushing. 'To the 
 Christian, facts have been the medium by which ideas the world 
 could not otherwise have come at have been communicated to 
 man. Christian theology is a system of ideas indeed, but of 
 ideas realised, made manifest in facts.' 
 
 Langham looked at him for a moment, undecided ; then that 
 suppressed irritation we have already spoken of broke through. 
 ' How do you know they are facts ? ' he said drily. 
 
 The younger man took up the challenge with all his natural 
 eagerness, and the conversation resolved itself into a discussion 
 of Christian evidences. Or rather Robert held forth, and Lang- 
 ham kept him going by an occasional remark which acted like 
 the prick of a spur. The tutor's psychological curiosity was 
 soon satisfied. He declared to himself that the intellect had 
 precious little to do with Elsmere's Christianity. He had got 
 hold of all the stock apologetic arguments, and used them, his 
 companion admitted, with ability and ingenuity. But they 
 were merely the outworks of the citadel. The inmost fortress 
 was held by something wholly distinct from intellectual con- 
 viction by moral passion, by love, by feeling, by that mysticism, 
 in short, which no healthy youth should be without. 
 
 ' He imagines he has satisfied his intellect,' was the inward 
 comment of one of the most melancholy of sceptics, ' and he has 
 never so much as exerted it. What a brute I am to protest ! ' 
 
 And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out 
 his hand to his companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness in 
 his black eyes, such as on one or two critical occasions before 
 had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere. 
 
 'No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of 
 course, and you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging 
 away at reforming and enlightening the world, don't trample 
 too much on the people who have more than enough to do to 
 enlighten themselves.' 
 
 As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this new turn of her son's fortunes, 
 she realised with humorous distinctness that for some years past 
 Robert had been educating her as well as himself. Her old re- 
 bellious sense of something inherently absurd in the clerical 
 status had been gradually slain in her by her long contact 
 through him with the finer and more imposing aspects of 
 church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the 
 Harden curates, and at times she would flame out into the 
 wildest, wittiest threats and gibes, for the momentary satisfac- 
 tion of her own essentially lay instincts ; but at bottom she 
 knew perfectly well that, when the moment came, no mother 
 could be more loyal, more easily imposed upon, than she 
 would be. 
 
 ' I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell before
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 67 
 
 very long,' she said to him one morning abruptly, studying him 
 the while out of her small twinkling eyes. What dignity there 
 was already in the young lightly-built frame ! what frankness 
 and character in the irregular, attractive face ! 
 
 ' Mother,' cried Elsmere indignantly, ' what do you take me 
 for ? Do you imagine I am going to bury myself in the country 
 at five or six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, and nothing 
 to do for it ? That would be a deserter's act indeed.' 
 
 Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. ' Oh, I supposed you 
 would insist on killing yourself, to begin with. To most people 
 nowadays that seems to be the necessary preliminary of a useful 
 career.' 
 
 Robert laughed and kissed hei', but her question had stirred 
 him so much that he sat down that very evening to write to his 
 cousin Mowbray Elsmere. He announced to him that he was 
 about to read for orders, and that at the same time he re- 
 linquished all claim on the living of Murewell. ' Do what you 
 like with it when it falls vacant,' he wrote, ' without reference 
 to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman in health 
 and strength, and in no immediate want of money, allows him- 
 self the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for some years 
 at any rate, to meet the challenge of evil and poverty where the 
 fight is hardest among our English town population.' 
 
 Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two to the 
 effect that Robert's letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir 
 Mowbray, had nothing to do with his cousin's views. When the 
 living was vacant the present holder, however, was uncommon 
 tough and did not mean dying he should follow out the in- 
 structions of his father's will, and if Robert did not want the 
 thing he could say so. 
 
 In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. 
 The following spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation com- 
 pletely by winning a Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant 
 fight with some of the best men of his year, and in June he was 
 ordained. 
 
 In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at 
 Merton, and by Mr. Grey's advice he accepted it, thus postpon- 
 ing for a while that London curacy and that stout grapple with 
 human need at its sorest for which his soul was pining. ' Stay 
 here a year or two,' Grey said bluntly ; ' you are at the beginning 
 of your best learning time, and you are not one of the natures 
 who can do without books. You will be all the better worth 
 having afterwards, and there is no lack of work here for a man's 
 moral energies.' 
 
 Langham took the same line, and Elsmere submitted. Three 
 happy and fruitful years followed. The young lecturer de- 
 veloped an amazing power of work. That concentration which 
 he had been unable to achieve for himself his will was strong 
 enough to maintain when it was a question of meeting the 
 demands of a college class in which he was deeply interested.
 
 68 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 He became a stimulating and successful teacher, and one of the 
 most popular of men. His passionate sense of responsibility 
 towards his pupils made him load himself with burdens to which 
 he was constantly physically unequal, and fill the vacations 
 almost as full as the terms. And as he was comparatively a 
 man of means, his generous impetuous temper was able to 
 gratify itself in ways that would have been impossible to others. 
 The story of his summer reading parties, for instance, if one 
 could have unravelled it, would have been found to be one long 
 string of acts of kindness towards men poorer and duller than 
 himself. 
 
 At the same time he formed close and eager relations with 
 the heads of the religious party in Oxford. His mother's Evan- 
 gelical training of him and Mr. Grey's influence, together, per- 
 haps, with certain drifts of temperament, prevented him from 
 becoming a High Churchman. The sacramental, ceremonial 
 view of the Church never took hold upon him. But to the 
 English Church as a great national institution for the promotion 
 of God's work on earth no one could have been more deeply 
 loyal, and none coming close to him could mistake the fervour 
 and passion of his Christian feeling. At the same time he did 
 not know what rancour or bitterness meant, so that men of all 
 shades of Christian belief reckoned a friend in him, and he went 
 through life surrounded by an unusual, perhaps a dangerous 
 amount of liking and affection. He threw himself ardently into 
 the charitable work of Oxford, now helping a High Church 
 vicar, and now toiling with Grey and one or two other Liberal 
 fellows, at the maintenance of a coffee-palace and lecture-room 
 just started by them in one of the suburbs ; while in the second 
 year of his lectureship the success of some first attempts at 
 preaching fixed the attention of the religious leaders upon him 
 as upon a man certain to make his mark. 
 
 So the three years passed years not, perhaps, of great intel- 
 lectual advance, for other forces in him than those of the 
 intellect were mainly to the fore, but years certainly of continu- 
 ous growth in character and moral experience. And at the end 
 of them Mowbray Elsmere made his offer, and it was accepted. 
 
 The secret of it, of course, was overwork. Mrs. Elsmere, from 
 the little house in Merton Street, where she had established 
 herself, had watched her boy's meteoric career through these 
 crowded months with very frequent misgivings. No one knew 
 better than she that Robert was constitutionally not of the 
 toughest fibre, and she realised long before he did that the 
 Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end for him in 
 premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her 
 remonstrances, nor Mr. Grey's common -sense, nor Langham's 
 fidgety protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom 
 self-slaughter came so easy. During the latter half of his third 
 year of teaching he was continually being sent away by the 
 doctors, and coming back only to break down again. At last,
 
 CHAP, v WESTMORELAND 69 
 
 in the January of his fourth year, the collapse became so de- 
 cided that he consented, bribed by the prospect of the Holy 
 Land, to go away for three months to Egypt and the East, 
 accompanied by his mother and a college friend. 
 
 Just before their departure news reached him of the death of 
 the rector of Murewell, followed by a formal offer of the living 
 from Sir Mowbray. At the moment when the letter arrived he 
 was feeling desperately tired and ill, and in after-life he never 
 forgot the half -superstitious thrill and deep sense of depression 
 with which he received it. For within him was a slowly- 
 emerging, despairing conviction that he was indeed physically 
 unequal to the claims of his Oxford work, and if so, still more 
 unequal to grappling with the hardest pastoral labour and the 
 worst forms of English poverty. And the coincidence of the 
 Murewell incumbent's death struck his sensitive mind as a 
 Divine leading. 
 
 But it was a painful defeat. He took the letter to Grey, and 
 Grey strongly advised him to accept. 
 
 ' You overdrive your scruples, Elsmere,' said the Liberal tutor 
 with emphasis. 'No one can say a living with 1200 souls, and 
 no curate, is a sinecure. As for hard town work, it is absurd 
 you couldn't stand it. And after all, I imagine, there are some 
 souls worth saving out of the towns.' 
 
 Elsmere pointed out vindictively that family livings were a 
 corrupt and indefensible institution. Mr. Grey replied calmly 
 that they probably were, but that the fact did not affect, so far 
 as he could see, Elsmere's competence to fulfil all the duties of 
 rector of Murewell. 
 
 ' After all, my dear fellow,' he said, a smile breaking over his 
 strong expressive face, ' it is well even for reformers to be sane.' 
 
 Mrs. Elsmere was passive. It seemed to her that she had 
 foreseen it all along. She was miserable about his health, but 
 she too had a moment of superstition, and would not urge him. 
 Murewell was no name of happy omen to her she had passed 
 the darkest hours of her life there. 
 
 In the end Robert asked for delay, which was grudgingly 
 granted him. Then he and his mother and friend fled over 
 seas : he feverishly determined to get well and cheat the fates. 
 But, after a halcyon time in Palestine and Constantinople, a 
 whiff of poisoned air at Cannes, on their way home, acting on a 
 low constitutional state, settled matters. Robert was laid up 
 for weeks with malarious fever, and when he struggled out 
 again into the hot Riviera sunshine it was clear to himself and 
 everybody else that he must do what he could, and not what he 
 would, in the Christian vineyard. 
 
 ' Mother,' he said one day, suddenly looking up at her as she 
 sat near him working, ' can you be happy at Murewell ? ' 
 
 There was a wistfulness in the long thin face, and a pathetic 
 accent of surrender in the voice, which hurt the mother's 
 heart.
 
 70 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' I can be happy wherever you are,' she said, laying her brown 
 nervous hand on his blanched one. 
 
 ' Then give me pen and paper and let me write to Mowbray. 
 I wonder whether the place has changed at all. Heigh ho ! 
 How is one to preach to people who have stuffed you up with 
 gooseberries, or swung you on gates, or lifted you over puddles 
 to save your petticoats? 1 wonder what has become of that 
 boy whom I hit in the eye with my bow and arrow, or of that 
 other lout who pummelled me into the middle of next week for 
 disturbing his bird-trap ? By the way, is the Squire is Roger 
 Wendover living at the Hall now 1 ' 
 
 He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest. 
 
 'So I hear,' said Mrs. Elsmere drily. 'He won't be much 
 good to you.' 
 
 He sat on meditating while she went for pen and paper. He 
 had forgotten the Squire of Murewell. But Roger Wendover, 
 the famous and eccentric owner of Murewell Hall, hermit and 
 scholar, possessed of one of the most magnificent libraries in 
 England, and author of books which had carried a revolutionary 
 shock into the heart of English society, was not a figure to be 
 overlooked by any rector of Murewell, least of all by one pos- 
 sessed of Robert's culture and imagination. 
 
 The young man ransacked his memory on the subject with a 
 sudden access of interest in his new home that was to be. 
 
 Six weeks later they were in England, and Robert, now con- 
 valescent, had accepted an invitation to spend a month in Long 
 Whindale with his mother's cousins, the Thornburghs, who 
 offered him quiet, and bracing air. He was to enter on his 
 duties at Murewell in July, the bishop, who had been made 
 aware of his Oxford reputation, welcoming the new recruit to 
 the diocese with marked warmth of manner. 
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 4 AGNES, if you want any tea, here it is,' cried Rose, calling from 
 outside through the dining-room window ; ' and tell mamma.' 
 
 It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which 
 Robert Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An 
 intelligent foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled valley 
 might have believed that, after all, England, and even Northern 
 England, had a summer. Early in the season as it was, the sun 
 was already drawing the colour out of the hills ; the young 
 green, hardly a week or two old, was darkening. Except the 
 oaks. They were brilliance itself against the luminous gray- 
 blue sky. So were the beeches, their young downy leaves just 
 unpacked, tumbling loosely open to the light. But the larches 
 and the birches and the hawthorns were already sobered by a 
 longer acquaintance with life and Phoebus.
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 71 
 
 Rose sat fanning herself with a portentous hat, which when 
 in its proper place served her, apparently, both as hat and as 
 parasol. She seemed to have been running races with a fine 
 collie, who lay at her feet panting, but studying her with his 
 bright eyes, and evidently ready to be off again at the first in- 
 dication that his playmate had recovered her wind. Chattie 
 was coming lazily over the lawn, stretching each leg behind her 
 as she walked, tail arched, green eyes flaming in the sun, a 
 model of treacherous beauty. 
 
 ' Chattie, you fiend, come here ! ' cried Hose, holding out a 
 hand to her ; ' if Miss Barks were ever pretty she must have 
 looked like you at this moment.' 
 
 'I won't have Chattie put upon,' said Agnes, establishing 
 herself at the other side of the little tea-table ; ' she has done 
 you no harm. Come to me, beastie. / won't compare you to 
 disagreeable old maids.' 
 
 The cat looked from one sister to the other, blinking ; then 
 with a sudden magnificent spring leaped on to Agnes's lap and 
 curled herself up there. 
 
 ' Nothing but cupboard love,' said Rose scornfully, in answer 
 to Agnes's laugh ; ' she knows you will give her bread and 
 butter and I won't, out of a double regard for my skirts and her 
 morals. Oh, dear me ! Miss Barks was quite seraphic last 
 night ; she never made a single remark about my clothes, and 
 she didn't even say to me as she generally does, with an air of 
 compassion, that she " quite understands how hard it must be to 
 keep in tune." ' 
 
 ' The amusing thing was Mrs. Seaton and Mr. Elsmere,' said 
 Agnes. 'I just love, as Mrs. Thornburgh says, to hear her in- 
 structing other people in their own particular trades. She 
 didn't get much change out of him.' 
 
 Rose gave Agnes her tea, and then, bending forward, with 
 one hand on her heart, said in 'a stage whisper, with a 
 dramatic glance round the garden, ' My heart is whole. How 
 is yours ? ' 
 
 ' Intact] said Agnes calmly, ' as that French bric-a-brac man 
 in the Brompton Road used to say of his pots. But he is very 
 nice.' 
 
 ' Oh, charming ! But when my destiny arrives ' and Rose, 
 returning to her tea, swept her little hand with a teaspoon in 
 it eloquently round ' he won't have his hair cut close. I must 
 have luxuriant locks, and I will take no excuse ! Une chevelwe 
 de poete, the eve of an eagle, the moustache of a hero, the hand 
 of a Rubinstein, and, if it pleases him, the temper of a fiend. 
 He will be odious, insufferable for all the world besides, except 
 for me ; and for me he will be heaven.' 
 
 She threw herself back, a twinkle in her bright eye, but a 
 little flush of something half real on her cheek. 
 
 'No doubt,' said Agnes drily. 'But you can't wonder if 
 under the circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law. To
 
 72 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 return to the subject, however, Catherine liked him. She 
 said so.' 
 
 ' Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose discontentedly ; ' Cath- 
 erine likes everybody of a certain sort and everybody likes 
 Catherine.' 
 
 ' Does that mean, Miss Hasty,' said her sister, ' that you have 
 made up your mind Catherine will never marry ? ' 
 
 ' Marry ! ' cried Rose. ' You might as well talk of marrying 
 Westminster Abbey.' 
 
 Agnes looked at her attentively. Rose's fun had a decided 
 lack of sweetness. ' After all,' she said demurely, ' St. Elizabeth 
 married.' 
 
 'Yes, but then she was a princess. Reasons of State. If 
 Catherine were " her Royal Highness " it would be her duty to 
 marry, which would just make all the difference. Duty ! I 
 hate the word.' 
 
 And Rose took up a fir-cone lying near and threw it at the 
 nose of the collie, who made a jump at it, and then resumed an 
 attitude of blinking and dignified protest against his mistress's 
 follies. 
 
 Agnes again studied her sister. ' What's the matter with you, 
 Rose?' 
 
 ' The usual thing, my dear,' replied Rose curtly, ' only more 
 so. I had a letter this morning from Carry Ford the daughter, 
 you know, of those nice people I stayed in Manchester with last 
 year. Well, she wants me to go and stay the winter with them 
 and study under a first-rate man, Franzen, who is to be in 
 Manchester two days a week during the winter. I haven't said 
 a word about it^- what's the use ? I know all Catherine's argu- 
 ments by heart. Manchester is not Whindale, and papa wished 
 us to live in Whindale ; I am not somebody else and needn't 
 earn my bread ; and art is jnot religion ; and 
 
 ' Wheels ! ' exclaimed Agnes. ' Catherine, I suppose, home 
 from Whinborough.' 
 
 Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at 
 the top of the wall which shut them off from the road. 
 
 ' Catherine, and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot's 
 pace, and the unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course 
 Mr. Elsmere. He will come in to tea, so I'll go for a cup. It 
 is his duty to call on us to-day.' 
 
 When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine 
 and Robert Elsmere were coming up the drive. Something had 
 given Catherine more colour than usual, and as Mrs. Ley burn 
 shook hands with the young clergyman her mother's eyes turned 
 approvingly to her eldest daughter. ' After all, she is as hand- 
 some as Rose,' she said to herself ' though it is quite a different 
 style.' 
 
 Rose, who was always tea - maker, dispensed her wares ; 
 Catherine took her favourite low seat beside her mother, clasp- 
 ing Mrs. Leyburn's thin mittened hand awhile tenderly in her
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 73 
 
 own: Robert and Agnes set up a lively gossip on the subject of 
 the Thornburghs' guests, in which Rose joined, while Catherine 
 looked smiling on. She seemed apart from the rest, Robert 
 thought ; not, clearly, by her own will, but by virtue of a differ- 
 ence of temperament which could not but make itself felt. Yet 
 once as Rose passed her, Robert saw her stretch out her hand 
 and touch her sister caressingly, with a bright upward look and 
 smile as though she would say, ' Is all well ? have you had a 
 good time this afternoon, Roschen ? ' Clearly the strong con- 
 templative nature was not strong enough to dispense with any 
 of the little wants and cravings of human affection. Compared 
 to the main impression she was making on him, her suppliant 
 attitude at her mother's feet and her caress of her sister were 
 like flowers breaking through the stern March soil and changing 
 the whole spirit of the fields. 
 
 Presently he said something of Oxford, and mentioned 
 Merton. Instantly Mrs. Leyburn fell upon him. Had he ever 
 seen Mr. S who had been a Fellow there, and Rose's god- 
 father ? 
 
 'I don't acknowledge him,' said Rose, pouting. 'Other 
 people's godfathers give them mugs and corals. Mine never 
 gave me anything but a Concordance.' 
 
 Robert laughed, and proved to their satisfaction that Mr. 
 - had been extinct before his day. But could they ask 
 him any other questions ? Mrs. Leyburn became quite ani- 
 mated, and, diving into her memory, produced a number of 
 fragmentary reminiscences of her husband's Queen's friends, 
 asking him for information about each and all of them. The 
 young man disentangled all her questions, racked his brains to 
 answer, and showed all through a quick friendliness, a charming 
 deference as of youth to age, which confirmed the liking of the 
 whole party for him. Then the mention of an associate of 
 Richard Leyburn's youth, who had been one of the Tractarian 
 leaders, led him into talk of Oxford changes and the influences 
 of the present. He drew for them the famous High Church 
 preacher of the moment, described the great spectacle of his 
 Bampton Lectures, by which Oxford had been recently thrilled, 
 and gave a dramatic account of a sermon on evolution preached 
 by the hermit- veteran Pusey, as though by another Elias re- 
 turning to the world to deliver a last warning message to men. 
 Catherine listened absorbed, her deep eyes fixed upon him. And 
 though all he said was pitched in a vivacious narrative key 
 and addressed as much to the others as to her, inwardly it 
 seemed to him that his one object all through was to touch and 
 keep her attention. 
 
 Then, in answer to inquiries about himself, he fell to describ- 
 ing St. Anselm's with enthusiasm, its growth, its Provost, its 
 effectiveness as a great educational machine, the impression it 
 had made on Oxford and the country. This led him naturally 
 to talk of Mr. Grey, then, next to the Provost, the most promi-
 
 74 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 nent figure in the college ; and once embarked on this theme he 
 became more eloquent and interesting than ever. The circle of 
 women listened to him as to a voice from the large world. He 
 made them feel the beat of the great currents of English life 
 and thought ; he seemed to bring the stir and rush of our central 
 English society into the deep quiet of their valley. Even the 
 bright-haired Rose, idly swinging her pretty foot, with a head 
 full of dreams and discontent, was beguiled, and for the moment 
 seemed to lose her restless self in listening. 
 
 He told an exciting story of a bad election riot in Oxford 
 which had been quelled at considerable personal risk by Mr. 
 Grey, who had gained his influence in the town by a devotion 
 of years to the policy of breaking down as far as possible the old 
 venomous feud between city and university. 
 
 When he paused, Mrs. Leyburn said, vaguely, 'Did you say 
 he was a canon of somewhere ? ' 
 
 ' Oh no,' said Robert, smiling, ' he is not a clergyman.' 
 
 ' But you said he preached,' said Agnes. 
 
 ' Yes but lay sermons addresses. He is not one of us even, 
 according to your standard and mine.' 
 
 ' A Nonconformist ? ' sighed Mrs. Leyburn. ' Oh, I know 
 they have let in everybody now.' 
 
 ' Well, if you like,' said Robert. ' What I meant was that his 
 opinions are not orthodox. He could not be a clergyman, but 
 he is one of the noblest of men ! ' 
 
 He spoke with affectionate warmth. Then suddenly Cath- 
 erine's eyes met his, and he felt an involuntary start. A veil 
 had fallen over them ; her sweet moved sympathy was gone ; 
 she seemed to have shrunk into herself. 
 
 She turned to Mrs. Leyburn. ' Mother, do you know, I have 
 all sorts of messages from Aunt Ellen ' and in an under- voice 
 she began to give Mrs. Leyburn the news of her afternoon 
 expedition. 
 
 Rose and Agnes soon plunged young Elsmere into another 
 stream of talk. But he kept his feeling of perplexity. His 
 experience of other women seemed to give him nothing to go 
 upon with regard to Miss Leyburn. 
 
 Presently Catherine got up and drew her plain little black 
 cape round her again. 
 
 ' My dear ! ' remonstrated Mrs. Leyburn. ' Where are you 
 off to now 1 ' 
 
 ' To the Backhouses, mother,' she said in a low voice ; ' I have 
 not been there for two days. I must go this evening.' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn said no more. Catherine's ' musts ' were never 
 disputed. She moved towards Elsmere with outstretched hand. 
 But he also sprang up. 
 
 ' I, too, must be going,' he said ; ' I have paid you an uncon- 
 scionable visit. If you are going past the vicarage, Miss Ley- 
 burn, may I escort you so far ? ' 
 
 She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells. Agnes,
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 75 
 
 whose eye fell on her sister during the pause, was struck with 
 a passing sense of something out of the common. She could 
 hardly have denned her impression, but Catherine seemed more 
 alive to the outer world, more like other people, less nun-like, 
 than usual. 
 
 When they had left the garden together, as they had come 
 into it, and Mrs. Leyburn, complaining of chilliness, had re- 
 treated to the drawing-room, Rose laid a quick hand on her 
 sister's arm. 
 
 ' You say Catherine likes him ? Owl ! what is a great deal 
 more certain is that he likes her.' 
 
 'Well,' said Agnes calmly, 'well, I await your remarks.' 
 
 ' Poor fellow ! said Rose grimly, and removed her hand. 
 
 Meanwhile Elsmere and Catherine walked along the valley 
 road towards the Vicarage. He thought, uneasily, she was a 
 little more reserved with him than she had been in those pleasant 
 moments after he had overtaken her in the pony-carriage ; but 
 still she was always kind, always courteous. And what a white 
 hand it was, hanging ungloved against her dress ! what a beauti- 
 ful dignity and freedom, as of mountain winds and mountain 
 streams, in every movement ! 
 
 'You are bound for High Ghyll?' he said to her as they 
 neared the vicarage gate. ' Is it not a long way for you ? You 
 have been at a meeting already, your sister said, and teaching 
 this morning ! ' 
 
 He looked down on her with a charming diffidence as though 
 aware that their acquaintance was very young, and yet with a 
 warm eagerness of feeling piercing through. As she paused 
 under his eye the slightest flush rose to Catherine's cheek. 
 Then she looked up with a smile. It was amusing to be taken 
 care of by this tall stranger ! 
 
 ' It is most unfeminine, I am afraid,' she said, ' but I couldn't 
 be tired if I tried.' 
 
 Elsmere grasped her hand. 
 
 'You make me feel myself more than ever a shocking ex- 
 ample,' he said, letting it go with a little sigh. The smart of 
 his own renunciation was still keen in him. She lingered a 
 moment, could find nothing to say, threw him a look all shy 
 sympathy and lovely pity, and was gone. 
 
 In the evening Robert got an explanation of that sudden 
 stiffening in his auditor of the afternoon, which had perplexed 
 him. He and the vicar were sitting smoking in the study after 
 dinner, and the ingenious young man managed to shift the con- 
 versation on to the Leyburns, as he had managed to shift it 
 once or twice before that day, flattering himself, of course, on 
 each occasion that his manoeuvres were beyond detection. The 
 vicar, good soul, by virtue of his original discovery, detected 
 them all, and with a sense of appropriation in the matter, not 
 at all unmixed with a sense of triumph over Mrs. T., kept the 
 ball rolling merrily.
 
 76 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 'Miss Leyburn seems to have very strong religious views,' 
 said Robert, a propos of some remark of the vicar's as to the 
 assistance she was to him in the school. 
 
 ' Ah, she is her father's daughter,' said the vicar genially. He 
 had his oldest coat on, his favourite pipe between his lips, and 
 a bit of domestic carpentering on his knee at which he was 
 fiddling away ; and, being perfectly happy, was also perfectly 
 amiable. 'Richard Leyburn was a fanatic as mild as you 
 please, but immovable.' 
 ' 'What line?' 
 
 ' Evangelical, with a dash of Quakerism. He lent me Madame 
 Guyon's Life once to read. I didn't appreciate it. I told him 
 that for all her religion she seemed to me to have a deal of the 
 vixen in her. He could hardly get over it : it nearly broke our 
 friendship. But I suppose he was very like her, except that, 
 in my opinion, his nature was sweeter. He was a fatalist saw 
 leadings of Providence in every little thing. And such a dreamer ! 
 When he came to live up here just before his death, and all his 
 active life was taken off him, I believe half his time he was see- 
 ing visions. He used to wander over the fells and meet you 
 with a start, as though you belonged to another world than the 
 one he was walking in.' 
 
 ' And his eldest daughter was much with him ? ' 
 
 ' The apple of his eye. She understood him. He could talk 
 his soul out to her. The others, of course, were children ; and 
 his wife well, his wife was just what you see her now, poor 
 thing. He must have married her when she was very young 
 and very pretty. She was a squire's daughter somewhere 
 near the school of which he was master a good family, I be- 
 lieve she'll tell you so, in a ladylike way. He was always 
 fidgety about her health. He loved her, I suppose, or had loved 
 her. But it was Catherine who had his mind ; Catherine who 
 was his friend. She adored him. I believe there was always a 
 sort of pity in her heart for him too. But at any rate he made 
 her and trained her. He poured all his ideas and convictions 
 into her.' 
 
 ' Which were strong 1 ' 
 
 ' Uncommonly. For all his gentle, ethereal look, you could 
 neither bend nor break him. I don't believe anybody but 
 Richard Leyburn could have gone through Oxford at the height 
 of the Oxford Movement, and, so to speak, have known nothing 
 about it, while living all the time for religion. He had a great 
 deal in common with the Quakers, as I said ; a great deal in 
 common with the Wesley ans ; but he was very loyal to the 
 Church all the same. He regarded it as the golden mean. 
 George Herbert was his favourite poet. He used to carry his 
 poems about with him on the mountains, and an expurgated 
 Christian Year the only thing he ever took from the High 
 Churchmen which he had made for himself, and which he and 
 Catherine knew by heart. In some ways he was not a bigot at
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 77 
 
 all. He would have had the Church make peace with the Dis- 
 senters ; he was all for upsetting tests so far as Nonconformity 
 was concerned. But he drew the most rigid line between belief 
 and unbelief. He would not have dined at the same table with 
 a Unitarian if he could have helped it. I remember a furious 
 article of Ms in the Record against admitting Unitarians to the 
 Universities or allowing them to sit in Parliament. England is 
 a Christian State, he said ; they are not Christians ; they have 
 no right in her except on sufferance. Well, I suppose he was 
 abou t right,' said the vicar with a sigh. ' We are all so half- 
 hearted nowadays.' 
 
 'Not he,' cried Robert hotly. 'Who are we that because a 
 man differs from us in opinion we are to shut him out from the 
 education of political and civil duty ? But never mind, Cousin 
 William. Go on.' 
 
 'There's no more that I remember, except that of course 
 Catherine took all these ideas from him. He wouldn't let his child- 
 ren know any unbeliever, however apparently worthy and good. 
 He impressed it upon them as their special sacred duty, in a 
 time of wicked enmity to religion, to cherish the faith and the 
 whole faith. He wished his wife and daughters to live on here 
 after his death that they might be less in danger spiritually 
 than in the big world, and that they might have more oppor- 
 tunity of living the old-fashioned Christian life. There was also 
 some mystical idea, I think, of making up through his children 
 for the godless lives of their forefathers. He used to reproach 
 himself for having in his prosperous days neglected his family, 
 some of whom he might have helped to raise.' 
 
 ' Well, but,' said Robert, ' all very well for Miss Leyburn, but 
 I don't see the father in the two younger girls.' 
 
 ' Ah, there is Catherine's difficulty,' said the vicar, shrugging 
 his shoulders. ' Poor thing ! How well I remember her after 
 her father's death ! She came down to see me in the dining- 
 room about some arrangement for the funeral. She was only 
 sixteen, so pale and thin with nursing. I said something about 
 the comfort she had been to her father. She took my hand and 
 burst into tears. " He was so good ! " she said ; "I loved him 
 so ! Oh, Mr. Thornburgh, help me to look after the others ! " 
 And that's been her one thought since then that, next to 
 following the narrow road.' 
 
 The vicar had begun to speak with emotion, as generally 
 happened to him whenever he was beguiled into much speech 
 about Catherine Leyburn. There must have been something 
 great somewhere in the insignificant elderly man. A meaner 
 soul might so easily have been jealous of this girl with her in- 
 conveniently high standards, and her influence, surpassing his 
 own, in his own domain. 
 
 ' I should like to know the secret of the little musician's inde 
 pendence,' said Robert, musing. 'There might be no tie of 
 mood at all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.'
 
 78 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' Oh, I don't know that ! There's more than you think, or 
 Catherine wouldn't have kept her hold over her so far as she 
 has. Generally she gets her way, except about the music. There 
 Rose sticks to it.' 
 
 ' And why shouldn't she ? ' 
 
 'Ah, well, you see, my dear fellow, I am old enough, and 
 you're not, to remember what people in the old days used to 
 think about art. Of course nowadays we all say very fine things 
 about it ; but Richard Leyburn would no more have admitted 
 that a girl who hadn't got her own bread or her family's to earn 
 by it was justified in spending her time in fiddling than he 
 would have approved of her spending it in dancing. I have 
 heard him take a text out of the Imitation and lecture Rose 
 when she was quite a baby for pestering any stray person she 
 could get hold of to give her music-lessons. " Woe to them "- 
 yes, that was it "that inquire many curious things of men, 
 and care little about the way of serving me." However, he 
 wasn't consistent. Nobody is. It was actually he that brought 
 Rose her first violin from London in a green baize bag. Mrs. 
 Leyburn took me in one night to see her asleep with it on her 
 pillow, and all her pretty curls lying over the strings. I dare- 
 say, poor man, it was one of the acts towards his children that 
 tormented his mind in his last hour.' 
 
 ' She has certainly had her way about practising it : she plays 
 superbly.' 
 
 ' Oh yes, she has had her way. She is a queer mixture, is 
 Rose. 1 see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her ; 
 and then there is the beauty and refinement of her mother's 
 side of the family. Lately she has got quite out of hand. She 
 went to stay with some relations they have in Manchester, got 
 drawn into the musical set there, took to these funny gowns, 
 and now she and Catherine are always half at war. Poor 
 Catherine said to me the other day, with tears in her eyes, that 
 she knew Rose thought her as hard as iron. " But what can I 
 do ? " she said. " I promised papa." She makes herself miser- 
 able, and it's no use. I wish the little wild thing would get her- 
 self well married. She's not meant for this humdrum place, and 
 she may kick over the traces.' 
 
 ' She's pretty enough for anything and anybody,' said Robert. 
 
 The vicar looked at him sharply, but the young man's critical 
 and meditative look reassured him. 
 
 The next day, just before early dinner, Rose and Agnes, who 
 had been for a walk, were startled, as they were turning into 
 their own gate, by the frantic waving of a white handkerchief 
 from the vicarage garden. It was Mrs. Thornburgh's accepted 
 way of calling the attention of the Burwood inmates, and the 
 girls walked on. They found the good lady waiting for them in 
 the drive in a characteristic glow and nutter. 
 
 ' My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning ! 
 I should have come over but for the stores coming, and a tire-
 
 CHAP. vi WESTMORELAND 79 
 
 some man from Randall's. I've had to bargain with him for a 
 whole hour about taking back those sweets. I was swindled, of 
 course, but we should have died if we'd had to eat them up. 
 Well, now, my dears -' 
 
 The vicar's wife paused. Her square short figure was be- 
 tween the two girls ; she had an arm of each, and she looked 
 significantly from one to another, her gray curls flapping across 
 her face as she did so. 
 
 ' Go on, Mrs. Thornburgh,' cried Rose. ' You make us quite 
 nervous.' 
 
 ' How do you like Mr. Elsmere ? ' she inquired solemnly. 
 
 ' Very much,' said both in chorus. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh surveyed Rose's smiling frankness with a 
 little sigh. Things were going grandly, but she could imagine 
 a disposition of affairs which would have given her personally 
 more pleasure. 
 
 ' How would you like, him for a brother-in-law 1 ' she in- 
 quired, beginning in a whisper, with slow emphasis, patting 
 Rose's arm, and bringing out the last words with a rush. 
 
 Agnes caught the twinkle in Rose's eye, but she answered for 
 them both demurely. 
 
 ' We have no objection to entertain the idea. But you must 
 explain.' 
 
 ' Explain ! ' cried Mrs. Thornburgh. ' I should think it 
 explains itself. At least if you'd been in this house the last 
 twenty-four hours you'd think so. Since the moment when he 
 first met her, it's been " Miss Leyburn," " Miss Leyburn," all the 
 time. One might have seen it with half an eye from the 
 beginning.' 
 
 Airs. Thornburgh had not seen it with two eyes, as we know, 
 till it was pointed out to her ; but her imagination worked with 
 equal liveliness backwards or forwards. 
 
 'He went to see you yesterday, didn't he yes, I know he 
 did and he overtook her in the pony-carriage the vicar saw 
 them from across the valley and he brought her back from your 
 house, and then he kept William up till nearly twelve talking 
 of her. And now he wants a picnic. Oh, it's as plain as a pike- 
 staff. And, my dears, not/ting to be said against him. Fifteen 
 hundred a year if he's a penny. A nice living, only his mother 
 to look after, and as good a young fellow as ever stepped.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh stopped, choked almost by her own elo- 
 quence. The girls, who had by this time established her between 
 them on a garden-seat, looked at her with smiling composure. 
 They were accustomed to letting her have her budget out. 
 
 ' And now, of course,' she resumed, taking breath, and chilled 
 a little by their silence, ' now, of course, I want to know about 
 Catherine?' She regarded them with anxious interrogation. 
 Rose, still smiling, slowly shook her head. 
 
 ' What ! ' cried Mrs. Thornburgh ; then, with charming incon- 
 sistency, ' oh, you can't know anything in two days.'
 
 80 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening ; ' we can't know any- 
 thing iii two days. No one ever will know anything about 
 Catherine, if she takes to anybody, till the last minute.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh's face fell. ' It's very difficult when people 
 will be so reserved,' she said dolefully. 
 
 The girls acquiesced, but intimated that they saw no way out 
 of it. 
 
 ' At any rate we can bring them together,' she broke out, 
 brightening again. ' We can have picnics, you know, and teas, 
 and all that and watch. Now listen.' 
 
 And the vicar's wife sketched out a programme of festivities 
 for the next fortnight she had been revolving in her inventive 
 head, which took the sisters' breath away. Rose bit her lip to 
 keep in her laughter. Agnes with vast self-possession took 
 Mrs. Thornburgh in hand. She pointed out firmly that nothing 
 would be so likely to make Catherine impracticable as fuss. 
 ' In vain is the net spread,' etc. She preached from the text 
 with a worldly wisdom which quickly crushed Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh. 
 
 ' Well, wliat am I to do, my dears ? ' she said at last helplessly. 
 ' Look at the weather ! We must have some picnics, if it's only 
 to amuse Robert.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh spent her life between a condition of effer- 
 vescence and a condition of feeling the world too much for her. 
 Rose and Agnes, having now reduced her to the latter state, 
 proceeded cautiously to give her her head again. They promised 
 her two or three expeditions and one picnic at least ; they said 
 they would do their best ; they promised they would report 
 what they saw and be very discreet, both feeling the comedy of 
 Mrs. Thornburgh as the advocate of discretion ; and then they 
 departed to their early dinner, leaving the vicar's wife decidedly 
 less self-confident than they found her. 
 
 ' The first matrimonial excitement of the family,' cried Agnes 
 as they walked home. ' So far no one can say the Miss Leyburns 
 have been besieged ! ' 
 
 ' It will be all moonshine,' Rose replied decisively. ' Mr. Els- 
 mere may lose his heart ; we may aid and abet him ; Catherine will 
 live in the clouds for a few weeks, and come down from them at 
 the end with the air of an angel, to give him his coup de grdce. 
 As I said before poor fellow ! 
 
 Agnes made no answer. She was never so positive as Rose, 
 and on the whole did not find herself the worse for it in life. 
 Besides, she understood that there was a soreness at the bottom 
 of Rose's heart that was always showing itself in unexpected 
 connections. 
 
 There was no necessity, indeed, for elaborate schemes for 
 assisting Providence. Mrs. Thornburgh had her picnics and her 
 expeditions, but without them Robert Elsmere would have been 
 still man enough to see Catherine Leyburn every day. He 
 loitered about the roads along which she must needs pass to do
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 81 
 
 her many offices of charity ; he offered the vicar to take a class 
 in the school, and was naively exultant that the vicar curiously 
 happened to fix an hour when he must needs see Miss Leyburn 
 going or coming on the same errand ; he dropped into Burwood 
 on any conceivable pretext, till Rose and Agnes lost all incon- 
 venient respect for his cloth and Mrs. Leyburn sent him on 
 errands ; and he even insisted that Catherine and the vicar 
 should make use of him and his pastoral services in one or two 
 of the cases of sickness or poverty under their care. Catherine, 
 with a little more reserve than usual, took him one day to the 
 Tysons', and introduced him to the poor crippled son who was 
 likely to live on paralysed for some time, under the weight, 
 moreover, of a black cloud of depression which seldom lifted. 
 Mrs. Tyson kept her talking in the roem, and she never forgot 
 the scene. It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intel- 
 lectual life was becoming plain to her, while his moral life was 
 still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere's face as he 
 sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and 
 tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things 
 he said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her power- 
 fully. He had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the 
 bitter human need, and the comfort it was his privilege to offer. 
 Catherine stood answering Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears 
 rising in her eyes. She slipped out while he was still talking, 
 and went home strangely moved. 
 
 As to the festivities, she did her best to join in them. The 
 sensitive soul often reproached itself afterwards for having 
 juggled in the matter. Was it not her duty to manage a little 
 society and gaiety for her sisters sometimes f Her mother could 
 not undertake it, and was always plaintively protesting that 
 Catherine would not be young. So for a short week or two 
 Catherine did her best to be young, and climbed the mountain 
 grass, or forded the mountain streams with the energy and the 
 grace of perfect health, trembling afterwards at night as she 
 knelt by her window to think how much sheer pleasure the day 
 had contained. Her life had always had the tension of a bent 
 bow. It seemed to her once or twice during this fortnight as 
 though something were suddenly relaxed in her, and she felt a 
 swift Bunyan-like terror of backsliding, of falling away. But 
 she never confessed herself fully ; she was even blind to what 
 her perspicacity would have seen so readily in another's case 
 the little arts and manoeuvres of those about her. It did not 
 strike her that Mrs. Thorn burgh was more flighty and more 
 ebullient than ever ; that the vicar's wife kissed her at odd 
 times, and with a quite unwonted effusion ; or that Agnes and 
 Rose, when they were in the wild heart of the mountains, or 
 wandering far and wide in search of sticks for a picnic fire, 
 showed a perfect genius for avoiding Mr. Elsmere, whom both 
 of them liked, and that in consequence his society almost always 
 fell to her. Nor did she ever analyse what would have been the 
 
 a
 
 82 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 attraction of those walks to her without that tall figure at her 
 side, that bounding step, that picturesque impetuous talk. 
 There are moments when Nature throws a kind of heavenly 
 mist and dazzlement round the soul it would fain make happy. 
 The soul gropes blindly on ; if it saw its way it might be timid 
 and draw back, but kind powers lead it genially onward through 
 a golden darkness. 
 
 Meanwhile if she did not know herself, she and Elsmere 
 learnt with wonderful quickness and thoroughness to know 
 each other. The two households so near together, and so isolated 
 from the world besides, were necessarily in constant communi- 
 cation. And Elsmere made a most stirring element in their 
 common life. Never had he been more keen, more strenuous. 
 It gave Catherine new lights on modern character altogether 
 to see how he was preparing himself for this Surrey living 
 reading up the history, geology, and botany of the Weald and 
 its neighbourhood, plunging into reports of agricultural com- 
 missions, or spending his quick brain on village sanitation, with 
 the oddest results sometimes, so far as his conversation was 
 concerned. And then in the middle of his disquisitions, which 
 would keep her breathless with a sense of being whirled through 
 space at the tail of an electric kite, the kite would come down 
 with a run, and the preacher and reformer would come hat in 
 hand to the girl beside him, asking her humbly to advise him, 
 to pour out on him some of that practical experience of hers 
 among the poor and suffering, for the sake of which he would 
 in an instant scornfully fling out of sight all his own magnificent 
 plannings. Never had she told so much of her own life to any 
 one ; her consciousness of it sometimes filled her with a sort of 
 terror, lest she might have been trading, as it were, for her own 
 advantage on the sacred things of God. But he would have it. 
 His sympathy, his sweetness, his quick spiritual feeling drew 
 the stories out of her. And then how his bright frank eyes 
 would soften ! With what a reverence would he touch her hand 
 when she said good-bye ! 
 
 And on her side she felt that she knew almost as much about 
 Murewell as he did. She could imagine the wild beauty of the 
 Surrey heathland, she could see the white square rectory with 
 its sloping walled garden, the juniper common just outside the 
 straggling village ; she could even picture the strange squire, 
 solitary in the great Tudor Hall, the author of terrible books 
 against the religion of Christ of which she shrank from hearing, 
 and share the anxieties of the young rector as to his future 
 relations towards a personality so marked, and so important to 
 every soul in the little community he was called to rule. Here 
 all was plain sailing ; she understood him perfectly, and her 
 gentle comments, or her occasional sarcasms, were friendliness 
 itself. 
 
 But it was when he turned to larger things to books, move- 
 ments, leaders of the day that she was often puzzled, sometimes
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 83 
 
 distressed. Why would he seem to exalt and glorify rebellion 
 against the established order in the person of Mr. Grey ? Or 
 why, ardent as his own faith was, would he talk as though 
 opinion was a purely personal matter, hardly in itself to be 
 made the subject of moral judgment at all, and as though right 
 belief were a blessed privilege and boon rather than a law and 
 an obligation? When his comments on men and things took 
 this tinge, she would turn silent, feeling a kind of painful 
 opposition between his venturesome speech and his clergyman's 
 dress. 
 
 And yet, as we all know, these ways of speech were not his 
 own. He was merely talking the natural Christian language of 
 this generation ; whereas she, the child of a mystic solitary, 
 intense, and deeply reflective from her earliest youth was still 
 thinking and speaking in the language of her father's genera- 
 tion. 
 
 But although, as often as his unwariness brought him near 
 to these points of jarring, he would hurry away from them, 
 conscious that here was the one profound difference between 
 them, it was clear to him that insensibly she had moved further 
 than she knew from her father's standpoint. Even among these 
 solitudes, far from men and literature, she had unconsciously 
 felt the breath of her time in some degree. As he penetrated 
 deeper into the nature he found it honeycombed, as it were, 
 here and there, with beautiful unexpected softnesses and diffi- 
 dences. Once, after a long walk, as they were lingering home- 
 wards under a cloudy evening sky, he came upon the great 
 problem of her life Rose and Rose's art. He drew her difficulty 
 from her with the most delicate skill. She had laid it bare, and 
 was blushing to think how she had asked his counsel, almost 
 before she knew where their talk was leading. How was it 
 lawful for the Christian to spend the few short years of the 
 earthly combat in any pursuit, however noble and exquisite, 
 which merely aimed at the gratification of the senses, and im- 
 plied in the pursuer the emphasising rather than the surrender 
 of self? 
 
 He argued it very much as Kingsley would have argued it, 
 tried to lift her to a more intelligent view of a multifarious 
 world, dwelling on the function of pure beauty in life, and on 
 the influence of beauty on character, pointing out the value to 
 the race of all individual development, and pressing home on 
 her the natural religious question : How are the artistic apti- 
 tudes to be explained unless the Great Designer meant them to 
 have a use and function in His world 1 She replied doubtfully 
 that she had always supposed they were lawful for recreation, 
 and like any other trade for bread-winning, but 
 
 Then he told her much that he knew about the humanising 
 effect of music on the poor. He described to her the efforts of 
 a London society, of which he was a subscribing member, to 
 popularise the best music among the lowest class ; he dwelt
 
 84 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 almost with passion on the difference between the joy to be got 
 out of such things and the common brutalising joys of the 
 workman. And you could not have art without artists. In 
 this again he was only talking the commonplaces of his day. 
 But to her they were not commonplaces at all. She looked at 
 him from time to time, her great eyes lightening and deepening 
 as it seemed with every fresh thrust of his. 
 
 ' I am grateful to you,' she said at last with an involuntary 
 outburst, 'I am very grateful to you !' 
 
 And she gave a long sigh as if some burden she had long 
 borne in patient silence had been loosened a little, if only by the 
 fact of speech about it. She was not convinced exactly. She 
 was too strong a nature to relinquish a principle without a 
 period of meditative struggle in which conscience should have 
 all its dues. But her tone made his heart leap. He felt in it a 
 momentary self -surrender that, coming from a creature of so 
 rare a dignity, filled him with an exquisite sense of power, and 
 yet at the same time with a strange humility beyond words. 
 
 A day or two later he was the spectator of a curious little 
 scene. An aunt of the Leyburns living in Whinborough came 
 to see them. She was their father's youngest sister, and the 
 wife of a man who had made some money as a builder in Whin- 
 borough. When Robert came in he found her sitting on the 
 sofa having tea, a large homely-looking woman with gray hair, 
 a high brow, and prominent white teeth. She had unfastened 
 her bonnet strings, and a clean white handkerchief lay spread 
 out on her lap. When Elsmere was introduced to her, she got 
 up, and said with some effusiveness, and a distinct Westmore- 
 land accent 
 
 ' Very pleased indeed to make your acquaintance, sir,' while 
 she enclosed his fingers in a capacious hand. 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn, looking fidgety and uncomfortable, was sit- 
 ting near her, and Catherine, the only member of the party 
 who showed no sign of embarrassment when Robert entered, 
 was superintending her aunt's tea and talking busily the 
 while. 
 
 Robert sat down at a little distance beside Agnes and Rose, 
 who were chattering together a little artificially and of set 
 purpose as it seemed to him. But the aunt was not to be 
 ignored. She talked too loud not to be overheard, and Agnes 
 inwardly noted that as soon as Robert Elsmere appeared she 
 talked louder than before. He gathered presently that she was 
 an ardent Wesleyan, and that she was engaged in describing to 
 Catherine and Mrs. Leyburn the evangelistic exploits of her 
 eldest son, who had recently obtained his first circuit as a 
 Wesleyan minister. He was shrewd enough, too, to guess, after 
 a minute or two, that his presence and probably his obnoxious 
 clerical dress gave additional zest to the recital. 
 
 ' Oh, his success at Colesbridge has been somethin' marvel- 
 lous,' he heard her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, ' some-thin'
 
 CHAP, vi WESTMORELAND 85 
 
 marvellous. The Lord has blessed him indeed ! It doesn't 
 matter what it is, whether it's meetin's, or sermons, or parlour 
 work, or just faithful dealin's with souls one by one. Satan 
 has no cliverer foe than Edward. He never shuts his eyes ; as 
 Edward says himself, it's like trackin' for game is huntin' for 
 souls. Why, the other day he was walkin' out from Coventry 
 to a service. It was the Sabbath, and he saw a man in a bit of 
 grass by the roadside, mendin' his cart. And he stopped did 
 Edward, and gave him the Word strong. The man seemed 
 puzzled like, and said he meant no harm. " No harm ! " says 
 Edward, "when you're just doin' the devil's work every nail 
 you put in, and hammerin' away, mon, at your own damnation." 
 But here's his letter.' And while Rose turned away to a far 
 window to hide an almost hysterical inclination to laugh, Mrs. 
 Fleming opened her bag, took out a treasured paper, and read 
 with the emphasis and the unction peculiar to a certain type of 
 revivalism 
 
 ' " Poor sinner ! He was much put about. I left him, pray- 
 ing the Lord my shaft might rankle in him ; ay, might fester 
 and burn in him till he found no peace but in Jesus. He seemed 
 very dark and destitute no respect for the Word or its minis- 
 ters. A bit farther I met a boy carrying a load of turnips. To 
 him, too, I was faithful, and he went on, taking, without know- 
 ing it, a precious leaflet with him in his bag. Glorious work ! 
 If Wesleyans will but go on claiming even the highways for 
 God, sin will skulk yet. ' 
 
 A dead silence. Mrs. Fleming folded up the letter and put 
 it back into her bag. 
 
 'There's your true minister,' she said, with a large judicial 
 utterance as she closed the snap. ' Wherever he goes Edward 
 must have souls ! ' 
 
 And she threw a swift searching look at the young clergyman 
 in the window. 
 
 ' He must have very hard work with so much walking and 
 preaching,' said Catherine gently. 
 
 Somehow, as soon as she spoke, Elsmere saw the whole odd 
 little scene with other eyes. 
 
 ' His work is just wearin' him out,' said the mother fervently ; 
 ' but a minister doesn't think of that. Wherever he goes there 
 are sinners saved. He stayed last week at a house near Nun- 
 eaton. At family prayer alone there were five saved. And at 
 the prayer-meetin s on the Sabbath such outpourin's of the 
 Spirit ! Edward comes home, his wife tells me, just ready to 
 drop. Are you acquainted, sir,' she added, turning suddenly to 
 Elsmere, and speaking in a certain tone of provocation, ' with 
 the labours of our Wesleyan ministers ? ' 
 
 'No,' said Robert, with his pleasant smile, 'not personally. 
 But I have the greatest respect for them as a body of devoted 
 men.' 
 
 The look of battle faded from the woman's face. It was not
 
 86 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 an unpleasant face. He even saw strange reminiscences of 
 Catherine in it at times. 
 
 ' You're aboot right there, sir. Not that they dare take any 
 credit to themselves it's grace, sir, all grace.' 
 
 'Aunt Ellen,' said Catherine, while a sudden light broke 
 over her face ; ' I just want you to take Edward a little story 
 from me. Ministers are good things, but God can do without 
 them.' 
 
 And she laid her hand on her aunt's knee with a smile in 
 which there was the slightest touch of affectionate satire. 
 
 ' I was up among the fells the other day,' she went on ; ' I 
 met an elderly man cutting wood in a plantation, and I stopped 
 and asked him how he was. " Ah, miss," he said, " verra weel, 
 verra weel. And yet it was nobbut Friday morning lasst ; I 
 cam opp here, awfu' bad in my sperrits like. For my wife 
 she's sick, an' a' dwinnelt away, and I'm gettin' auld, and can't 
 wark as I'd used to, and it did luke to me as thoo there was 
 naethin' afore us nobbut t' Union. And t' mist war low on t' 
 fells, and I sat oonder t' wall, wettish and broodin' like. And 
 theer all ov a soodent the Lord found me ! Yes, puir Reuben 
 Judge, as dawn't matter to naebody, the Lord found un. It 
 war leyke as thoo His feeace cam a-glisterin' an' a-shinin' 
 through t' mist. An' iver sence then, miss, aa've jest felt as 
 thoo aa could a' cut an' stackt all t' wood on t' fell in naw time 
 at a' ! " And he waved his hand round the mounta in side which 
 was covered with plantation. And all the way along the path 
 for ever so long I could hear him singing, chopping away, and 
 quavering out, " Rock of Ages." ' 
 
 She paused, her delicate face, with just a little quiver in the 
 lip, turned to her aunt, her eyes glowing as though a hidden 
 fire had leapt suddenly outward. And yet the gesture, the 
 attitude, was simplicity and unconsciousness itself. Robert had 
 never heard her say anything so intimate before. Nor had he 
 ever seen her so inspired, so beautiful. She had transmuted 
 the conversation at a touch. It had been barbarous prose ; she 
 had turned it into purest poetry. Only the noblest souls have 
 such an alchemy as this at command, thought the watcher on 
 the other side of the room with a passionate reverence. 
 
 ' I wasn't thinkin' of narrowin' the Lord down to ministers,' 
 said Mrs. Fleming, with a certain loftiness. ' We all know He 
 can do without us puir worms.' 
 
 Then, seeing that no one replied, the good woman got up to 
 go. Much of her apparel had slipped away from her in the 
 fervours of revivalist anecdote, and while she hunted for gloves 
 and reticule officiously helped by the younger girls Robert 
 crossed over to Catherine. 
 
 ' You lifted us on to your own high places ! ' he said, bending 
 down to her ; ' I shall carry your story with me through the 
 fells.' 
 
 She looked up, and as she met his warm moved look a little
 
 OHAP. vii WESTMORELAND 87 
 
 glow and tremor crept into the face, destroying its exalted 
 expression. He broke the spell ; she sank from the poet into 
 the embarrassed woman. 
 
 ' You must see my old man,' she said, with an effort ; ' he is 
 worth a library of sermons. I must introduce him to you.' 
 
 He could think of nothing else to say just then, but could 
 only stand impatiently wishing for Mrs. 1 leming's disappear- 
 ance, that he might somehow appropriate her eldest niece. 
 But alas ! when she went, Catherine went out with her, and 
 reappeared no more, though he waited some time. 
 
 He walked home in a whirl of feeling ; on the way he stopped, 
 and leaning over a gate which led into one of the river-fields 
 gave himself up to the mounting tumult within. Gradually, 
 from the half -articulate chaos of hope and memory, there 
 emerged the deliberate voice of his inmost manhood. 
 
 ' In her and her only is my heart's desire ! She and she only 
 if she will, and God will, shall be my wife ! ' 
 
 He lifted his head and looked out on the dewy field, the even- 
 ing beauty of the hills, with a sense of immeasurable change 
 
 'Tears 
 
 Were in his eyes, and in his ears 
 The murmur of a thousand years.' 
 
 He felt himself knit to his kind, to his race, as he had never 
 felt before. It was as though, after a long apprenticeship, he 
 had sprung suddenly into maturity entered at last into the 
 full human heritage. But the very intensity and solemnity 
 of his own feeling gave him a rare clear-sightedness. He realised 
 that he had no certainty of success, scarcely even an entirely 
 reasonable hope. But what of that ? Were they not together, 
 alone, practically, in these blessed solitudes ? Would they not 
 meet to-morrow, and next day, and the day after ? Were not 
 time and opportunity all his own ? How kind her looks are 
 even now ! Courage ! And through that maidenly kindness 
 his own passion shall send the last, transmuting glow. 
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed 
 and persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking 
 a singing class at the school, closed the school door behind her 
 with a sigh of relief, and tripped up the road to Burwood. 
 
 ' How abominably they sang this morning ! ' she said to her- 
 self with curving lip. ' Talk of the natural north-country gift 
 for music ! What ridiculous fictions people set up ! Dear me, 
 what clouds ! Perhaps we shan't get our walk to Shanmoor 
 after all, and if we don't, and if if ' her cheek flushed with a
 
 88 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 sudden excitement 'if Mr. Elsmere doesn't propose, Mrs. 
 Thornburgh will be unmanageable. It is all Agnes and I can 
 do to keep her in bounds as it is, and if something doesn't come 
 off to-day, she'll be for reversing the usual proceeding, and 
 asking Catherine her intentions, which would ruin everything.' 
 
 Then raising her head she swept her eyes round the sky. 
 The wind was freshening, the clouds were coming up fast from 
 the westward ; over the summit of High Fell and the crags on 
 either side, a gray straight-edged curtain was already lowering. 
 
 ' It will hold up yet awhile,' she thought, ' and if it rains later 
 we can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.' 
 
 And she walked on homewards meditating, her thin fingers 
 clasped before her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue rib- 
 bons on her hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in a pretty 
 many-coloured turmoil about her. When she got to Burwood 
 she shut herself into the room which was peculiarly hers, the 
 room which had been a stable. Now it was full of artistic odds 
 and ends her fiddle, of course, and piles of music, her violin 
 stand, a few deal tables and cane chairs beautified by a number 
 of chiffons, bits of Liberty stuffs with the edges still ragged, or 
 cheap morsels of Syrian embroidery. On the tables stood 
 photographs of musicians and friends the spoils of her visits 
 to Manchester, and of two visits to London which gleamed like 
 golden points in the girl's memory. The plastered walls were 
 covered with an odd medley. Here was a round mirror, of 
 which Rose was enormously proud. She had extracted it from 
 a farmhouse of the neighbourhood, and paid for it with her 
 own money. There a group of unfinished headlong sketches of 
 the most fiercely impressionist description the work and the 
 gift of a knot of Manchester artists, who had feted and flattered 
 the beautiful little Westmoreland girl, when she was staying 
 among them, to her heart's content. Manchester, almost alone 
 among our great towns of the present day, has not only a musi- 
 cal, but a pictorial life of its own ; its young artists dub them- 
 selves 'a school,' study in Paris, and when they come home 
 scout the Academy and its methods, and pine to set up a rival 
 art-centre, skilled in all the methods of the Salon, in the murky 
 north. Rose's uncle, originally a clerk in a warehouse, and a 
 rough diamond enough, had more or less moved with the times, 
 like his brother Richard ; at any rate he had grown rich, had 
 married a decent wife, and was glad enough to befriend his 
 dead brother's children, who wanted nothing of him, and did 
 their uncle a credit of which he was sensible, by their good 
 manners and good looks. Music was the only point at which 
 he touched the culture of the times, like so many business men ; 
 but it pleased him also to pose as a patron of local art ; so that 
 when Rose went to stay with her childless uncle and aunt, she 
 found long-haired artists and fiery musicians about the place, 
 who excited and encouraged her musical gift, who sketched her 
 while she played, and talked to the pretty, clever, unformed
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 89 
 
 creature of London and Paris and Italy, and set her pining for 
 that golden vie de Boheme which she alone apparently of all 
 artists was destined never to know. 
 
 For she was an artist she would be an artist let Catherine 
 say what she would ! She came back from Manchester restless 
 for she knew not what, thirsty for the joys and emotions of art, 
 determined to be free, reckless, passionate ; with Wagner and 
 Brahms in her young blood ; and found Burwood waiting for 
 her Burwood, the lonely house in the lonely valley, of which 
 Catherine was the presiding genius. Catherine I For Rose, 
 what a multitude of associations clustered round the name ! 
 To her it meant everything at this moment against which her 
 soul rebelled the most scrupulous order, the most rigid self- 
 repression, the most determined sacrificing of ' this warm kind 
 world,' with all its indefensible delights, to a cold other-world 
 with its torturing inadmissible claims. Even in the midst of 
 her stolen joys at Manchester or London, this mere name, the 
 mere mental image of Catherine moving through life, wrapped 
 in a religious peace and certainty as austere as they were 
 beautiful, and asking of all about her the same absolute sur- 
 render to an awful Master she gave so easily herself, was enough 
 to chill the wayward Rose, and fill her with a kind of restless 
 despair. And at home, as the vicar said, the two sisters were 
 always on the verge of conflict. Rose had enough of her father 
 iu her to suffer in resisting, but resist she must by the law of 
 her nature. 
 
 Now, as she threw off her walking things, she fell first upon 
 her violin, and rushed through a Brahms's ' Liebeslied,' her 
 eyes dancing, her whole light form thrilling with the joy of it 
 and then with a sudden revulsion she stopped playing, and 
 threw herself down listlessly by the open window. Close by 
 against the wall was a little looking-glass, by which she often 
 arranged her ruffled locks ; she glanced at it now, it showed her 
 a brilliant face enough, but drooping lips, and eyes darkened 
 with the extravagant melancholy of eighteen. 
 
 'It is come to a pretty pass,' she said to herself, 'that I 
 should be able to think of nothing but schemes for getting 
 Catherine married and out of my way ! Considering what she 
 is and what I am, and how she has slaved for us all her life, I 
 seem to have descended pretty low. Heigh ho ! ' 
 
 And with a portentous sigh she dropped her chin on her 
 hand. She was half acting,, acting to herself. Life was not 
 really quite unbearable, and she knew it. But it relieved her 
 to overdo it. 
 
 ' I wonder how much chance there is,' she mused presently. 
 ' Mr. Elsmere will soon be ridiculous. Why, / saw him gather 
 up those violets she threw away yesterday on Moor Crag. And 
 as for her, I don't believe she has realised the situation a bit. 
 At least, if she has, she is as unlike other mortals in this as iu 
 everything else. But when she does '
 
 90 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem. 
 Chattie jumped up on the window-sill, with her usual stealthy 
 aplomb, and rubbed herself against the girl's face. 
 
 ' Oh, Chattie ! ' cried Rose, throwing her arms round the cat, 
 'if Catherine '11 only marry Mr. Elsmere, my dear, and be 
 happy ever afterwards, and set me free to live my own life 
 a bit, I'll be so good, you won't know me, Chattie. And you 
 shall have a new collar, my beauty, and cream till you die 
 of it ! ' 
 
 And springing up she dragged in the cat, and snatching a 
 scarlet anemone from a bunch on the table, stood opposite 
 Chattie, who stood slowly waving her magnificent tail from 
 side to side, and glaring as though it were not at all to her 
 taste to be hustled and bustled in this way. 
 
 ' Now, Chattie, listen ! Will she ? ' 
 
 A leaf of the flower dropped on Chattie's nose. 
 
 'Won't she? Will she? Won't she? Will Tiresome flower, 
 
 why did Nature give it such a beggarly few petals ? If I'd had 
 a daisy it would have all come right. Come, Chattie, waltz ; 
 and let's forget this wicked world ! ' 
 
 And, snatching up her violin, the girl broke into a Strauss 
 waltz, dancing to it the while, her cotton skirts flying, her 
 pretty feet twinkling, till her eyes glowed, and her cheeks 
 blazed with a double intoxication the intoxication of move- 
 ment, and the intoxication of sound the cat meanwhile follow- 
 ing her with little mincing perplexed steps, as though not 
 knowing what to make of her. 
 
 ' Rose, you madcap ! ' cried Agnes, opening the door. 
 
 'Not at all, my dear,' said Rose calmly, stopping to take 
 breath. ' Excellent practice and uncommonly difficult. Try if 
 you can do it, and see ! ' 
 
 The weather held up in a gray grudging sort of way, and 
 Mrs. Thornburgh especially was all for braying the clouds and 
 going on with the expedition. It was galling to her that she 
 herself would have to be driven to Shanmoor behind the fat 
 vicarage pony, while the others would be climbing the fells, and 
 all sorts of exciting things might be happening. Still it was 
 infinitely better to be half in it than not in it at all, and she started 
 by the side of the vicarage 'man' in a most delicious flutter. 
 The skies might fall any day now. Elsmere had not confided in 
 her, though she was unable to count the openings she had given 
 him thereto. For one of the frankest of men he had kept his 
 secret, so far as words went, with a remarkable tenacity. 
 Probably the neighbourhood of Mrs. Thornburgh was enough 
 to make the veriest chatterbox secretive. But notwithstanding, 
 no one possessing the clue could live in the same house with 
 him these June days without seeing that the whole man was 
 absorbed, transformed, and that the crisis might be reached at 
 any moment. Even the vicar was eager and watchful, and 
 playing up to his wife in fine style, and if the situation had so
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 91 
 
 worked on the vicar, Mrs. Thornburgh's state is easier imagined 
 than described. 
 
 The walk to Shanmoor need not be chronicled. The party 
 kept together. Robert fancied sometimes that there was a 
 certain note of purpose in the way in which Catherine clung to 
 the vicar. If so it did not disquiet him. Never had she been 
 kinder, more gentle. Nay, as the walk went on a lovely gaiety 
 broke through her tranquil manner, as though she, like the 
 others, had caught exhilaration from the sharpened breeze and 
 the towering mountains, restored to all their grandeur by the 
 storm clouds. 
 
 And yet she had started in some little inward trouble. She 
 had promised to join this walk to Shanmoor, she had promised 
 to go with the others on a picnic the following day, but her 
 conscience was pricking her. Twice this last fortnight had she 
 been forced to give up a night-school she held in a little lonely 
 hamlet among the fells, because even she had been too tired to 
 walk there and back after a day of physical exertion. Were 
 not the world and the flesh encroaching? She had been 
 conscious of a strange inner restlessness as they all stood 
 waiting in the road for the vicar and Elsmere. Agnes had 
 thought her looking depressed and pale, and even dreamt for a 
 moment of suggesting to her to stay at home. And then ten 
 minutes after they had started it had all gone, her depression, 
 blown away by the winds, or charmed away by a happy voice, 
 a manly presence, a keen responsive eye ? 
 
 Elsmere, indeed, was gaiety itself. He kept up an incessant 
 war with Rose ; he had a number of little jokes going at the 
 vicar's expense, which kept that good man in a half-protesting 
 chuckle most of the way ; he cleared every gate that presented 
 itself in first-rate Oxford form, and climbed every point of rock 
 with a cat-like agility that Jset the girls scoffing at the pre- 
 tence of invalidism under which he had foisted himself on 
 Whin dale. 
 
 ' How fine all this black purple is ! ' he cried, as they topped 
 the ridge, and the Shanmoor valley lay before them, bounded 
 on the other side by line after line of mountain, Wetherlam 
 and the Pikes and Fairfield in the far distance, piled sombrely 
 under a sombre sky. ' I had grown quite tired of the sun. He 
 had done his best to make you commonplace.' 
 
 ' Tired of the sun in Westmoreland ? said Catherine, with a 
 little mocking wonder. ' How wanton, how prodigal ! ' 
 
 ' Does it deserve a Nemesis 1 ' he said, laughing. ' Drowning 
 from now till I depart? No matter. I can bear a second 
 deluge with an even mind. On this enchanted soil all things 
 are welcome ! ' 
 
 She looked up, smiling, at his vehemence, taking it all as a 
 tribute to the country, or to his own recovered health. He 
 stood leaning on his stick, gazing, however, not at the view but 
 at her. The others stood a little way off laughing and chatter-
 
 92 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ing. As their eyes met, a strange new pulse leapt up in 
 Catherine. 
 
 ' The wind is very boisterous here,' she said, with a shiver. 
 ' I think we ought to be going on.' 
 
 And she hurried up to the others, nor did she leave their 
 shelter till they were in sight of the little Shanmoor inn, where 
 they were to have tea. The pony carriage was already standing 
 in front of the inn, and Mrs. Thornburgh's gray curls shaking 
 at the window. 
 
 ' William !' she shouted, 'bring them in. Tea is just ready, 
 and Mr. Ruskin was here last week, and there are ever so many 
 new names in the visitors' book ! ' 
 
 While the girls went in Elsmere stood looking a moment at 
 the inn, the bridge, and the village. It was a characteristic 
 Westmoreland scene. The low whitewashed inn, with its 
 newly painted signboard, was to his right, the pony at the door 
 lazily flicking off the flies and dropping its greedy nose in search 
 of the grains of corn among the cobbles ; to his left a gray stone 
 bridge over a broad light-filled river ; beyond, a little huddled 
 village backed by and apparently built out of the great slate 
 quarry which represented the only industry of the neighbour- 
 hood, and a tiny towered church the scene on the Sabbath of 
 Mr. Mayhew's ministrations. Beyond the village, shoulders of 
 purple fell, and behind the inn masses of broken crag rising at 
 the very head of the valley into a fine pike, along whose jagged 
 edges the rain -clouds were trailing. There was a little lurid 
 storm-light on the river, but, in general, the colour was all dark 
 and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and purple back- 
 ground. He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily, 
 trying to fix it there for ever. 
 
 Presently he was called in by the vicar, and found a tempting 
 tea spread in a light upper room, where Agnes and Rose were 
 already making fun of the chromo-lithographs and rummaging 
 the visitors' book. The scrambling, chattering meal passed like 
 a flash. At the beginning of it Mrs. Thornburgli's small gray 
 eyes had travelled restlessly from face to face, as though to say, 
 'What no news yet? Nothing happened?' As for Elsmere, 
 though it seemed to him at the time one of the brightest 
 moments of existence, he remembered little afterwards but the 
 scene : the peculiar clean mustiness of the room only just 
 opened for the summer season, a print of the Princess of Wales 
 on the wall opposite him, a stuffed fox over the mantelpiece, 
 Rose's golden, head and heavy amber'necklace, and the figure at 
 the vicar's right, in a gown of a little dark blue check, the broad 
 hat shading the white brow and luminous eyes. 
 
 When tea was over they lounged out on the bridge. There 
 was to be no long lingering, however. The clouds were deepen- 
 ing, the rain could not be far off. But if they started soon they 
 could probably reach home before it came down. Elsmere and 
 Rose hung over the gray stone parapet, mottled with the green
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 93 
 
 and gold of innumerable mosses, and looked down through a 
 fringe of English maidenhair growing along the coping, into the 
 clear eddies of the stream. Suddenly he raised himself on one 
 elbow, and, shading his eyes, looked to where the vicar and 
 Catherine were standing in front of the inn, touched for an 
 instant by a beam of fitful light slipping between two great 
 rain-clouds. 
 
 ' How well that hat and dress become your sister ! ' he said, 
 the words breaking, as it were, from his lips. 
 
 ' Do you think Catherine pretty ? ' said Rose with an excellent 
 pretence of innocence, detaching a little pebble and flinging it 
 harmlessly at a water- wagtail balancing on a stone below. 
 
 He flushed. * Pretty ! You might as well apply the word to 
 your mountains, to the exquisite river, to that great purple 
 peak !' 
 
 ' Yes,' thought Rose, ' she is not unlike that high cold peak ! ' 
 But her girlish sympathy conquered her ; it was very exciting, 
 and she liked Elsmere. She turned back to him, her face 
 overspread with a quite irrepressible smile. He reddened still 
 more, then they stared into each other's eyes, and without a 
 word more understood each other perfectly. 
 
 Rose held out her hand to him with a little brusque bon 
 camarade gesture. He pressed it warmly in his. 
 
 ' That was nice of you ! ' he cried. ' Very nice of you ! 
 Friends then ? ' 
 
 She nodded, and drew her hand away just as Agnes and the 
 vicar disturbed them. 
 
 Meanwhile Catherine was standing by the side of the pony 
 carriage, watching Mrs. Thornburgh's preparations. 
 
 ' You're sure you don't mind driving home alone ? ' she said 
 in a troubled voice. ' Mayn't I go with you ? ' 
 
 ' My dear, certainly not ! As if I wasn't accustomed to going 
 about alone at my time of life ! No, no, my dear, you go and 
 have your walk ; you'll get home before the rain. Ready, James.' 
 
 The old vicarage factotum could not imagine what made his 
 charge so anxious to be oft". She actually took the whip out of 
 his hand and gave a flick to the pony, who swerved and started 
 off in a way which would have made his mistress clamorously 
 nervous under any other circumstances. Catherine stood look- 
 ing after her. 
 
 ' Now, then, right about face and quick march ! ' exclaimed 
 the vicar. ' We've got to race that cloud over the Pike. It'll be 
 up with us in no time.' 
 
 Off they started, and were soon climbing the slippery green 
 slopes, or crushing through the fern of the fell they had de- 
 scended earlier in the afternoon. Catherine for some little way 
 walked last of the party, the vicar in front of her. Then 
 Elsmere picked a stonecrc-p, quarrelled over its precise name 
 with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very close and 
 familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.
 
 94 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower 
 carefully into his pocket-book ; ' but it is worth while to be 
 crushed by any one who can give so much ground for their 
 knowledge. How you do know your mountains from their 
 peasants to their plants ! ' 
 
 'I have had more than ten able-bodied years living and 
 scrambling among them,' she said, smiling. 
 
 ' Do you keep up all your visits and teaching in the winter ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, not so much, of course ! But people must be helped and 
 taught in the winter. And our winter is often not as hard as 
 yours down south.' 
 
 ' Do you go on with that night-school in Poll Ghyll, for in- 
 stance 1 ' he said, with another note in his voice!* 
 
 Catherine looked at him and coloured. 'Rose has been tell- 
 ing tales,' she said. ' I wish she would leave my proceedings 
 alone. Poll Ghyll is the family bone of contention at present. 
 Yes, I go on with it. I always take a lantern when the night is 
 dark, and I know every inch of the ground, and Bob is always 
 with me ; aren't you, Bob 1 ' 
 
 And she stooped down to pat the collie beside her. Bob 
 looked up at her, blinking with a proudly confidential air as 
 though to remind her that there were a good many such secrets 
 between them. 
 
 ' I like to fancy you with your lantern in the dark,' he cried, 
 the hidden emotion piercing through, 'the night wind blowing 
 about you, the black mountains to right and left of you, 
 some little stream, perhaps, running beside you for com- 
 pany, your dog guarding you, and all good angels going with 
 you.' 
 
 She flushed still more deeply ; the impetuous words affected 
 her strangely. 
 
 ' Don't fancy it at all,' she said, laughing. ' It is a very small 
 and very natural incident of one's life here. Look back, Mr. 
 Elsmere ; the rain has beaten us ! ' 
 
 He looked back and saw the great Pike over Shanmoor village 
 blotted out in a moving deluge of rain. The quarry opposite on 
 the mountain side gleamed green and vivid against the ink -black 
 fell ; some clothes hanging out in the field below the church 
 flapped wildly hither and thither in the sudden gale, the only 
 spot of white in the prevailing blackness ; children with their 
 petticoats over their heads ran homewards along the road the 
 walking party had just quitted ; the stream beneath, spreading 
 broadly through the fields, shivered and wrinkled under the 
 blast. Up it came, and the rain mists with it. In another 
 minute the storm was beating in their faces. 
 
 ' Caught ! ' cried Elsmere, in a voice almost of jubilation. 
 ' Let me help you into your cloak, Miss Leyburn.' 
 
 He flung it round her, and struggled into his own mackintosh. 
 The vicar in front of them turned and waved his hand to them 
 in laughing despair, then hurried after the others, evidently
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 95 
 
 with the view of performing for them the same office Elsmere 
 had just performed for Catherine. 
 
 Robert and his companion struggled on for a while in a 
 breathless silence against the deluge, which seemed to beat on 
 them from all sides. He walked behind her, sheltering her by 
 his tall form and his big umbrella as much as he could. His 
 pulses were all aglow with the joy of the storm. It seemed to 
 him that he rejoiced with the thirsty grass over which the rain 
 streams were running, that his heart filled with the shrunken 
 becks as the flood leapt along them. Let the elements thunder 
 and rave as they pleased. Could he not at a word bring the 
 light of that face, those eyes, upon him ? Was she not his for a 
 moment in the rain and the solitude, as she had never been in 
 the commonplace sunshine of their valley life ? 
 
 Suddenly he heard an exclamation, and saw her run on in 
 front of him. What was the matter ? Then he noticed for the 
 first time that Rose, far ahead, was still walking in her cotton 
 dress. The little scatterbrain had, of course, forgotten her cloak. 
 But, monstrous ! There was Catherine stripping off her own, 
 Rose refusing it. In vain. The sister's determined arms put it 
 round her. Rose is enwrapped, buttoned up before she knows 
 where she is, and Catherine falls back, pursued by some shaft 
 from Rose, more sarcastic than grateful, to judge by the tone of it. 
 
 ' Miss Ley burn, what have you been doing ? ' 
 
 ' Rose had forgotten her cloak,' she said briefly. ' She has a 
 very thin dress on, and she is the only one of us that takes cold 
 easily.' 
 
 ' You must take my mackintosh,' he said at once. 
 
 She laughed in his face. 
 
 ' As if I should do anything of the sort ! ' 
 
 ' You must,' he said, quietly stripping it off. ' Do you think 
 that you are always to be allowed to go through the world 
 taking thought of other people and allowing no one to take 
 thought for you ? ' 
 
 He held it out to her. 
 
 ' No, no ! This is absurd, Mr. Elsmere. You are not strong 
 yet. And I have often told you that nothing hurts me.' 
 
 He hung it deliberately over his arm. ' Very well, then, there 
 it stays ! ' 
 
 And they hurried on again, she biting her lip and on the 
 point of laughter. 
 
 ' Mr. Elsmere, be sensible ! ' she said presently, her look 
 changing to one of real distress. ' I should never forgive my- 
 self if you got a chill after your illness ! ' 
 
 ' You will not be called upon,' he said in the most matter-of- 
 fact tone. ' Men's coats are made to keep out weather,' and lie 
 pointed to his own, closely buttoned up. ' Your dress I can't 
 help being disrespectful under the circumstances will be wet 
 through in ten minutes.' 
 
 Another silence. Then he overtook her.
 
 96 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' Please, Miss Leyburn,' he said, stopping her. 
 
 There was an instant's mute contest between them. The rain 
 splashed on the umbrellas. She could not help it, she broke 
 down into the merriest, most musical laugh of a child that can 
 hardly stop itself, and he joined. 
 
 ' Mr. Elsmere, you are ridiculous ! ' 
 
 But she submitted. He put the mackintosh round her, 
 thinking, bold man, as she turned her rosy rain-dewed face to 
 him, of Wordsworth's ' Louisa,' and the poet's cry of longing. 
 
 And yet he was not so bold either. Even at this moment of 
 exhilaration he was conscious of a bar that checked and arrested. 
 Something what was it ? drew invisible lines of defence about 
 her. A sort of divine fear of her mingled with his rising passion. 
 Let him not risk too much too soon. 
 
 They walked on briskly, and were soon on the Whindale side 
 of the pass. To the left of them the great hollow of High Fell 
 unfolded, storm-beaten and dark, the river issuing from the 
 heart of it like an angry voice. 
 
 ' What a change ! ' he said, coming up with her as the path 
 widened. ' How impossible that it should have been only 
 yesterday afternoon I was lounging up here in the heat, by 
 the pool where the stream rises, watching the white butterflies 
 on the turf, and reading " Laodamia " ! ' 
 
 ' " Laodamia " ! ' she said, half sighing as she caught the name. 
 ' Is it one of those you like best ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' he said, bending forward that he might see her in spite 
 of the umbrella. ' How superb it is the roll, the majesty of 
 it ; the severe chastened beauty of the main feeling, the in- 
 dividual lines ! ' 
 
 And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences. 
 
 'It was my father's favourite of all, she said, in the low 
 vibrating voice of memory. ' He said the last verse to me the 
 day before he died.' 
 
 Kobert recalled it 
 
 ' Yet tears to human suffering are due, 
 And mortal hopes defeated and o'erthrown 
 Are mourned by man, and not by man alone 
 As fondly we believe. ' 
 
 Poor Richard Leyburn ! Yet where had the defeat lain ? 
 
 ' Was he happy in his school life 1 ' he asked gently. ' Was 
 teaching what he liked ? ' 
 
 ' Oh yes only ' Catherine paused and then added hurriedly, 
 as though drawn on in spite of herself by the grave sympathy of 
 his look, ' I never knew anybody so good who thought himself 
 of so little account. He always believed that he had missed 
 everything, wasted everything, and that anybody else would 
 have made infinitely more out of his life. He was always blam- 
 ing, scourging himself. And all the time he was the noblest, 
 purest, most devoted '
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 97 
 
 She stopped. Her voice had passed beyond her control. 
 Elsmere was startled by the feeling she showed. Evidently he 
 had touched one of the few sore places in this pure heart. It 
 was as though her memory of her father had in it elements of 
 almost intolerable pathos, as though the child's brooding love 
 and loyalty were in perpetual protest, even now after this lapse 
 of years, against the verdict which an over-scrupulous, despond- 
 ent soul had pronounced upon itself. Did she feel that he had 
 gone uncomforted out of life even by her even by religion ? 
 was that the sting 1 
 
 1 Oh, I can understand ! ' he said reverently ' I can under- 
 stand. I have come across it once or twice, that fierce self- 
 judgment of the good. It is the most stirring and humbling 
 thing in life.' Then his voice dropped. 'And after the last 
 conflict the last "quailing breath the last onslaughts of 
 doubt or fear think of the Vision waiting the Eternal 
 Comfort 
 
 ' " Oh, my only Light ! 
 It cannot be 
 That I am he 
 On whom Thy tempests fell all night ! " ' 
 
 The words fell from the softened voice like noble music. 
 
 There was a pause. Then Catherine raised her eyes to his. 
 They swam in tears, and yet the unspoken thanks in them were 
 radiance itself. It seemed to him as though she came closer to 
 him like a child to an elder who has soothed and satisfied an 
 inward smart. 
 
 They walked on in silence. They were just nearing the 
 swollen river which roared below them. On the opposite bank 
 two umbrellas were vanishing through the field gate into the 
 road, but the vicar had turned and was waiting for them. They 
 could see his becloaked figure leaning on his stick through the 
 light wreaths of mist that floated above the tumbling stream. 
 The abnormally heavy rain had ceased, but the clouds seemed to 
 be dragging along the very floor of the valley. 
 
 The stepping-stones came into sight. He leaped on the first 
 and held out his hand to her. When they started she would 
 have refused his help with scorn. Now, after a moment's hesita- 
 tion she yielded, and he felt her dear weight on him as he guided 
 her carefully from stone to stone. In reality it is both difficult 
 and risky to be helped over stepping-stones. You had much 
 better manage for yourself ; and naif way through Catherine 
 had a mind to tell him so. But the words died on her lips which 
 smiled instead. He could have wished that passage from stone 
 to stone could have lasted for ever. She was wrapped up gro- 
 tesquely in his mackintosh ; her hat was all bedraggled; her 
 gloves dripped in his ; and in spite of all he could have vowed 
 that anything so lovely as that delicately cut, gravely smiling 
 face, swaying above the rushing brown water, was never seen 
 in Westmoreland wilds before.
 
 98 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' It is clearing,' he cried, with ready optimism, as they reached 
 the bank. 'We shall get our picnic to-morrow after all we 
 must get it ! Promise me it shall be fine and you will be 
 there ! ' 
 
 The vicar was only fifty yards away waiting for them against 
 the field gate. But Robert held her eagerly, imperiously, and 
 it seemed to her, her head was still dizzy with the water. 
 ' Promise ! ' he repeated, his voice dropping. 
 She could not stop to think of the absurdity of promising for 
 Westmoreland weather. She could only say faintly ' Yes ! ' and 
 so release her hand. 
 
 ' You are pretty wet ! ' said the vicar, looking from one to 
 the other with a curiosity which Robert's quick sense divined 
 at once was directed to something else than the mere condition 
 of their garments. But Catherine noticed nothing ; she walked 
 on wrestling blindly with she knew not what till they reached 
 the vicarage gate. There stood Mrs. Thornburgh, the light 
 drizzle into which the rain had declined beating unheeded on 
 her curls and ample shoulders. She stared at Robert's drenched 
 condition, but he gave her no time to make remarks. 
 
 ' Don't take it off,' he said with a laughing wave of the hand 
 to Catherine ; ' I will come for it to-morrow morning.' 
 
 And he ran up the drive, conscious at last that it might be 
 prudent to get himself into something less spongelike than his 
 present attire as quickly as possible. 
 The vicar followed him. 
 
 'Don't keep Catherine, my dear. There's nothing to tell. 
 Nobody's the worse.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh took no heed. Opening the iron gate she 
 went through it on to the deserted rain-beaten road, laid both 
 her hands on Catherine's shoulders, and looked her straight in 
 the eyes. The vicar's anxious hint was useless. She could 
 contain herself no longer. She had watched them from the 
 vicarage come down the fell together, had seen them cross the 
 stepping stones, lingeringly, hand in hand. 
 
 ' My dear Catherine ! ' she cried, effusively kissing Catherine's 
 glowing cheek under the shelter of the laurustinus that made a 
 bower of the gate. ' My dear Catherine ! ' 
 
 Catherine gazed at her in astonishment. Mrs. Thornburgh's 
 eyes were all alive, and swarming with questions. If it had 
 been Rose she would have let them out in one fell flight. But 
 Catherine's personality kept her in awe. And after a second, 
 as the two stood together, a deep flush rose on Catherine's face, 
 and an expression of half -frightened apology dawned in Mrs. 
 Thornburgh's. 
 
 Catherine drew herself away. 'Will you please give Mr. 
 Elsmere his mackintosh ?' she said, taking it off; 'I shan't want 
 it this little way.' 
 
 And putting it on Mrs. Thornburgh's arm she turned away, 
 walking quickly round the bend of the road.
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 99 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh watched her open-mouthed, and moved 
 slowly back to the house in a state of complete collapse. 
 
 ' I always knew ' she said with a groan ' I always knew it 
 would never go right if it was Catherine ! Why was it Catherine ?' 
 
 And she went in, still hurling at Providence the same vin- 
 dictive query. 
 
 Meanwhile Catherine, hurrying home, the receding flush 
 leaving a sudden pallor behind it, was twisting her hands before 
 her in a kind of agony. 
 
 ' What have I been doing ? ' she said to herself. ' What have 
 I been doing ? ' 
 
 At the gate of Burwood something made her look up. She 
 saw the girls in their own room Agnes was standing behind, 
 Hose had evidently rushed forward to see Catherine come in, 
 and now retreated as suddenly when she saw her sister 
 look up. 
 
 Catherine understood it all in an instant. ' They, too, are on 
 the watch,' she thought to herself bitterly. The strong reticent 
 nature was outraged by the perception that she had been for 
 days the unconscious actor in a drama of which her sisters and 
 Mrs. Thornburgh had been the silent and intelligent spectators. 
 
 She came down presently from her room very white and 
 quiet, admitted that she was tired, and said nothing to anybody. 
 Agnes and Rose noticed the change at once, whispered to each 
 other when they found an opportunity, and foreboded ill. 
 
 After their tea-supper, Catherine, unperceived, slipped out 
 of the little lane gate, and climbed the stony path above the 
 house leading on to the fell. The rain had ceased, but the 
 clouds hung low and threatening, and the close air was 
 saturated with moisture. As she gained the bare fell, sounds of 
 water met her on all sides. The river cried hoarsely to her from 
 below, the becks in the little ghylls were full and thunderous ; 
 and beside her over the smooth grass slid many a new-born 
 rivulet, the child of the storm, and destined to vanish with the 
 night. Catherine's soul went out to welcome the gray damp of 
 the hills. She knew them best in this mood. They were thus 
 most her own. 
 
 She climbed on till at last she reached the crest of the ridge. 
 Behind her lay the valley, and on its further side the fells she 
 had crossed in the afternoon. Before her spread a long green 
 vale, compared to which Whindale with its white road, its 
 church, and parsonage, and scattered houses, was the great 
 world itself. Marrisdale had no road and not a single house. 
 As Catherine descended into it she saw not a sign of human 
 life. There were sheep grazing in the silence of the long June 
 twilight ; the blackish walls ran down and up again, dividing 
 the green hollow with melancholy uniformity. Here and there 
 was a sheepfold, suggesting the bleakness of winter nights- 
 and here and there a rough stone barn for storing fodder. Ana 
 beyond the vale, eastwards and northwards, Catherine looked
 
 100 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 out upon a wild _ sea of moors wrapped in mists, sullen and 
 storm-beaten, while to the left the clouds hung deepest and 
 inkiest over the high points of the Ullswater mountains. 
 
 When she was once below the pass, man and his world were 
 shut out. The girl figure in the blue cloak and hood was abso- 
 lutely alone. She descended till she reached a point where a 
 little stream had been turned into a stone trough for cattle. 
 Above it stood a gnarled and solitary thorn. Catherine sank 
 down on a rock at the foot of the tree. It was a seat she knew 
 well ; she had lingered there with her father ; she had thought 
 and prayed there as girl and woman ; she had wrestled there 
 often with despondency or grief, or some of those subtle spiritual 
 temptations which were all her pure youth had known, till the 
 inner light had dawned again, and the humble enraptured soul 
 could almost have traced amid the shadows of that dappled 
 moorland world ? between her and the clouds, the white stoles 
 and ' sleeping wings ' of ministering spirits. 
 
 But no wrestle had ever been so hard as this. And with what 
 fierce suddenness had it come upon her ! She looked back over 
 the day with bewilderment. She could see dimly that the 
 Catherine who had started on that Shanmoor walk had been 
 full of vague misgivings other than those concerned with a few 
 neglected duties. There had been an undefined sense of unrest, 
 of difference, of broken equilibrium. She had shown it in the 
 way in which at first she had tried to keep herself and Kobert 
 Elsmere apart. 
 
 And then ; beyond the departure from Shanmoor she seemed 
 to lose the thread of her own history. Memory was drowned in 
 a feeling to which the resisting soul as yet would give no name. 
 She laid her head on her knees trembling. She heard again the 
 sweet imperious tones with which he broke down her opposition 
 about the cloak ; she felt again the grasp of his steadying hand 
 on hers. 
 
 But it was only for a very few minutes that she drifted thus. 
 She raised her head again, scourging herself in shame and self- 
 reproach, recapturing the empire of the soul with a strong effort. 
 She set herself to a stern analysis of the whole situation. 
 Clearly Mrs. Thornburgh and her sisters had been aware for 
 some indefinite time that Mr. Elsmere had been showing a 
 peculiar interest in her. Their eyes had been open. She realised 
 now with hot cheeks how many meetings and tete-a-tetes had 
 been managed for her and Elsmere, and how complacently she 
 had fallen into Mrs. Thornburgh's snares. 
 
 ' Have I encouraged him ? ' she asked herself sternly. 
 
 ' Yes,' cried the smarting conscience. 
 
 ' Can I marry him ? ' 
 
 ' No,' said conscience again ; ' not without deserting your post, 
 not without betraying your trust.' 
 
 What post ? What trust ? Ah, conscience was ready enough 
 with the answer. Was it not just ten years since, as a girl of
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 101 
 
 sixteen, prematurely old and thoughtful, she had sat beside her 
 father's deathbed, while her delicate hysterical mother, in a state 
 of utter collapse, was kept away from him by the doctors 1 She 
 could see the drawn face, the restless melancholy eyes. ' Cath- 
 erine, my darling, you are the strong one. They will look to 
 you. Support them.' And she could see in imagination her 
 own young face pressed against the pillows. 'Yes, father, 
 always always ! ' ' Catherine, life is harder, the narrow way 
 narrower than ever. I die' and memory caught still the 
 piteous, long-drawn breath by which the voice was broken ' in 
 much much perplexity about many things. You have a clear 
 soul, an iron will. Strengthen the others. Bring them safe to 
 the day of account.' ' Yes, father, with God's help. Oh, with 
 God's help!' 
 
 That long-past dialogue is clear and sharp to her now, as 
 though it were spoken afresh in her ears. And how has she 
 kept her pledge ? She looks back humbly on her life of incessant 
 devotion, on the tie of long dependence which has bound to her 
 her weak and widowed mother, on her relations to her sisters, 
 the efforts she has made to train them in the spirit of her father's 
 life and beliefs. 
 
 Have those efforts reached their term 1 Can it be said in any 
 sense that her work is done, her promise kept ? 
 
 Oh, no no ! she cries to herself with vehemence. Her 
 mother depends on her every day and hour for protection, com- 
 fort, enjoyment. The girls are at the opening of life, Agnes 
 twenty, llose eighteen, with all experience to come. And 
 Rose - Ah ! at the thought of Rose, Catherine's heart sinks 
 deeper and deeper she feels a culprit before her father's 
 memory. What is it has gone so desperately wrong with her 
 training of the child ! Surely she has given love enough, 
 anxious thought enough, and here is Rose only fighting to be 
 free from the yoke of her father's wishes, from the galling 
 pressure of the family tradition ! 
 
 No. Her task has just now reached its most difficult, its 
 most critical, moment. How can she leave it ? Impossible. 
 
 What claim can she put against these supreme claims of her 
 promise, her mother's and sisters' need ? 
 
 His claim ? Oh, no no ! She admits with soreness and 
 humiliation unspeakable that she has done him wrong. If he 
 loves her she has opened the way thereto ; she confesses in her 
 scrupulous honesty that when the inevitable withdrawal comes 
 she will have given him cause to think of her hardly, slightingly. 
 She flinches painfully under the thought. But it does not alter 
 the matter. This girl, brought up in the austerest school of 
 Christian self-government, knows nothing of the divine rights 
 of passion. Half modern literature is based upon them. Cath- 
 erine Leyburn knew of no supreme right but the right of God 
 to the obedience of man. 
 
 Oh, and besides besides it is impossible that he should care
 
 102 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 so very much. The time is so short there is so little in her, 
 comparatively, to attract a man of such resource, such attain- 
 ments, such access to the best things of life. 
 
 She cannot in a kind of terror she will not, believe in her 
 own love -worthiness, in her own power to deal a lasting 
 wound. 
 
 Then her own claim ? Has she any claim, has the poor bound- 
 ing heart that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all 
 this strenuous debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy 1 
 
 She locks her hands round her knees, conscious, poor soul, 
 that the worst struggle is here, the quickest agony here. But 
 she does not waver for an instant. And her weapons are all 
 ready. The inmost, soul of her is a fortress well stored, whence 
 at any moment the mere personal craving of the natural man 
 can be met, repulsed, slain. 
 
 ' Man approacheth so much the nearer unto God the farther he 
 departeth from all earthly comfort.' 
 
 ' If thou couldst perfectly annihilate thyself and empty thyselj 
 of all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee 
 ^o^th greater abundance of grace.' 
 
 ' When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is 
 withdrawn from thee.' 
 
 1 Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy 
 Creator. . . .' 
 
 She presses the sentence she has so often meditated in her 
 long solitary walks about the mountains into her heart. And 
 one fragment of George Herbert especially rings in her ears, 
 solemnly, funereally 
 
 1 Thy Saviour sentenced joy ! ' 
 
 Ay, sentenced it for ever the personal craving, the selfish 
 need, that must be filled at any cost. In the silence of the 
 descending night Catherine quietly, with tears, carried out that 
 sentence, and slew her young new-born joy at the feet of the 
 Master. 
 
 She stayed where she was for a while after this crisis in a 
 kind of bewilderment and stupor, but maintaining a perfect 
 outward tranquillity. Then there was a curious little epilogue. 
 
 'It is all over,' she said to herself tenderly. 'But he has 
 taught me so much he has been so good to me he is so good ! 
 Let me take to my heart some counsel some word of his, and 
 obey it sacredly silently for these days' sake.' 
 
 Then she fell thinking again, and she remembered their talk 
 about Hose. How often she had pondered it since ! In this 
 intense trance of feeling it breaks upon her finally that he is 
 right. May it not be that he with his clearer thought, his 
 wider knowledge of life, has laid his finger on the weak point 
 in her guardianship of her sisters ? ' I have tried to stifle her 
 passion,' she thought, ' to push it out of the way as a hindrance. 
 Ought I not rather to have taught her to make of it a step in
 
 CHAP, vii WESTMORELAND 103 
 
 the ladder to have moved her to bring her gifts to the altar 1 
 Oh, let me take his word for it be ruled by him in this one 
 thing, once ! ' 
 
 She bowed her face on her knees again. It seemed to her 
 that she had thrown herself at Elsmere's feet, that her cheek 
 was pressed against that young brown hand of his. How long 
 the moment lasted she never knew. When at last she rose stiff 
 and weary, darkness was overtaking even the lingering northern 
 twilight. The angry clouds had dropped lower on the moors ; 
 a few sheep beside the glimmering stone trough showed dimly 
 white ; the night wind was sighing through the untenanted 
 valley and the scanty branches of the thorn. White mists lay 
 along the hollow of the dale ; they moved weirdly under the 
 breeze. She could have fancied them a troop 01 wraiths to 
 whom she had flung her warm crushed heart, and who were 
 bearing it away to burial. 
 
 As she came slowly over the pass and down the Whindale 
 side of the fell a clear purpose was in her mind. Agnes had 
 talked to her only that morning of Rose and Rose's desire, and 
 she had received the news with her habitual silence. 
 
 The house was lit up when she returned. Her mother had 
 gone upstairs. Catherine went to her, but even Mrs. Leyburn 
 discovered that she looked worn out, and she was sent off to 
 bed. She went along the passage quickly to Rose's room, listen- 
 ing a moment at the door. Yes, Rose was inside, crooning some 
 German song, and apparently alone. She knocked and went in. 
 
 Rose was sitting on the edge of her bed, a white dressing- 
 gown over her shoulders, her hair in a glorious confusion all 
 about her. She was swaying backwards and forwards dreamily 
 singing, and she started up when she saw Catherine. 
 
 ' Roschen,' said the elder sister, going up to her with a tremor 
 of heart, and putting her motherly arms round the curly golden 
 hair and the half -covered shoulders, ' you never told me of that 
 letter from Manchester, but Agnes did. Did you think, 
 Roschen, I would never let you have your way ? Oh, I am not 
 so hard ! I may have been wrong I think I have been wrong 
 you shall do what you will, Roschen. If you want to go, I will 
 ask mother.' 
 
 Rose, pushing herself away with one hand, stood staring. 
 She was struck dumb by this sudden breaking down of 
 Catherine's long resistance. And what a strange white Cath- 
 erine ! What did it mean ? Catherine withdrew her arms with 
 a little sigh and moved away. 
 
 ' I just came to tell you that, Roschen,' she said, ' but I am 
 very tired and must not stay.' 
 
 Catherine ' very tired ' ! Rose thought the skies must be 
 falling. 
 
 ' Cathie ! ' she cried, leaping forward just as her sister gained 
 the door. 'Oh, Cathie, you are an angel, and I am a nasty, 
 odious little wretch. But oh, tell me, what is the matter ? '
 
 104 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with 
 a passionate strength. 
 
 The elder sister struggled to release herself. 
 
 ' Let me go, Hose,' she said in a low voice. ' Oh, you must let 
 me go ! ' 
 
 And wrenching herself free, she drew her hand over her eyes 
 as though trying to drive away the mist from them. 
 
 ' Good-night ! Sleep well.' 
 
 And she disappeared, shutting the door noiselessly after her. 
 Rose stood staring a moment, and then swept off her feet by a 
 flood of many feelings remorse, love, fear, svmpathy threw 
 herself face downwards on her bed and burst into a passion of 
 tears. 
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 CATHERINE was much perplexed as to how she was to carry out 
 her resolution ; she pondered over it through much of the night. 
 She was painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand without 
 a scene, without a definite proposal and a definite rejection. It 
 was no use letting things drift. Something brusque and marked 
 there must be. She quietly made her dispositions. 
 
 It was long after the gray vaporous morning stole on the 
 hills before she fell lightly, restlessly asleep. To her healthful 
 youth a sleepless night was almost unknown. She wondered 
 through the long hours of it, whether now, like other women, 
 she had had her story, passed through her one supreme moment, 
 and she thought of one or two worthy old maids she knew in 
 the neighbourhood with a new and curious pity. Had any of 
 them, too, gone down into Marrisdale and come up widowed 
 indeed ? 
 
 All through, no doubt, there was a certain melancholy pride 
 in her own spiritual strength. 'It was not mine,' she would 
 have said with perfect sincerity, ' but God's.' Still, whatever its 
 source, it had been there at command, and the reflection carried 
 with it a sad sense of security. It was as though a soldier after 
 his first skirmish should congratulate himself on being bullet- 
 proof. 
 
 To be sure, there was an intense trouble and disquiet in the 
 thought that she and Mr. Elsmere must meet again, probably 
 many times. The period of his original invitation had been 
 warmly extended by the Thornburghs. She believed he meant 
 to stay another week or ten days in the valley. But in the 
 spiritual exaltation of the night she felt herself equal to any 
 conflict, any endurance, and she fell asleep, the hands clasped 
 on her breast expressing a kind of resolute patience, like those 
 of some old sepulchral monument. 
 
 The following morning Elsmere examined the clouds and the 
 barometer with abnormal interest. The day was sunless and
 
 CHAP, vni WESTMORELAND 105 
 
 lowering, but not raining, and he represented to Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh, with a hypocritical assumption of the practical man, 
 that with rugs and mackintoshes it was possible to picnic on 
 the dampest grass. But he could not make out the vicar's wife. 
 She was all sighs and flightiness. She ' supposed they could go,' 
 and ' didn't see what good it would do them ' ; she had twenty 
 different views, and all of them more or less mixed up with 
 pettishness, as to the best place for a picnic on a gray day ; and 
 at last she grew so difficult that Robert suspected something 
 desperately wrong with the household, and withdrew lest male 
 guests might be in the way. Then she pursued him into the 
 study and thrust a Spectator into his hands, begging him to 
 convey it to Burwood. She asked it lugubriously with many 
 sighs, her cap much askew. Robert could have kissed her, curls 
 and all, one moment for suggesting the errand, and the next 
 could almost have signed her committal to the county lunatic 
 asylum with a clear conscience. What an extraordinary person 
 it was ! 
 
 Off he went, however, with his Spectator under his arm, whist- 
 ling. Mrs. Thornburgh caught the sounds through an open 
 window, and tore the flannel across she was preparing for a 
 mothers' meeting with a noise like the rattle of musketry. 
 Whistling ! She would like to know what grounds he had for 
 it, indeed ! She always knew she always said, and she would 
 go on saying that Catherine Leyburn would die an old maid. 
 
 Meanwhile Robert had strolled across to Burwood with the 
 lightest heart. By way of keeping all his anticipations within 
 the bounds of strict reason, he told himself that it was impos- 
 sible he should see ' her ' in the morning. She was always busy 
 in the morning. 
 
 He approached the house as a Catholic might approach a 
 shrine. That was her window, that upper casement with the 
 little Banksia rose twining round it. One night, when he and 
 the vicar had been out late on the hills, he had seen a light 
 streaming from it across the valley, and had thought how the 
 mistress of the maiden solitude within shone 'in a naughty 
 world.' 
 
 In the drive he met Mrs. Leyburn, who was strolling about 
 the garden. She at once informed him with much languid 
 plaintiveness that Catherine had gone to Whinborough for the 
 day, and would not be able to join the picnic. 
 
 Elsmere stood still. 
 
 ' Gone ! ' he cried. ' But it was all arranged with her yester- 
 day ! ' Mrs. Leyburn shrugged her shoulders. She too was 
 evidently much put out. 
 
 ' So I told her. But you know, Mr. Elsmere ' and the gentle 
 widow dropped her voice as though communicating a secret 
 ' when Catherine's once made up her mind, you may as well try 
 to dig away High Fell as move her. She asked me to tell Mrs. 
 Thornburgh will you, please ? that she found it was her day
 
 106 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 for the orphan asylum, and one or two other pieces of business, 
 and she must go.' 
 
 ' Mrs. Thombtirgh ! ' And not a word for him for him to 
 whom she had given her promise? She had gone to Whin- 
 borough to avoid him, and she had gone in the brusquest way, 
 that it might be unmistakable. 
 
 The young man stood with his hands thrust into the pockets 
 of his long coat, hearing with half an ear the remarks that Mrs. 
 Leyburn was making to him about the picnic. Was the wretched 
 thing to come off after all 1 
 
 He was too proud and sore to suggest an alternative. But 
 Mrs. Thornburgh managed that for him. When he got back, 
 he told the vicar in the hall of Miss Leyburn's flight in the 
 fewest possible words, and then his long legs vanished up the 
 stairs in a twinkling, and the door of his room shut behind him. 
 A few minutes afterwards Mrs. Thornburgh's shrill voice was 
 heard in the hall calling to the servant. 
 
 ' Sarah, let the hamper alone. Take out the chickens.' 
 
 And a minute after the vicar came up to his door. 
 
 ' Elsmere, Mrs. Thornburgh thinks the day is too uncertain ; 
 better put it off.' 
 
 To which Elsmere from inside replied with a vigorous assent. 
 The vicar slowly descended to tackle his spouse, who seemed to 
 have established herself for the morning in his sanctum, though 
 the parish accounts were clamouring to be done, and this morn- 
 ing in the week belonged to them by immemorial usage. 
 
 But Mrs. Thornburgh was unmanageable. She sat opposite 
 to him with one hand on each knee, solemnly demanding of him 
 if he knew what was to be done with young women nowadays, 
 because she didn't. 
 
 The tormented vicar declined to be drawn into so illimitable a 
 subject, recommended patience, declared that it might be all a 
 mistake, and tried hard to absorb himself in the consideration 
 of 2s. 8d. plus 2s. lid. minus 9d. 
 
 ' And I suppose, William,' said his wife to him at last, with 
 withering sarcasm, ' that you'd sit by and see Catherine break 
 that young man's heart, and send him back to his mother no 
 better than he came here, in spite of all the beef -tea and jelly 
 Sarah and I have been putting into him, and never lift a finger. 
 You'd see his life Hasted and you'd do nothing nothing, I 
 suppose.' 
 
 And she fixed him with a fiercely interrogative eye. 
 
 ' Of course,' cried the vicar, roused ; ' I should think so. What 
 
 food did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair? 
 ake care of yourself, Emma. If the girl doesn't care for him, 
 you can't make her.' 
 
 The vicar's wife rose, the upturned corners of her mouth say- 
 ing unutterable things. 
 
 ' Doesn't care for him ! ' she echoed in a tone which implied 
 that her husband's headpiece was past praying for.
 
 CHAP, vin WESTMORELAND 107 
 
 ' Yes, doesn't care for him ! ' said the vicar, nettled. ' What 
 else should make her give him a snub like this 1 ' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation. 
 Then a curious expression stole into her eves. 
 
 ' Oh, the Lord only knows ! ' she said, with a hasty freedom of 
 speech which left the vicar feeling decidedly uncomfortable as 
 she shut the door after her. 
 
 However, if the Higher Powers alone knew, Mrs. Thornburgh 
 was convinced that she could make a very shrewd guess at the 
 causes of Catherine's behaviour. In her opinion it was all pure 
 ' cussedness.' Catherine Leyburn had always conducted her life 
 on principles entirely different from those of other people. Mrs. 
 Thornburgh wholly denied, as she sat bridling by herself, that 
 it was a Christian necessity to make yourself and other people 
 uncomfortable. Yet this was what this perverse young woman 
 was always doing. Here was a charming young man who had 
 fallen in love with her at first sight, and had done his best to 
 make the fact plain to her in the most chivalrous devoted ways. 
 Catherine encourages him, walks with him, talks with him, is 
 for a whole three weeks more gay and cheerful and more like 
 other girls than she has ever been known to be, and then, at 
 the end of it, just when everybody is breathlessly awaiting the 
 natural denouement, goes off to spend the day that should have 
 been the day of her betrothal in pottering about orphan asylums, 
 leaving everybody, but especially the poor young man, to look 
 ridiculous ! No, Mrs. Thornburgh had no patience with her 
 none at all. It was all because she would not be happy like 
 anybody else, but must needs set herself up to be peculiar. Why 
 not live on a pillar, and go into hair-shirts at once 1 Then the 
 rest of the world would know what to be at. 
 
 Meanwhile Rose was in no small excitement. While her 
 mother and Elsmere had been talking in the garden she had 
 been discreetly waiting in the back behind the angle of the 
 house, and when she saw Elsmere walk off she followed him 
 with eager sympathetic eyes. 
 
 ' Poor fellow ! ' she said to herself, but this time with the 
 little tone of patronage which a girl of eighteen, conscious of 
 graces and good looks, never shrinks from assuming towards an 
 elder male, especially a male in love with some one else. 'I 
 wonder whether he thinks he knows anything about Catherine.' 
 
 But her own feeling to-day was very soft and complex. 
 Yesterday it had been all hot rebellion. To-day it was all 
 remorse and wondering curiosity. What had brought Catherine 
 into her room, with that white face, and that bewildering change 
 of policy ? What had made her do this brusque, discourteous 
 thing to-day 1 Rose, having been delayed by the loss of one of 
 her goloshes in a bog, had been once near her and Elsmere during 
 that dripping descent from Shanmoor. They had been so clearly 
 absorbed in one another that she had fled on guiltily to Agnes, 
 golosh in hand, without waiting to put it on ; confident, how-
 
 108 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ever, that neither Elsmere nor Catherine had been aware of her 
 little adventure. And at the Shanmoor tea Catherine herself 
 had discussed the picnic, offering, in fact, to guide the party to 
 a particular ghyll in High Fell, better known to her than any 
 one else. 
 
 ' Oh, of course it's our salvation in this world and the next 
 that's in the way,' thought Rose, sitting crouched up in a grassy 
 nook in the garden, her shoulders up to her ears, her chin in her 
 hands. ' I wish to goodness Catherine wouldn't think so much 
 about mine, at any rate. I hate,' added this incorrigible young 
 person 'I hate being the third part of a "moral obstacle" against 
 my will. I declare I don't believe we should any of us go to 
 perdition even if Catherine did marry. And what a wretch I 
 am to think so after last night ! Oh dear, I wish she'd let me 
 do something for her ; I wish she'd ask me to black her boots 
 for her, or put in her tuckers, or tidy her drawers for her, or 
 anything worse still, and I'd do it and welcome ! ' 
 
 It was getting uncomfortably serious all round, Rose admitted. 
 But there was one element of comedy besides Mrs. Thornburgh, 
 and that was Mrs. Leyburn's unconsciousness. 
 
 ' Mamma is too good,' thought the girl, with a little ripple of 
 laughter. ' She takes it as a matter of course that all the world 
 should admire us, and she'd scorn to believe that anybody did 
 it from interested motives.' 
 
 Which was perfectly true. Mrs. Leyburn was too devoted 
 to her daughters to feel any fidgety interest in their marrying. 
 Of course the most eligible persons would be only too thankful 
 to marry them when the moment came. Meanwhile her devo- 
 tion was in no need of the confirming testimony of lovers. It 
 was sufficient in itself, and kept her mind gently occupied from 
 morning till night. If it had occurred to her to notice that 
 Robert Elsmere had been paying special attentions to any one 
 in the family, she would have suggested with perfect naivete 
 that it was herself. For he had been to her the very pink of 
 courtesy and consideration, and she was of opinion that ' poor 
 Richard's views ' of the degeneracy of Oxford men would have 
 been modified could he have seen this particular specimen. 
 
 Later on in the morning Rose had been out giving Bob a run, 
 while Agnes drove with her mother. On the way home she 
 overtook Elsmere returning from an errand for the vicar. 
 
 ' It is not so bad,' she said to him, laughing, pointing to the 
 sky ; ' we really might have gone.' 
 
 ' Oh, it would have been cheerless,' he said simply. His look 
 of depression amazed her. She felt a quick movement of sym- 
 pathy, a wild wish to bid him cheer up and fight it out. If she 
 could just have shown him Catherine as she looked last night ! 
 Why couldn't she talk it out with him 1 Absurd conventions ! 
 She had half a mind to try. 
 
 But the grave look of the man beside her deterred even her 
 young half -childish audacity.
 
 ( HM-. via WESTMORELAND 109 
 
 ' Catherine will have a good day for all her business,' she said 
 carelessly. 
 
 He assented quietly. Oh, after that hand-shake on the bridge 
 yesterday she could not stand it, she must give him a hint 
 how the land lay. 
 
 'I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen. 
 Mr. Elsmere, what did you think of Aunt Ellen ? ' 
 
 Elsmere started, and could not help smiling into the young 
 girl's beautiful eyes, which were radiant with fun. 
 
 ' A most estimable person,' he said. ' Are you on good terms 
 with her, Miss Hose ? ' 
 
 ' Oh dear, no ! ' she said, with a little face. ' I'm not a Ley- 
 burn ; I wear aesthetic dresses, and Aunt Ellen has " special 
 leadings of the spirit" to the effect that the violin is a soul- 
 destroying instrument. Oh dear ! ' and the girl's mouth 
 twisted ' it's alarming to think, if Catherine hadn't been 
 Catherine, how like Aunt Ellen she might have been ! ' 
 
 She flashed a mischievous look at him, and thrilled as she 
 caught the sudden change of expression in his face. 
 
 ' Your sister has the Westmoreland strength in her one can 
 see that,' he said, evidently speaking with some difficulty. 
 
 ' Strength ! Oh yes. Catherine has plenty of strength,' cried 
 Rose, and then was silent a moment 'You know, Mr. Elsmere,' 
 she went on at last, obeying some inward impulse ' or perhaps 
 you don't know that, at home, we are all Catherine's creatures. 
 She does exactly what she likes with us. When my father died 
 she was sixteen, Agnes was ten, I was eight. We came here to 
 live we were not very rich of course, and mamma wasn't strong. 
 Well, she did everything : she taught us we have scarcely had 
 any teacher but her since then ; she did most of the housekeep- 
 ing ; and you can see for yourself what she does for the neigh- 
 bours and poor folk. She is never ill, she is never idle, she 
 always knows her own mind. We owe everything we are, 
 almost everything we have, to her. Her nursing has kept 
 mamma alive through one or two illnesses. Our lawyer says 
 he never knew any business affairs better managed than ours, 
 and Catherine manages them. The one thing she never takes 
 any care or thought for is herself. What we should do without 
 her I can't imagine ; and yet sometimes I think if it goes on 
 much longer none of us three will have any character of out- 
 own left. After all, you know, it may be good for the weak 
 people to struggle on their own feet, if the strong would only 
 believe it, instead of always being carried. The strong people 
 needn't be always trampling on themselves, if they only 
 knew ' 
 
 She stopped abruptly, flushing scarlet over her own daring. 
 Her eyes were feverishly bright, and her voice vibrated under 
 a strange mixture of feelings sympathy, reverence, and a 
 passionate inner admiration struggling with rebellion and 
 protest.
 
 110 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 They had reached the gate of the vicarage. Elsmere stopped 
 and looked at his companion with a singular lightening of ex- 
 pression. He saw perfectly that the young impetuous creature 
 understood him, that she felt his cause was not prospering, and 
 that she wanted to help him. He saw that what she meant by 
 this picture of their common life was that no one need expect 
 Catherine Leyburn to be an easy prey; that she wanted to 
 impress on him in her eager way that such lives as her sister's 
 were not to be gathered at a touch, without difficulty, from the 
 branch that bears them. She was exhorting him to courage, 
 nay, he caught more than exhortation a sort of secret message 
 from her bright excited looks and incoherent speech that made 
 his heart leap. But pride and delicacy forbade him to put his 
 feeling into words. 
 
 ' You don't hope to persuade me that your sister reckons you 
 among the weak persons of the world ? ' he said, laughing, his 
 hand on the gate. Rose could have blessed him for thus turning 
 the conversation. What on earth could she have said next '{ 
 
 She stood bantering a little longer, and then ran off with Bob. 
 
 Elsmere passed the rest of the morning wandering medi- 
 tatively over the cloudy fells. After all he was only where he 
 was, before the blessed madness, the upflooding hope, nay, 
 almost certainty, of yesterday. His attack had been for the 
 moment repulsed. He gathered from Rose's manner that Cath- 
 erine's action with regard to the picnic had not been unmeaning 
 nor accidental, as on second thoughts he had been half-trying 
 to persuade himself. Evidently those about her felt it to be 
 ominous. Well, then, at worst, when they met they would 
 meet on a different footing, with a sense of something critical 
 between them. Oh, if he did but know a little more clearly 
 how he stood ! He spent a noonday hour on a gray rock on 
 the side of the fell between Whindale and Marrisdale, studying 
 the path opposite, the stepping-stones, the bit of white road. 
 The minutes passed in a kind of trance of memory. Oh, that 
 soft child -like movement to him, after his speech about her 
 father ! that heavenly yielding and self-forgetfulness which 
 shone in her every look and movement as she stood balancing 
 on the stepping-stones ! If after all she should prove cruel to 
 him, would he not have a legitimate grievance, a heavy charge 
 to fling against her maiden gentleness ? He trampled on the 
 notion. Let her do with him as she would, she would be his 
 saint always, unquestioned, unarraigned. 
 
 But with such a memory in his mind it was impossible that 
 any man, least of all a man of Elsmere's temperament, could be 
 very hopeless. Oh yes, he had been rash, foolhardy. Do such 
 divine creatures stoop to mortal men as easily as he had dreamt ? 
 He recognises all the difficulties, he enters into the force of all 
 the ties that bind her or imagines that he does. But he is a 
 man and her lover ; and if she loves him, in the end love will 
 conquer must conquer. For his more modern sense, deeply
 
 CHAP, via WESTMORELAND 111 
 
 Christianised as it is, assumes almost without argument the 
 sacredness of passion and its claim wherein a vast difference 
 between himself and that solitary wrestler in Marrisdale. 
 
 Meanwhile he kept all his hopes and fears to himself. Mrs. 
 Thornburgh was dying to talk to him ; but though his mobile, 
 boyish temperament made it impossible for him to disguise his 
 change of mood, there was in him a certain natural dignity 
 which life greatly developed, but which made it always possible 
 for him to hold his own against curiosity and indiscretion. Mrs. 
 Thornburgh had to hold her peace. As for the vicar, he de- 
 veloped what were for him a surprising number of new topics of 
 conversation, and in the late afternoon took Elsmere a run up 
 the fells to the nearest fragment of the Eoman road which runs, 
 with such magnificent disregard of the humours of Mother 
 Earth, over the very top of High Street towards Penrith and 
 Carlisle. 
 
 Next day it looked as though after many waverings the char- 
 acteristic Westmoreland weather had descended upon them in 
 good earnest. From early morn till late evening the valley was 
 wrapped in damp clouds or moving rain, which swept down 
 from the west through the great basin of the hills, and rolled 
 along the course of the river, wrapping trees and fells and 
 houses in the same misty cheerless drizzle. Under the outward 
 pall of rain, indeed, the valley was renewing its summer youth ; 
 the river was swelling with an impetuous music through all its 
 dwindled channels ; the crags flung out white waterfalls again, 
 which the heat had almost dried away ; and by noon the whole 
 green hollow was vocal with the sounds of water water flashing 
 and foaming in the river, water leaping downwards from the 
 rocks, water dripping steadily from the larches and sycamores 
 and the slate-eaves 01 the houses. 
 
 Elsmere sat indoors reading up the history of the parish 
 system of Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner 
 of the study, where he and the vicar protected each other 
 against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good woman would open the 
 door once and again in the morning, and put her head through 
 in search of prey ; but on being confronted with two studious 
 men instead of one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she 
 would give vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. 
 In reality Elsmere was thinking of nothing in the world but 
 what Catherine Ley burn might be doing that morning. Judg- 
 ing a North countrywoman by the pusillanimous Southern 
 standard, he found himself glorying in the weather. She could 
 not wander far from him to-day. 
 
 After the early dinner he escaped, just as the vicar's wife 
 was devising an excuse on which to convey both him and her- 
 self to Burwood, and sallied forth with a mackintosh for a rush 
 down the Whinborough road. It was still raining, but the 
 clouds showed a momentary lightening, and a few gleams of 
 watery sunshine brought out every now and then that sparkle
 
 112 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 on the trees, that iridescent beauty of distance and atmosphere 
 which goes so far to make a sensitive spectator forget the petu- 
 lant abundance of mountain rain. Elsmere passed Burwood 
 with a thrill. Should he or should he not present himself 1 
 Let him push on a bit and think. So on he swung, measuring 
 his tall frame against the gusts, spirits and masculine energy 
 rising higher with every step. At last the passion of his mood 
 had wrestled itself out with the weather, and he turned back 
 once more determined to seek and find her, to face his fortunes 
 like a man. The warm rain beating from the west struck on 
 his uplifted face. He welcomed it as a friend. Rain and storm 
 had opened to him the gates of a spiritual citadel. What could 
 ever wholly close it against him any more ? He felt so strong, 
 so confident ! Patience and courage ! 
 
 Before him the great hollow of High Fell was just coming 
 out from the white mists surging round it. A shaft of sunlight 
 lay across its upper end, and he caught a marvellous apparition 
 of a sunlit valley hung in air, a pale strip of blue above it, a 
 white thread of stream wavering through it, and all around it 
 and below it the rolling rain-clouds. 
 
 Suddenly between him and that enchanter's vision he saw a 
 dark slim figure against the mists, walking before him along 
 the road. It was Catherine Catherine just emerged from a 
 footpath across the fields, battling with wind and rain, and 
 quite unconscious of any spectator. Oh, what a sudden thrill 
 was that ! what a leaping together of joy and dread, which sent 
 the blood to his heart ! Alone they two alone again in the 
 wild Westmoreland mists, and half a mile at least of winding 
 road between them and Burwood. He flew after her, dreading, 
 and yet longing for the moment when he should meet her eyes. 
 Fortune had suddenly given this hour into his hands ; he felt it 
 open upon him like that mystic valley in the clouds. 
 
 Catherine heard the hurrying steps behind her and turned. 
 There was an evident start when she caught sight of her pur- 
 suer a quick change of expression. She wore a close-fitting 
 waterproof dress and cap. Her hair was lightly loosened, her 
 cheek freshened by the storm. He came up with her ; he took 
 her hand, his eyes dancing with the joy he could not hide. 
 
 ' What are you made of, I wonder ! ' he said gaily. ' Nothing, 
 certainly, that minds weather.' 
 
 ' No Westmoreland native thinks of staying at home for this,' 
 she said with her quiet smile, moving on beside him as she 
 spoke. 
 
 He looked down upon her with an indescribable mixture of 
 feelings. No stiffness, no coldness in her manner only the 
 even gentleness which always marked her out from others. He 
 felt as though yesterday were blotted out, and would not for 
 worlds have recalled it to her or reproached her with it. Let it 
 be as though they were but carrying on the scene of the stepping- 
 stones.
 
 CHAP, vin WESTMORELAND 113 
 
 ' Look,' he said, pointing to the west ; ' have you been watch- 
 ing that magical break in the clouds ? ' 
 
 Her eyes followed his to the delicate picture hung high 
 among the moving mists. 
 
 'Ah,' she exclaimed, her face kindling, 'that is one of our 
 loveliest effects, and one of the rarest. You are lucky to have 
 seen it.' 
 
 'I am conceited enough,' he said joyously, Ho feel as if some 
 enchanter were at work up there drawing pictures on the mists 
 for my special benefit. How welcome the rain is ! As I am 
 afraid you have heard me say before, what new charm it gives 
 to your valley ! ' 
 
 There was something in the buoyancy and force of his 
 mood that seemed to make Catherine shrink into herself. She 
 would not pursue the subject of Westmoreland. She asked 
 with a little stiffness whether he had good news from Mrs. 
 Elsmere. 
 
 ' Oh, yes. As usual, she is doing everything for me,' he said, 
 smiling. ' It is disgraceful that I should be idling here while 
 she is struggling with carpenters and paperers, and puzzling 
 out the decorations of the drawing-room. She writes to me in 
 a fury about the word " artistic." She declares even the little 
 upholsterer at Churton hurls it at her every other minute, and 
 that if it weren't for me she would select everything as frankly, 
 primevally hideous as she could find, just to spite him. As it is, 
 he has so warped her judgment that she has left the sitting-room 
 papers till I arrive. For the drawing-room she avows a passion- 
 ate preference for one all cabbage-roses and no stalks ; but she 
 admits that it may be exasperation. She wants your sister, 
 clearly, to advise her. By the way,' and his voice changed, ' the 
 vicar told me last night that Miss Rose is going to- Manchester 
 for the winter to study. He heard it from Miss Agnes, I think. 
 The news interested me greatly after our conversation.' 
 
 He looked at her with the most winning interrogative eyes. 
 His whole manner implied that everything which touched and 
 concerned her touched and concerned him ; and, moreover, that 
 she had given him in some sort a right to share her thoughts 
 and difficulties. Catherine struggled with herself. 
 
 ' I trust it may answer,' she said in a low voice. 
 
 But she would say no more, and he felt rebuffed. His buoy- 
 ancy began to desert him. 
 
 'It must be a great trial to Mrs. Elsmere,' she said presently 
 with an effort, once more steering away from herself and her 
 concerns, ' this going back to her old home.' 
 
 ' It is. My father's long struggle for life in that house is a 
 very painful memory. I wished her to put it off till I could go 
 with her, but she declared she would rather get over the first 
 week or two by herself. How I should like you to know my 
 mother, Miss Leyburn ! ' 
 
 At this she could not help meeting his glance and smile,
 
 114 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 and answering them, though with a kind of constraint most 
 unlike her. 
 
 ' I hope I may some day see Mrs. Elsmere,' she said. 
 
 ' It is one of my strongest wishes,' he answered hurriedly, ' to 
 bring you together.' 
 
 The words were simple enough ; the tone was full of emotion. 
 He was fast losing control of himself. She felt it through 
 every nerve, and a sort of wild dread seized her of what he 
 might say next. Oh, she must, she must prevent it ! 
 
 ' Your mother was with you most of your Oxford life, was she 
 not ? ' she said, forcing herself to speak in her most everyday 
 tones. 
 
 He controlled himself with a mighty effort. 
 
 ' Since I became a Fellow. We have been alone in the world 
 so long. We have never been able to do without each other.' 
 
 'Isn't it wonderful to you?' said Catherine, after a little 
 electric pause and her voice was steadier and clearer than it 
 had been since the beginning of their conversation ' how little 
 the majority of sons and daughters regard their parents when 
 they come to grow up and want to live their own lives ? The 
 one thought seems to be to get rid of them, to throw off their 
 claims, to cut them adrift, to escape them decently, of course, 
 and under many pretexts, but still to escape them. All the 
 long years of devotion and self-sacrifice go for nothing.' 
 
 He looked at her quickly a troubled, questioning look. 
 
 'It is so, often but not, I think, where the parents have 
 truly understood their problem. The real difficulty for father 
 and mother is not childhood, but youth ; how to get over that 
 difficult time when the child passes into the man or woman, and 
 a relation of governor and governed should become the purest 
 and closest of friendships. You and I have been lucky.' 
 
 ' Yes,' she said, looking straight before her, and still speaking 
 with a distinctness which caught his ear painfully, ' and so are 
 the greater debtors ! There is no excuse, I think, for any child, 
 least of all for the child who has had years of understanding 
 love to look back upon, if it puts its own claim first ; if it insists 
 on satisfying itself, when there is age and weakness appealing 
 to it on the other side, when it is still urgently needed to help 
 those older, to shield those younger, than itself. Its business 
 first of all is to pay its debt, whatever the cost.' 
 
 The voice was low, but it had the clear vibrating ring of 
 steel. Robert's face had darkened visibly. 
 
 'But, surely,' he cried, goaded by a new stinging sense of 
 revolt and pain ' surely the child may make a fatal mistake if 
 it imagines that its own happiness counts for nothing in the 
 parents' eyes. What parent but must suffer from the starving 
 of the child's nature ? What have mother and father been work- 
 ing for, after all, but the perfecting of the child's life ? Their 
 longing is that it should fulfil itself in all directions. New ties, 
 new affections, on the child's part, mean the enriching of the
 
 CHAP, vnr WESTMORELAND 115 
 
 parent. What a cruel fate for the elder generation, to make it 
 the jailer and burden of the younger !' 
 
 He spoke with heat and anger, with a sense of dashing him- 
 self against an obstacle, and a dumb despairing certainty 
 rising at the heart of him. 
 
 ' Ah, that is what we are so ready to say,' she answered, her 
 breath coming more quickly, and her eye meeting his with a 
 kind of antagonism in it ; ' but it is all sophistry. The only 
 safety lies in following out the plain duty. The parent wants 
 the child's help and care, the child is bound to give it ; that is 
 all it needs to know. If it forms new ties, it belongs to them, 
 not to the old ones ; the old ones must come to be forgotten 
 and put aside.' 
 
 ' So you would make all life a sacrifice to the past ?' he cried, 
 quivering under the blow she was dealing him. 
 
 ' No, not all life,' she said, struggling hard to preserve her 
 perfect calm of manner : he could not know that she was 
 trembling from head to foot. ' There are many for whom it is 
 easy and right to choose their own way ; their happiness robs 
 no one. There are others on whom a charge has been laid from 
 their childhood, a charge perhaps ' and her voice faltered at 
 last 'impressed on them by dying lips, which must govern, 
 possess their lives ; which it would be baseness, treason, to 
 betray. We are not here only to be happy.' 
 
 And she turned to him deadly pale, the faintest, sweetest 
 smile on her lip. He was for the moment incapable of speech. 
 He began phrase after phrase, and broke them off. A whirl- 
 wind of feeling possessed him. The strangeness, the unworldli- 
 ness of what she had done struck him singularly. He realised 
 through every nerve that what she had just said to him she had 
 been bracing herself to say to him ever since their last parting. 
 And now he could not tell, or rather, blindly could not see, 
 whether she suffered in the saying it. A passionate protest 
 rose in him, not so much against her words as against her self- 
 control. The man in him rose up against the woman's un- 
 looked-for, unwelcome strength. 
 
 But as the hot words she had dared so much in her simplicity 
 to avert from them both were bursting from him, they were 
 checked by a sudden physical difficulty. A bit of road was 
 under water. A little beck, swollen by the rain, had overflowed, 
 and for a few yards' distance the water stood about eight inches 
 deep from hedge to hedge. Eobert had splashed through the 
 flood half an hour before, but it had risen rapidly since then. 
 He had to apply his mind to the practical task of finding a way 
 to the other side. 
 
 ' You must climb the bank,' he said, ' and get through into 
 the field.' 
 
 She assented mutely. He went first, drew her up the bank, 
 forced his way through the loosely growing hedge himself, and 
 holding back some young hazel saplings and breaking others,
 
 116 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 made an opening for her through which she scrambled with bent 
 head ; then, stretching out his hand to her, he made her submit 
 to be helped down the steep bank on the other side. Her 
 straight young figure was just above him, her breath almost on 
 his cheek. 
 
 'You talk of baseness and treason,' he began passionately, 
 conscious of a hundred wild impulses, as perforce she leant her 
 light weight upon his arm. 'Life is not so simple. It is so 
 easy to sacrifice others with one's self, to slay all claims in honour 
 of one, instead of knitting the new ones to the old. Is life to 
 be allowed no natural expansion 1 Have you forgotten that, in 
 refusing the new bond for the old bond's sake, the child may be 
 simply wronging the parents, depriving them of another affec- 
 tion, another support, which ought to have been theirs ?' 
 
 His tone was harsh, almost violent. It seemed to him that 
 she grew suddenly white, and he grasped her more firmly still. 
 She reached the level of the field, quickly withdrew her hand, 
 and for a moment their eyes met, her pale face raised to his. It 
 seemed an age, so much was said in that look. There was 
 appeal on her side, passion on his. Plainly she implored him to 
 say no more, to spare her and himself. 
 
 ' In some cases,' she said, and her voice sounded strained and 
 hoarse to both of them, ' one cannot risk the old bond. One 
 dare not trust one's self or circumstance. The responsibility is 
 too great ; one can but follow the beaten path, cling to the one 
 thread. But don't let us talk of it any more. We must make 
 for that gate, Mr. Elsmere. It will bring us out on the road 
 again close by home.' 
 
 He was quelled. Speech suddenly became impossible to him. 
 He was struck again with that sense of a will firmer and more 
 tenacious than his own, which had visited him in a slight 
 passing way on the first evening they ever met, and now filled 
 him with a kind of despair. As they pushed silently along the 
 edge of the dripping meadow, he noticed with a pang that the 
 stepping-stones lay just below them. The gleam of sun had 
 died away, the aerial valley in the clouds had vanished, and a 
 fresh storm of rain brought back the colour to Catherine's 
 cheek. On their left hand was the roaring of the river, on their 
 right they could already hear the wind moaning and tearing 
 through the trees which sheltered Burwood. The nature which 
 an hour ago had seemed to him so full of stimulus and exhilara- 
 tion had taken to itself a note of gloom and mourning ; for he 
 was at the age when Nature is the mere docile responsive mirror 
 of the spirit, when all her forces and powers are made for us, 
 and are only there to play chorus to our story. 
 
 They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. 
 She paused at the foot of it. 
 
 'You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere?' 
 
 Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. ' Your 
 pardon, your friendship,' it cried, with the usual futility of all
 
 CHAP, viii WESTMORELAND 117 
 
 good women under the circumstances. But as he met it for one 
 passionate instant, he recognised fully that there was not a 
 trace of yielding in it. At the bottom of the softness there was 
 the iron of resolution. 
 
 ' No, no ; not now,' he said involuntarily ; and she never for- 
 got the painful struggle of the face ; ' good-bye.' He touched 
 her hand without another word, and was gone. 
 
 She toiled up to the gate with difficulty, the gray rain- 
 washed road, the wall, the trees, swimming before her eyes. 
 
 In the hall she came across Agnes, who caught hold of her 
 with a start. 
 
 ' My dear Cathie ! you have been walking yourself to death. 
 You look like a ghost. Come and have some tea at once.' 
 
 And she dragged her into the drawing-room. Catherine 
 submitted with all her usual outward calm, faintly smiling at 
 her sister's onslaught. But she would not let Agnes put her 
 down on the sofa. She stood with her hand on the back of a 
 chair. 
 
 ' The weather is very close and exhausting,' she said, gently 
 lifting her hand to her hat. But the' hand dropped, and she 
 sank heavily into the chair. 
 
 ' Cathie, you are faint,' cried Agnes, running to her. 
 
 Catherine waved her away, and, with an effort of which none 
 but she would have been capable, mastered the physical weak- 
 ness. 
 
 ' I have been a long way, dear,' she said, as though in apology, 
 ' and there is no air. Yes, I will go upstairs and lie down a 
 minute or two. Oh no, don't come, I will be down for tea 
 directly.' 
 
 And refusing all help, she guided herself out of the room, 
 her face the colour of the foam on the beck outside. Agnes 
 stood dumfoundered. Never in her life before had she seen 
 Catherine betray any such signs of physical exhaustion. 
 
 Suddenly Rose ran in, shut the door carefully behind her, 
 and rushing up to Agnes put her hands on her shoulders. 
 
 ' He has proposed to her, and she has said no ! ' 
 
 ' He ? What, Mr. Elsmere ? How on earth can you know ? ' 
 
 ' I saw them from upstairs come to the bottom of the lane. 
 Then he rushed on, and I have just met her on the stairs. It's 
 as plain as the nose on your face.' 
 
 Agnes sat down bewildered. 
 
 ' It is hard on him,' she said at last. 
 
 ' Yes, it is very hard on him ! ' cried Rose, pacing the room, 
 her long thin arms clasped behind her, her eyes flashing, ' for 
 she loves him ! ' 
 
 'Rose!' 
 
 ' She does, my dear, she does,' cried the girl, frowning. ' I 
 know it in a hundred ways.' 
 
 Agnes ruminated. 
 
 ' And it's all because of us ? ' she said at last reflectively.
 
 118 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 ' Of course ! I put it to you, Agnes ' and Rose stood still 
 with a tragic air ' I put it to you, whether it isn't too bad that 
 three unoffending women should have such a r61e as this as- 
 signed them against their will ! ' 
 
 The eloquence of eighteen was irresistible. Agnes buried her 
 head in the sofa cushion, and shook with a kind of helpless 
 laughter. Rose meanwhile stood in the window, her thin form 
 drawn up to its full height, angry with Agnes, and enraged 
 with all the world. 
 
 ' It's absurd, it's insulting,' she exclaimed. ' I should imagine 
 that you and I, Agnes, were old enough and sane enough to 
 look after mamma, put out the stores, say our prayers, and 
 prevent each other from running away with adventurers ! I 
 won't be always in leading-strings. I won't acknowledge that 
 Catherine is bound to be an old maid to keep me in order. I 
 hate it ! It is sacrifice run mad.' 
 
 And Rose turned to her sister, the defiant head thrown back, 
 a passion of manifold protest in the girlish looks. 
 
 'It is very easy, my dear, to be judge in one's own case,' 
 replied Agnes calmly, recovering herself. 'Suppose you tell 
 Catherine some of these home truths ? ' 
 
 Rose collapsed at once. She sat down despondently, and 
 fell, head drooping, into a moody silence. Agnes watched her 
 with a kind of triumph. When it came to the point, she knew 
 perfectly well that there was not a will among them that could 
 measure itself with any chance of success against that lofty 
 but unwavering will of Catherine's. Rose was violent, and 
 there was much reason in her violence. But as for her, she pre- 
 ferred not to dash her head against stone walls. 
 
 ' Well, then, if you won't say them to Catherine, say them to 
 mamma,' she suggested presently, but half ironically. 
 
 ' Mamma is no good,' cried Rose angrily ; ' why do you bring 
 her in ? Catherine would talk her round in ten minutes.' 
 
 Long after every one else in Burwood, even the chafing, 
 excited Rose, was asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, 
 where the stormy north-west wind beat noisily against her 
 window, was sitting in a low chair, her head leaning against 
 her bed, her little well-worn Testament open on her knee. But 
 she was not reading. Her eyes were shut ; one hand hung 
 down beside her, and tears were raining fast and silently over 
 her cheeks. It was the stillest, most restrained weeping. She 
 hardly knew why she wept, she only knew that there was some- 
 thing within her which must have its way. What did this 
 inner smart and tumult mean, this rebellion of the self against 
 the will which had never yet found its mastery fail it ? It was 
 as though from her childhood till now she had lived in a moral 
 world whereof the aims, the dangers, the joys, were all she 
 knew ; and now the walls of this world were crumbling round 
 her, and strange lights, strange voices, strange colours were 
 breaking through. All the sayings of Christ which had lain
 
 CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 119 
 
 closest to her heart for years, to-night for the first time seem to 
 her no longer sayings of comfort or command, but sayings of 
 fire and flame that burn their coercing way through life and 
 thought. We recite so glibly, ' He that loseth his life shall save 
 it ; ' and when we come to any of the common crises of experi- 
 ence which are the source and the sanction of the words, flesh 
 and blood recoil. This girl amid her mountains had carried 
 religion as far as religion can be carried before it meets life in 
 the wrestle appointed it. The calm, simple outlines of things 
 are blurring before her eyes ; the great placid deeps of the soul 
 are breaking up. 
 
 To the purest ascetic temper a struggle of this kind is hardly 
 real. Catherine felt a bitter surprise at her own pain. Yester- 
 day a sort of mystical exaltation upheld her. What had broken 
 it down ? 
 
 Simply a pair of reproachful eves, a pale protesting face. 
 What trifles compared to the awful necessities of an infinite 
 obedience ! And yet they haunt her, till her heart aches for 
 misery, till she only yearns to be counselled, to be forgiven, to 
 be at least understood. 
 
 ' Why, why am I so weak 1 ' she cried in utter abasement of 
 soul, and knew not that in that weakness, or rather in the founts 
 of character from which it sprang, lay the innermost safeguard 
 of her life. 
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 ROBERT was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with 
 Catherine we have described. He spent a brooding and miser- 
 able hour in the vicar's study afterwards, making up his mind 
 as to what he should do. One phrase of hers which had passed 
 almost unnoticed in the shock of the moment was now ringing 
 in his ears, maddening him by a sense of joy just within his 
 reach, and yet barred away from him by an obstacle as strong 
 as it was intangible. -' We are not here only to be happy,' she 
 had said to him, with a look of ethereal exaltation worthy of 
 her namesake of Alexandria. The words had slipped from her 
 involuntarily in the spiritual tension of her mood. They were 
 now filling Robert Elsmere's mind with a tormenting, torturing 
 bliss. What could they mean? What had her paleness, her 
 evident trouble and weakness meant, but that the inmost self 
 of hers was his, was conquered : and that, but for the shadowy 
 obstacle between them, all would be well ? 
 
 As for the obstacle in itself, he did not admit its force for a 
 moment. No sane and practical man, least of all when that 
 man happened to be Catherine Leyburn's lover, could regard it 
 as a binding obligation upon her that she should sacrifice her 
 own life and happiness to three persons, who were in no evident 
 moral straits, no physical or pecuniary need, and who, as Rose
 
 120 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 incoherently put it, might very well be rather braced than in- 
 jured by the withdrawal of her strong support. 
 
 But the obstacle of character ah, there was a different 
 matter ! He realised with despair the brooding scrupulous 
 force of moral passion to which her lonely life, her antecedents, 
 and her father's nature working in her had given so rare and 
 marked a development. No temper in the world is so little 
 open to reason as the ascetic temper. How many a lover and 
 husband, how many a parent and friend, have realised to their 
 pain, since history began, the overwhelming attraction which 
 all the processes of self-annihilation have for a certain order of 
 minds ! Robert's heart sank before the memory of that frail 
 indomitable look, that aspect of sad yet immovable conviction 
 with which she had bade him farewell. And yet, surely surely 
 under the willingness of the spirit there had been a pitiful, a 
 most womanly weakness of the flesh. Surely, now memory re- 
 produced the scene, she had been white trembling : her hand 
 had rested on the moss-grown wall beside her for support. Oh, 
 why had he been so timid ? why had he let that awe of her, 
 which her personality produced so readily, stand between them ? 
 why had he not boldly caught her to himself, and, with all the 
 eloquence of a passionate nature, trampled on her scruples, 
 marched through her doubts, convinced reasoned her into a 
 blessed submission ? 
 
 'And I will do it yet !' he cried, leaping to his feet with a, 
 sudden access of hope and energy. And he stood awhile look- 
 ing out into the rainy evening, all the keen irregular face and 
 thin pliant form hardening into the intensity of resolve, which 
 had so often carried the young tutor through an Oxford diffi- 
 culty, breaking down antagonism and compelling consent. 
 
 At the high tea which represented the late dinner of the 
 household he was wary and self-possessed. Mrs. Thornburgh got 
 out of him that he had been for a walk, and had seen Catherine, 
 but for all her ingenuities of cross-examination she got nothing 
 more. Afterwards, when he and the vicar were smoking to- 
 gether, he proposed to Mr. Thornburgh that they two should go 
 off for a couple of days on a walking tour to Ullswater. 
 
 'I want to go away,' he said, with a hand on the vicar's 
 shoulder, ' and I want to come back.' The deliberation of the 
 last words was not to be mistaken. The vicar emitted a con- 
 tented puff, looked the young man straight in the eyes, and 
 without another word began to plan a walk to Patterdale via 
 High Street, Martindale, and Howtown, and back by Hawes- 
 water. 
 
 To Mrs. Thornburgh Robert announced that he must leave 
 them on the following Saturday, June 24. 
 
 ' You have given me a good time, Cousin Emma,' he said to 
 her, with a bright friendliness which dumfoundered her. A 
 good time, indeed ! with everything begun and nothing finished ; 
 with two households thrown into perturbation for a delusion,
 
 CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 121 
 
 and a desirable marriage spoilt, all for want of a little common 
 sense and plain speaking, which one person at least in the 
 valley could have supplied them with,- had she not been ignored 
 and browbeaten on all sides. She contained herself, however, 
 in his presence, but the vicar suffered proportionately in the 
 privacy of the connubial chamber. He had never seen his wife 
 so exasperated. To think what might have been, what she 
 might have done for the race, but for the whims of two stuck- 
 up, superior, impracticable young persons, that would neither 
 manage their own affairs nor allow other people to manage 
 them for them ! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret 
 of Elsmere's remark to himself like a man, and allowed himself 
 certain counsels against matrimonial meddling which plunged 
 Mrs. Thornburgh into well-simulated slumber. However, in the 
 morning he was vaguely conscious that some time in the visions 
 of the night his spouse had demanded of him peremptorily, 
 ' When do you get back, William 1 ' To the best of his memory 
 the vicar had sleepily murmured, ' Thursday ' ; and had then 
 heard, echoed through his dreams, a calculating whisper, 'He 
 goes Saturday one clear day ! ' 
 
 The following morning was gloomy but fine, and after break- 
 fast the vicar and Elsmere started off. Robert turned back at 
 the top of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpen- 
 stock, sending a passionate farewell to the gray distant house, 
 the upper window, the copper beech in the garden, the bit of 
 winding road, while the vicar discreetly stepped on northward, 
 his eyes fixed on the wild regions of Martindale. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh, left alone, absorbed herself to all appear- 
 ance in the school treat which was to come off in a fortnight, in 
 a new set of covers for the drawing-room, and in Sarah's love 
 affairs, which were always passing through some tragic phase 
 or other, and into which Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed a more 
 unencumbered view than she was into Catherine Leyburn's. 
 Hose and Agnes dropped in now and then, and found her not 
 at all disposed to talk to them on the great event of the day 
 Elsmere's absence and approaching departure. They cautiously 
 communicated to her their own suspicions as to the incident of 
 the preceding afternoon ; and Rose gave vent to one fiery on- 
 slaught on the 'moral obstacle' theory, during which Mrs. 
 Thornburgh sat studying her with small attentive eyes and 
 curls slowly waving from side to side. But for once in her life 
 the vicar's wife was not communicative in return. That the 
 situation should have driven even Mrs. Thornburgh to finesse 
 was a surprising testimony to its gravity. What between her 
 sudden taciturnity and Catherine's pale silence, the girls' sense 
 of expectancy was roused to its highest pitch. 
 
 ' They come back to-morrow night,' said Rose thoughtfully, 
 'and he goes Saturday 10.20 from Whinborough one day for 
 the Fifth Act ! By the way, why did Mrs. Thornburgh ask us 
 to say nothing about Saturday at home ?'
 
 122 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 She Jiad asked them, however ; and with a pleasing sense of 
 conspiracy they complied. 
 
 It was late on Thursday afternoon when Mrs. Thornburgh, 
 finding the Burwood front door open, made her unchallenged 
 way into the hall, and after an unanswered knock at the draw- 
 ing-room door, opened it and peered in to see who might be 
 there. 
 
 ' May I come in ? ' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn, who was a trifle deaf, was sitting by the 
 window absorbed in the intricacies of a heel which seemed to 
 her more than she could manage. Her card was mislaid, the 
 girls were none of them at hand, and she felt as helpless as she 
 commonly did when left alone. 
 
 ' Oh, do come in, please ! So glad to see you. Have you been 
 nearly blown away f ' 
 
 For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous north-west 
 wind was still rushing through the valley, and the trees round 
 Burwood were swaying and groaning under the force of its 
 onslaught. 
 
 '"Wel^ it is stormy,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, stepping in and 
 undoing all the various safety pins and elastics which had held 
 her dress high above the mud. ' Are the girls out ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, Catherine and Agnes are at the school ; and Rose, I 
 think, is practising.' 
 
 ' Ah, well,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, settling herself in a chair 
 close by her friend, ' I wanted to find you alone.' 
 
 Her face, framed in bushy curls and an old garden bonnet, 
 was flushed and serious. Her mittened hands were clasped 
 nervously on her lap, and there was about her such an air of 
 forcibly restrained excitement that Mrs. Leyburn's mild eyes 
 gazed at her with some astonishment. The two women were a 
 curious contrast : Mrs. Thornburgh short, inclined, as we know, 
 to be stout, ample and abounding in all things, whether it were 
 curls or cap-strings or conversation ; Mrs. Leyburn tall and 
 well proportioned, well dressed, with the same graceful ways 
 and languid pretty manners as had first attracted her husband's 
 attention thirty years before. She was fond of Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh, but there was something in the ebullient energies of the 
 vicar's wife which always gave her a sense of bustle and 
 fatigue. 
 
 ' I am sure you will be sorry to hear,' began her visitor, ' that 
 Mr. Elsmere is going.' 
 
 ' Going 1 ' said Mrs. Leyburn, laying down her knitting. 
 'Why, I thought he was going to stay with you another ten 
 days at least.' 
 
 'So did I so did he,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, nodding, and 
 then pausing with a most effective air of sudden gravity and 
 ' recollection.' 
 
 ' Then why what's the matter ? ' asked Mrs. Leyburn, won- 
 dering.
 
 CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 123 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh did not answer for a minute, and Mrs. 
 Leyburn began to feel a little nervous, her visitor's eyes were 
 fixed upon her with so much meaning. Urged by a sudden 
 impulse she bent forward ; so did Mrs. Thornburgh, and their 
 two elderly heads nearly touched. 
 
 ' The young man is in love ! ' said the vicar's wife in a stage 
 whisper, drawing back after a pause, to see the effect of her 
 announcement. 
 
 ' Oh ! with whom ? ' asked Mrs. Leyburn, her look brightening. 
 She liked a love affair as much as ever. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh furtively looked round to see if the door was 
 shut and all safe she felt herself a criminal, but the sense of 
 guilt had an exhilarating rather than a depressing effect upon 
 her. 
 
 'Have you guessed nothing? have the girls told you any- 
 thing?' 
 
 ' No ! ' said Mrs. Leyburn, her eyes opening wider and wider. 
 She never guessed anything; there was no need, with three 
 daughters to think for her, and give her the benefit of their 
 young brains. ' No,' she said again. ' I can't imagine what you 
 mean.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh felt a rush of inward contempt for so much 
 obtuseness. 
 
 ' Well, then, he is in love with Catherine ! ' she said abruptly, 
 laying her hand on Mrs. Leyburn's knee, and watching the 
 effect. 
 ,, ' With Catherine ! ' stammered Mrs. Leyburn ; ' with Catherine / ' 
 
 The idea was amazing to her. She took up her knitting with 
 trembling fingers, and went on with it mechanically a second or 
 two. Then laying it down 'Are you quite sure? has he told 
 you?' 
 
 ' No, but one has eyes,' said Mrs. Thornburgh hastily. ' Will- 
 iam and I have seen it from the very first day. And we are 
 both certain that on Tuesday she made him understand in some 
 way or other that she wouldn't marry him, and that is why he 
 went off to Ullswater, and why he made up his mind to go south 
 before his time is up.' 
 
 ' Tuesday ? ' cried Mrs. Leyburn. ' In that walk, do you mean, 
 when Catherine looked so tired afterwards ? You think he pro- 
 posed in that walk ? ' 
 
 She was in a maze of bewilderment and excitement. 
 
 ' Something like it but if he did, she said " No " ; and what I 
 want to know is why she said " No." ' 
 
 ' Why, of course, because she didn't care for him ! ' exclaimed 
 Mrs. Leyburn, opening her blue eyes wider and wider. ' Cath- 
 erine's not like most girls ; she would always know what she 
 felt, and would never keep a man in suspense.' 
 
 ' Well, I don't somehow believe,' said Mrs. Thornburgh boldly, 
 'that she doesn't care for him. He is just the young man 
 Catherine might care for. You can see that yourself.'
 
 124 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn once more laid down her knitting and stared 
 at her visitor. Mrs. Thornburgh, after all her meditations, had 
 no very precise idea as to why she was at that moment in the Bur- 
 wood drawing-room bombarding Mrs. Leyburn in this fashion. 
 All she knew was that she had sallied forth determined somehow 
 to upset the situation, just as one gives a shake purposely to a 
 bundle of spillikins on the chance of more favourable openings. 
 Mrs. Leyburn's mind was just now playing the part of spillikins, 
 and the vicar's wife was shaking it vigorously, though with 
 occasional qualms as to the lawfulness of the process. 
 
 ' You think Catherine does care for him ? ' resumed Mrs. Ley- 
 burn tremulously. 
 
 ' Well, isn't he just the kind of man one would suppose Cath- 
 erine would like ? ' repeated Mrs. Thornburgh persuasively ; ' he 
 is a clergyman, and she likes serious people ; and he's sensible 
 and nice and well-mannered. And then he can talk about books, 
 just like her father used I'm sure William thinks he knows 
 everything ! He isn't as nice-looking as he might be just now, 
 but then that's his hair and his fever, poor man. And then he 
 isn't hanging about. He's got a living, and there'd be the poor 
 people all ready, and everything else Catherine likes. And 
 now I'll just ask you did you ever see Catherine more more 
 lively well, I know that's not just the word, but you know 
 what I mean than she has been the last fortnight ? ' 
 
 But Mrs. Leyburn only shook her head helplessly. She did 
 not know in the least what Mrs. Thornburgh meant. She never 
 thought Catherine doleful, and she agreed that certainly ' lively ' 
 was not the word. 
 
 ' Girls get so frightfully particular nowadays,' continued the 
 vicar's wife, with reflective candour. ' Why, when William fell 
 in love with me, I just fell in love with him at once because 
 he did. And if it hadn't been William, but somebody else, it 
 would have been the same. I don't believe girls have got hearts 
 like pebbles if the man's nice, of course ! ' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn listened to this summary of matrimonial philo- 
 sophy with the same yielding flurried attention as she was 
 always disposed to give to the last speaker. 
 
 ' But,' she said, still in a maze, ' if she did care for him, why 
 should she send him away ? ' 
 
 ' Because she won't have him ! ' said Mrs. Thornburgh ener- 
 getically, leaning over the arm of her chair that she might bring 
 herself nearer to her companion. 
 
 The fatuity of the answer left Mrs. Leyburn staring. 
 
 ' Because she won't have him, my dear Mrs. Leyburn ! And 
 and I'm sure nothing would make me interfere like this if I 
 weren't so fond of you all, and if William and I didn't know for 
 certain that there never was a better young man born ! And 
 then I was just sure you'd be the last person in the world, if you 
 knew, to stand in young people's way ! ' 
 
 '//'cried poor Mrs. Leyburn 'I stand in the way!' She 

 
 CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 125 
 
 was getting tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh felt 
 herself a brute. 
 
 ' Well,' she said, plunging on desperately, ' I have been think- 
 ing over it night and day. I've been watching him, and I've 
 been talking to the girls, and I've been putting two and two to- 
 gether, and I'm just about sure that there might be a chance for 
 Robert, if only Catherine didn't feel that you and the girls 
 couldn't get on without her ! ' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn took up her knitting again with agitated 
 fingers. She was so long in answering that Mrs. Thornburgh 
 sat and thought with trepidation of all sorts of unpleasant con- 
 sequences which might result from this audacious move of hers. 
 
 ' I don't know how we should get on,' cried Mrs. Leyburn at 
 last, with a sort of suppressed sob, while something very like a 
 tear fell on the stocking she held. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh was still more frightened, and rushed into 
 a flood of apologetic speech. Very likely she was wrong, per- 
 haps it was all a mistake, she was afraid she had done harm, and 
 so on. Mrs. Leyburn took very little heed, but at last she said, 
 looking up and applying a soft handkerchief gently to her 
 eyes 
 
 ' Is his mother nice ? Where's his living ? Would he want to 
 be married soon ? ' 
 
 The voice was weak and tearful, but there was in it unmis- 
 takable eagerness to be informed. Mrs. Thornburgh, overjoyed, 
 let loose upon her a flood of particulars, painted the virtues and 
 talents of Mrs. Elsmere, described Robert's Oxford career, with 
 an admirable sense for effect, and a truly feminine capacity for 
 murdering every university detail, drew pictures of the Mure- 
 well living and rectory, of which Robert had photographs with 
 him, threw in adroit information about the young man's private 
 means, and in general showed what may be made of a woman's 
 mind under the stimulus of one of the occupations most proper 
 to it. Mrs. Leyburn brightened visibly as the flood proceeded. 
 Alas, poor Catherine ! How little room there is for the heroic 
 in this trivial everyday life of ours ! 
 
 Catherine a bride, Catherine a wife and mother, dim visions 
 of a white soft morsel in which Catherine's eyes and smile should 
 live again all these thoughts went trembling and flashing 
 through Mrs. Leyburn's mind as she listened to Mrs. Thornburgh. 
 There is so much of the artist in the maternal mind, of the 
 artist who longs to see the work of his hand in fresh combina- 
 tions and under all points of view. Catherine, in the heat of 
 her own self-surrender, had perhaps forgotten that her mother 
 too had a heart ! 
 
 'Yes, it all sounds very well,' said Mrs. Leyburn at last, 
 sighing, ' but, you know, Catherine isn't easy to manage.' 
 
 ' Could you talk to her find out a little ? ' 
 
 ' Well, not to-day ; I shall hardly see her. Doesn't it seem to 
 you that when a girl takes up notions like Catherine's, she
 
 126 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 hasn't time for thinking about the young men ? Why, she's as 
 full of business all day long as an egg's full of meat. Well, it 
 was my poor Richard's doing it was his doing, bless him ! I am 
 not going to say anything against it. But it was different 
 once.' 
 
 ' Yes, I know,' said Mrs. Thornburgh thoughtfully. ' One had 
 plenty of time, when you and I were young, to sit at home and 
 think what one was going to wear, and how one would look, and 
 whether he had been paying attention to any one else ; and if 
 he had, why; and all that. And now the young women are so 
 superior. But the marrying has got to be done somehow all the 
 same. What is she doing to-day ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, she'll be busy all to-day and to-morrow ; I hardly expect 
 to see her till Saturday.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh gave a start of dismay. 
 
 ' Why, what is the matter now ? ' she cried in her most ag- 
 grieved tones. 'My dear Mrs. Leyburn, one would think we 
 had the cholera in the parish. Catherine just spoils the people.' 
 
 ' Don't you remember,' said Mrs. Leyburn, staring in her turn, 
 and drawing herself up a little, ' that to-morrow is Midsummer 
 Day, and that Mary Backhouse is as bad as she can be ? ' 
 
 ' Mary Backhouse ! Why, I had forgotten all about her ! ' 
 cried the vicar's wife, with sudden remorse. And she sat pen- 
 sively eyeing the carpet awhile. 
 
 Then she got what particulars she could out of Mrs. Leyburn. 
 Catherine, it appeared, was at this moment at High Ghyll, was 
 not to return till late, and would be with the dying girl through 
 the greater part of the following day, returning for an hour or 
 two's rest in the afternoon, and staying in the evening till the 
 twilight, in which the ghost always made her appearances, 
 should have passed into night. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh listened to it all, her contriving mind work- 
 ing the while at railway speed on the facts presented to her. 
 
 ' How do you get her home to-morrow nignt ? ' she asked, with 
 sudden animation. 
 
 ' Oh, we send our man Richard at ten. He takes a lantern if 
 it's dark.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh said no more. Her eyes and gestures were 
 all alive again with energy and hope. She had given her shake 
 to Mrs. Leyburn's mind. Much good might it do ! But, after 
 all, she had the poorest opinion of the widow's capacities as an 
 ally. 
 
 She and her companion said a few more excited, affectionate, 
 and apologetic things to one another, and then she departed. 
 
 Both mother and knitting were found by Agnes half an hour 
 later in a state of considerable confusion. But Mrs. Leyburn 
 kept her own counsel, having resolved for once, with a timid 
 and yet delicious excitement, to act as the head of the family. 
 
 Meanwhile Mrs. Thornburgh was laying plans on her own 
 account.
 
 CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 127 
 
 ' Ten o'clock moonlight,' said that contriving person to her- 
 self going home 'at least if the clouds hold up that'll do 
 couldn't be better.' 
 
 To any person familiar with her character the signs of some 
 unusual preoccupation were clear enough in Mrs. Leyburn during 
 this Thursday evening. Catherine noticed them at once when 
 she got back from High Ghyll about eight o'clock, and wondered 
 first of all what was the matter ; and then, with more emphasis, 
 why the trouble was not immediately communicated to her. It 
 had never entered into her head to take her mother into her con- 
 fidence with regard to Elsmere. Since she could remember, it 
 had been an axiom in the family to spare the delicate nervous 
 mother all the anxieties and perplexities of life. It was a system 
 in which the subject of it had always acquiesced with perfect 
 contentment, and Catherine had no qualms about it. If there 
 was good news, it was presented in its most sugared form to 
 Mrs. Leyburn ; but the moment any element of pain and diffi- 
 culty cropped up in the common life, it was pounced upon and 
 appropriated by Catherine, aided and abetted by the girls, and 
 Mrs. Leyburn knew no more about it than an un weaned babe. 
 
 So that Catherine was thinking at most of some misconduct 
 of a Perth dyer with regard to her mother's best gray poplin, 
 when one of the greatest surprises of her life burst upon ner. 
 
 She was in Mrs. Leyburn's bedroom that night, helping to 
 put away her mother's things, as her custom was. She had just 
 taken off the widow's cap, caressing as she did so the brown hair 
 underneath, which was still soft and plentiful, when Mrs. Ley- 
 burn turned upon her. ' Catherine ! ' she said in an agitated 
 voice, laying a thin hand on her daughter's arm. ' Oh, Catherine, 
 I want to speak to you ! ' 
 
 Catherine knelt lightly down by her mother's side, and put 
 her arms round her waist. 
 
 ' Yes, mother darling,' she said, half smiling. 
 
 ' Oh, Catherine ! if if you like Mr. Elsmere, don't mind 
 don't think about us, dear. We can manage we can manage, 
 dear !' 
 
 The change that took place in Catherine Leyburn's face is 
 indescribable. She rose instantly, her arms falling behind her, 
 her beautiful brows drawn together. Mrs. Leyburn looked up at 
 her with a pathetic mixture of helplessness, alarm, entreaty. 
 
 ' Mother, who has been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and 
 me 1 ' demanded Catherine. 
 
 ' Oh, never mind, dear, never mind.' said the widow hastily ; 
 ' I should have seen it myself oh, I know I should ; but I'm a 
 bad mother, Catherine ! ' And she caught her daughter's dress 
 and drew her towards her. ' Do you care for him ? ' 
 
 Catherine did not answer. She knelt down again, and laid 
 her head on her mother's hands. 
 
 'I want nothing,' she said presently in a low voice of intense 
 
 J
 
 128 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 emotion ' I want nothing but you and the girls. You are my 
 life, I ask for nothing more. I am abundantly content.' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn gazed down on her with infinite perplexity. 
 The brown hair, escaped from the cap, had fallen about her still 
 pretty neck, a pink spot of excitement was on each gently- 
 hollowed cheek ; she looked almost younger than her pale 
 daughter. 
 
 ' But he is very nice,' she said timidly. ' And he has a good 
 living. Catherine, you ought to be a clergyman's wife.' 
 
 'I ought to be, and I am your daughter,' said Catherine, 
 smiling a little with an unsteady lip, and kissing her hand. 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn sighed and looked straight before her. Perhaps 
 in imagination she saw the vicar's wife. ' I think I think,' she 
 said very seriously, ' I should like it ! ' 
 
 Catherine straightened herself brusquely at that. It was as 
 though she had felt a blow. 
 
 ' Mother ! ' she cried, with a stifled accent of pain, and yet 
 still trying to smile, ' do you want to send me away ? ' 
 
 ' No, no ! ' cried Mrs. Leyburn hastily. ' But if a nice man 
 wants you to marry him, Catherine 1 Your father would have 
 liked him oh, I know your father would have liked him ! And 
 his manners to me are so pretty, I shouldn't mind being his 
 mother-in-law. And the girls have no brother, you know, dear. 
 Your father was always so sorry about that.' 
 
 She spoke with pleading agitation, her own tempting imagina- 
 tions the pallor, the latent storm of Catherine's look exciting 
 her more and more. 
 
 Catherine was silent a moment, then she caught her mother's 
 hand again. 
 
 ' Dear little mother dear, kind little mother ! You are an 
 angel, you always are. But I think, if you'll keep me, I'll 
 stay.' 
 
 And she once more rested her head clingingly on Mrs. Ley- 
 burn's knee. 
 
 ' But do you do you love him, Catherine ? ' 
 
 ' I love you, mother, and the girls, and my life here.' 
 
 ' Oh dear,' sighed Mrs Leyburn, as though addressing a third 
 person, the tears in her mild eyes, ' she won't, and she would like 
 it, and so should I ! ' 
 
 Catherine rose, stung beyond bearing. 
 
 ' And I count for nothing to you, mother ! ' her deep voice 
 quivering. ' You could put me aside, you and the girls, and live 
 as though I had never been ! ' 
 
 'But you would be a great deal to us if you did marry, 
 Catherine ! ' cried Mrs. Leyburn, almost with an accent of pet- 
 tishness. ' People have to do without their daughters. There's 
 Agnes I often think, as it is, you might let her do more. And 
 if Rose were troublesome, why, you know it might be a good 
 thing a very good thing if there were a man to take her in 
 hand ! '
 
 CHAP, ix WESTMORELAND 129 
 
 'And you, mother, without me?' cried poor Catherine, 
 choked. 
 
 ' Oh, I should come and see you,' said Mrs. Leyburn, brighten- 
 ing. ' They say it is such a nice house, Catherine, and such 
 pretty country ; and I'm sure I should like his mother, though 
 she is Irish ! ' 
 
 It was the bitterest moment of Catherine Leyburn's life. In 
 it the heroic dream of years broke down. Nay, the shrivelling 
 ironic touch of circumstance laid upon it made it look even in 
 her own eyes almost ridiculous. What had she been living for, 
 praying for, all these years'? She threw herself down by the 
 widow's side, her face working with a passion that terrified Mrs. 
 Leyburn. 
 
 ' Oli, mother, say you would miss me say you would miss 
 me if I went ! ' 
 
 Then Mrs. Leyburn herself broke down, and the two women 
 clung to each other, weeping. Catherine's sore heart was soothed 
 a little by her mother's tears, and by the broken words of endear- 
 ment that were lavished on her. But through it all she felt that 
 the excited imaginative desire in Mrs. Leyburn still persisted. 
 It was the cheapening the vulgarising, so to speak, of her 
 whole existence. 
 
 In the course of their long embrace Mrs. Leyburn let fall 
 various items of news that showed Catherine very plainly who 
 had been at work upon her mother, and one of which startled 
 her. 
 
 ' He comes back to-night, my dear and he goes on Saturday. 
 Oh, and, Catherine, Mrs. Thornburgh says he does care so much. 
 Poor young man ! ' 
 
 And Mrs. Leyburn looked up at her now standing daughter 
 with eyes as woe-begone for Elsmere as for herself. 
 
 ' Don't talk about it any more, mother,' Catherine implored. 
 ' You won't sleep, and I shall be more wroth with Mrs. Thorn- 
 burgh than I am already.' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn let herself be gradually soothed and coerced, 
 and Catherine, with a last kiss to the delicate emaciated fingers 
 on which the worn wedding-ring lay slipping forward in itself 
 a history left her at last to sleep. 
 
 ' And I don't know much more than when I began ! ' sighed 
 the perplexed widow to herself. ' Oh, I wish Richard was here 
 I do ! ' 
 
 Catherine's night was a night of intense mental struggle. 
 Her struggle was one with which the modern world has perhaps 
 but scant sympathy. Instinctively we feel such things out of 
 place in our easy indifferent generation. We think them more 
 than half unreal. We are so apt to take it for granted that the 
 world has outgrown the religious thirst for sanctification, for a 
 perfect moral consistency, as it has outgrown so many of the 
 older complications of the sentiment of honour. And meanwhile 
 half the tragedy of our time lies in this perpetual clashing of
 
 130 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 two estimates of life the estimate which is the offspring of the 
 scientific spirit, and which is for ever making the visible world 
 fairer and more desirable in mortal eyes ; and the estimate of 
 Saint Augustine. 
 
 As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, 
 the vicar and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. 
 Catherine knew nothing of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Ley- 
 burn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never men- 
 tioned Elsmere's name to any one on the Friday morning, and 
 no one dared speak of him to her. She came home in the after- 
 noon from the Backhouses' absorbed apparently in the state of 
 the dying girl, took a couple of hours' rest, and hurried off again. 
 She passed the vicarage with bent head, and never looked up. 
 
 ' She is gone ! ' said Rose to Agnes as she stood at the window 
 looking after her sister's retreating figure. ' It is all over ! They 
 can't meet now. He will be off by nine to-morrow.' 
 
 The girl spoke with a lump in her throat, and flung herself 
 down by the window, moodily watching the dark form against 
 the fells. Catherine's coldness seemed to make all life colder 
 and more chilling to fling a hard denial in the face of the 
 dearest claims of earth. 
 
 The stormy light of the afternoon was fading towards sunset. 
 Catherine walked on fast towards the group of houses at the 
 head of the valley, in one of which lived the two old carriers 
 who had worked such havoc with Mrs. Thornburgh's housekeep- 
 ing arrangements. She was tired physically, but she was still 
 more tired mentally. She had the bruised feeling of one who 
 has been humiliated before the world and before herself. Her 
 self-respect was for the moment crushed, and the breach made 
 in the wholeness of personal dignity had produced a strange 
 slackness of nerve, extending both to body and mind. She had 
 been convicted, it seemed to her, in her own eyes, and in those 
 of her world, of an egregious over-estimate of her own value. 
 She walked with hung head like one ashamed, the overstrung 
 religious sense deepening her discomfiture at every step. How 
 rich her life had always been in the conviction of usefulness 
 nay, indispensableness ! Her mother's persuasions had dashed 
 it from her. And religious scruple, for her torment, showed her 
 her past, transformed, alloyed with all sorts of personal prides 
 and cravings, which stood unmasked now in a white light. 
 
 And he ? Still near her for a few short hours ! Every pulse 
 in her had thrilled as she had passed the house which sheltered 
 him. But she will see him no more. And she is glad. If he 
 had stayed on, he too would have discovered how cheaply they 
 held her those dear ones of hers for whom she had lived till 
 now ! And she might have weakly yielded to his pity what she 
 had refused to his homage. The strong nature is half tortured, 
 half soothed by the prospect of his going. Perhaps when he is 
 gone she will recover something of that moral equilibrium which
 
 CHAI-. x WESTMORELAND 131 
 
 has been so shaken. At present she is a riddle to herself, in- 
 vaded by a force she has no power to cope with, feeling the 
 moral ground of years crumbling beneath her, and struggling 
 feverishly for self-control. 
 
 As she neared the head of the valley the wind became less 
 tempestuous. The great wall of High Fell, towards which she 
 was walking, seemed to shelter her from its worst violence. 
 But the hurrying clouds, the gleams of lurid light which every 
 now and then penetrated into the valley from the west, across 
 the dip leading to Shanmoor, the voice of the river answering 
 the voice of the wind, and the deep unbroken shadow that 
 covered the group of houses and trees towards which she was 
 walking, all served to heighten the nervous depression which 
 had taken hold of her. As she neared the bridge, however, 
 leading to the little hamlet, beyond which northwards all was 
 stony loneliness and desolation, and saw in front of her the 
 gray stone house, backed by the sombre red of a great copper 
 beech, and overhung by crags, she had perforce to take herself 
 by both hands, try and realise her mission afresh, and the scene 
 which lay before her. 
 
 CHAPTEE X 
 
 MAKY BACKHOUSE, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting 
 with regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this 
 evening nearing a terrible and long-expected crisis, was the 
 victim of a fate sordid and common enough, yet not without its 
 elements of dark poetry. Some fifteen months before this Mid- 
 summer Day she had been the mistress of the lonely old house in 
 which her father and uncle had passed their whole lives, in 
 which she had been born, and in which, amid snowdrifts so 
 deep that no doctor could reach them, her mother had passed 
 away. She had been then strong and well favoured, possessed 
 of a certain masculine black-browed beauty, and of a temper 
 which sometimes gave to it an edge and glow such as an artist 
 of ambition might have been glad to catch. At the bottom of 
 all the outward sauvagerie, however, there was a heart, and 
 strong wants, which only affection and companionship could 
 satisfy and tame. Neither was to be found in sufficient measure 
 within her home. Her father and she were on fairly good terms, 
 and had for each other up to a certain point the natural instincts 
 of kinship. On her uncle, whom she regarded as half-witted, 
 she bestowed alternate tolerance and jeers. She was, indeed, 
 the only person whose remonstrances ever got under the wool 
 with old Jim, and her sharp tongue had sometimes a cowing 
 effect on his curious nonchalance which nothing else had. For 
 the rest, they had no neighbours with whom the girl could 
 fraternise, and Whinborough was "too far off to provide any
 
 132 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 adequate food for her vague hunger after emotion and excite- 
 ment. 
 
 In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very 
 coarse attractions of a young farmer in the neighbouring valley 
 of Shanmoor. He was a brute with a handsome face, and a 
 nature in which whatever grains of heart and conscience might 
 have been interfused with the original composition had been 
 long since swamped. Mary, who had recklessly flung herself 
 into his power on one or two occasions, from a mixture of 
 motives, partly passion, partly jealousy, partly ennui, awoke one 
 day to find herself ruined, and a grim future hung before her. 
 She had realised her doom for the first time in its entirety on 
 the Midsummer Day preceding that we are now describing. On 
 that day she had walked over to Shanmoor in a fever of dumb 
 rage and despair, to claim from her betrayer the fulfilment of 
 his promise of marriage. He had laughed at her, and she had 
 fled home in the warm rainy dusk, a prey to all those torturing 
 terrors which only a woman in extremis can know. And on her 
 way back she had seen the ghost or ' bogle ' of Deep Crag ; the 
 ghost had spoken to her, and she had reached home more dead 
 than alive, having received what she at once recognised as her 
 death sentence. 
 
 What had she seen ? An effect of moonlit mist a shepherd 
 boy bent on a practical joke a gleam of white waterfall among 
 the darkening rocks? What had she heard? The evening 
 greeting of a passer-by, wafted down to her from some higher 
 path along the fell ? distant voices in the farm enclosures beneath 
 her feet ? or simply the eerie sounds of the mountain, those weird 
 earth-whispers which haunt the lonely places of nature ? Who 
 can tell ? Nerves and brain were strained to their uttermost. 
 The legend of the ghost of the girl who had thrown her baby 
 and herself into the tarn under the frowning precipitous cliffs 
 which marked the western end of High Fell, and who had since 
 then walked the lonely road to Shanmoor every Midsummer 
 Night, with her moaning child upon her arm had flashed into 
 Mary's mind as she left the white-walled village of Shanmoor 
 behind her, and climbed upward with her shame and her secret 
 into the mists. To see the bogle was merely distressing and 
 untoward ; to be spoken to by the phantom voice was death. 
 No one so addressed could hope to survive the following Mid- 
 summer Day. Revolving these things in her mind, along with 
 the terrible details of her own story, the exhausted girl had seen 
 her vision, and, as she firmly believed, incurred her doom. 
 
 A week later she had disappeared from home and from the 
 neighbourhood. The darkest stories were afloat. She had taken 
 some money with her, and all trace of her was lost. The father 
 had a period of gloomy taciturnity, during which his principal 
 relief was got out of jeering and girding at his elder brother, 
 the noodle's eyes wandered and glittered more ; his shrunken 
 frame seemed more shrunken as he sat dangling his spindle legs
 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 133 
 
 from the shaft of the carrier's cart ; his absence of mind was for 
 a time more marked, and excused with less buoyancy and in- 
 ventiveness than usual. But otherwise all went on as before. 
 John Backhouse took no step, and for nine months nothing was 
 heard of his daughter. 
 
 At last one cheerless March afternoon, Jim, coming back first 
 from the Wednesday round with the cart, entered the farm 
 kitchen, while John Backhouse was still wrangling at one of the 
 other farmhouses of the hamlet about some disputed payment. 
 The old man came in cold and weary, and the sight of the half- 
 tended kitchen and neglected fire they paid a neighbour to do 
 the housework, as far as the care of her own seven children 
 would let her suddenly revived in his slippery mind the 
 memory of his niece, who, with all her faults, had had the 
 makings of a housewife, and for whom, in spite of her flouts 
 and jeers, he had always cherished a secret admiration. As he 
 came in he noticed that the door to the left hand, leading into 
 what Westmoreland folk call the 'house' or sitting-room of the 
 farm, was open. The room had hardly been used since Mary's 
 flight, and the few pieces of black oak and shining mahogany 
 which adorned it had long ago fallen from their pristine 
 polish. The geraniums an.d fuchsias with which she had filled 
 the window all the summer before had died into dry blackened 
 stalks ; and the dust lay heavy on the room, in spite of the 
 well-meant but wholly ineffective efforts of the charwoman next 
 door. The two old men had avoided the place for months 
 past by common consent, and the door into it was hardly ever 
 opened. 
 
 Now, however, it stood aiar, and old Jim going up to shut it, 
 and looking in, was struck dumb with astonishment. For there 
 on a wooden rocking-chair, which had been her mother's favourite 
 seat, sat Mary Backhouse, her feet on the curved brass fender, 
 her eyes staring into the parlour grate. Her clothes, her face, 
 her attitude of cowering chill and mortal fatigue, produced an 
 impression which struck through the old man's dull senses, and 
 made him tremble so that his hand dropped from the handle of 
 the door. The slight sound roused Mary, and she turned towards 
 him. She said nothing for a few seconds, her hollow black eyes 
 fixed upon him ; then with a ghastly smile, and a voice so hoarse 
 as to be scarcely audible 
 
 ' Weel, aa've coom back. Ye'd maybe not expect me ? ' 
 
 There was a sound behind on the cobbles outside the kitchen 
 door. 
 
 ' Yur feyther ! ' cried Jim between his teeth. ' Gang upstairs 
 wi' ye.' And he pointed to a door in the wall concealing a 
 staircase to the upper storey. 
 
 She sprang up, looked at the door and at him irresolutely, 
 and then stayed where she was, gaunt, pale, fever-eyed, the 
 wreck and ghost of her old self. 
 
 The-steps neared. There was a rough voice in the kitchen, a
 
 134 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 surprised exclamation, and her father had pushed past his 
 brother into the room. 
 
 John Backhouse no sooner saw his daughter than his dull 
 weather-beaten face flamed into violence. With an oath he 
 raised the heavy whip he held in his hand, and flung himself 
 towards her. 
 
 ' Naw, ye'll not du'at ! ' cried Jim, throwing himself with all 
 his feeble strength on to his brother's arm. John swore and 
 struggled, but the old man stuck like a limpet. 
 
 ' You let 'un aleann,' said Mary, drawing her tattered shawl 
 over her breast. ' If he aims to kill me, aa'll not say naa. But 
 he needn't moider hisself ! There's them abuve as ha' taken 
 care o' that ! ' 
 
 She sank again into her chair, as though her limbs could not 
 support her, and her eyes closed in the utter indifference of a 
 fatigue which had made even fear impossible. 
 
 The father's arm dropped he stood there sullenly looking at 
 her. Jim, thinking she haa fainted, went up to her, took a 
 glass of water out of which she had already been drinking from 
 the mahogany table, and held it to her lips. She drank a little, 
 and then with a desperate effort raised herself, and clutching 
 the arm of the chair, faced her father. 
 
 ' Ye'll not hev to wait lang. Doan't ye fash yersel. Maybe 
 it ull comfort ye to knaw summat ! Lasst Midsummer Day aa 
 was on t' Shanmoor road, i' t' gloaming. An' aa saw theer t' 
 bogle thee knaws, t' bogle o' Bleacliff Tarn ; an' she turned 
 hersel, an' she spoak to me ! ' 
 
 She uttered the last words with a grim emphasis, dwelling 
 on each, the whole life of the wasted face concentrated in the 
 terrible black eyes, which gazed past the two figures within 
 their immediate range into a vacancy peopled with horror. 
 Then a film came over them, the grip relaxed, and she fell back 
 with a lurch of the rocking-chair in a dead swoon. 
 
 With the help of the neighbour from next door, Jim got her 
 upstairs into the room that had been hers. She awoke from 
 her swoon only to fall into the torpid sleep of exhaustion, which 
 lasted for twelve hours. 
 
 ' Keep her oot o' ma way,' said the father with an oath to Jim, 
 ' or aa'll not answer nayther for her nor me ! ' 
 
 She needed no telling. She soon crept downstairs again, and 
 went to the task of house-cleaning. The two men lived in the 
 kitchen as before ; when they were at home she ate and sat in 
 the parlour alone. Jim watched her as far as his dull brain was 
 capable of watching, and he dimly understood that she was 
 dying. Both men, indeed, felt a sort of superstitious awe of 
 her, she was so changed, so unearthly. As for the story of the 
 ghost, the old popular superstitions are almost dead in the 
 Cumbrian mountains, and the shrewd north-country peasant is 
 in many places <juite as scornfully ready to sacrifice his ghosts 
 to the Time Spirit as any ' bold bad' haunter of scientific associa-
 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 135 
 
 tions could wish him to be. But in a few of the remoter valleys 
 they still linger, though beneath the surface. Either of the 
 Backhouses, or Mary in her days of health, would have suffered 
 many things rather than allow a stranger to suppose they 
 placed the smallest credence in the story of Bleacliff Tarn. But, 
 all the same, the story which each had heard in childhood, on 
 stormy nights perhaps, when the mountain side was awful 
 with the sounds of tempest, had grown up with them, had 
 entered deep into the tissue of consciousness. In Mary's imagi- 
 nation the ideas and images connected with it had now, under 
 the stimulus of circumstance, become instinct with a living 
 pursuing terror. But they were present, though in a duller, 
 blunter state, in the minds of her father and uncle ; and as the 
 weeks passed on, and the days lengthened towards midsummer, 
 a sort of brooding horror seemed to settle on the house. 
 
 Mary grew weaker and weaker ; her cough kept Jim awake 
 at nights ; once or twice when he went to help her with a piece 
 of work which not even her extraordinary will could carry 
 her through, her hand burnt him like a hot cinder. But she 
 kept all other women out of the house by her mad, strange 
 ways ; and if her uncle showed any consciousness of her state, 
 she turned upon him with her old temper, which had lost all its 
 former stormy grace, and had become ghastly by the contrast it 
 brought out between the tempestuous vindictive soul and the 
 shaken weakness of frame. 
 
 A doctor would have discovered at once that what was wrong 
 with her was phthisis, complicated with insanity ; and the 
 insanity, instead of taking the hopeful optimistic tinge which 
 is characteristic of the insanity of consumption, had rather 
 assumed the colour of the events from which the disease itself 
 had started. Cold, exposure, long-continued agony of mind and 
 body the madness intertwined with an illness which had such 
 roots as these was naturally a madness of despair. One of its 
 principal signs was the fixed idea as to Midsummer Day. It 
 never occurred to her as possible that her life should be pro- 
 longed beyond that limit. Every night, as she dragged herself 
 up the steep little staircase to her room, she checked off the day 
 which had just passed from the days she had still to live. She 
 had made all her arrangements ; she had even sewed with her 
 own hands, and that without any sense of special horror, but 
 rather in the provident peasant way, the dress in which she was 
 to be carried to her grave. 
 
 At last one day, her father, coming unexpectedly into the 
 yard, saw her carrying a heavy pail of water from the pump. 
 Something stirred within him, and he went up to her and 
 forcibly took it from her. Their looks met, and her poor mad 
 eyes gazed intensely into his. As he moved forward towards 
 the house she crept after him, passing him into the parlour, 
 where she sank down breathless on the settle where she had 
 been sleeping for the last few nights, rather than face climbing'
 
 136 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 the stairs. For the first time he followed her, watching her 
 
 gasping struggle for breath, in spite of her impatient motion to 
 im to go. After a few seconds he left her, took his hat, went 
 out, saddled his horse, and rode off to Whinborough. He got 
 Dr. Baker to promise to come over on the morrow, and on his 
 way back he called and requested to see Catherine Leyburn. 
 He stammeringly asked her to come and visit his daughter who 
 was ill and lonesome, and when she consented gladly he went 
 on his way feeling a load off his mind. What he had just done 
 had been due to an undefined, but still vehement prompting of 
 conscience. It did not make it any the less probable that the 
 girl would die on or before Midsummer Day ; but, supposing 
 her story were true, it absolved him from any charge of assist- 
 ance to the designs of those grisly powers in whose clutch she 
 was. 
 
 When the doctor came next morning a change for the worse 
 had taken place, and she was too feeble actively to resent his 
 appearance. She lay there on the settle, every now and then 
 making superhuman efforts to get up, which generally ended in 
 a swoon. She refused to take any medicine, she would hardly 
 take any food, and to the doctor's questions she returned no 
 answer whatever. In the same way, when Catherine came, she 
 would be absolutely silent, looking at her with glittering, 
 feverish eyes, but taking no notice at all, whether she read or 
 talked, or simply sat quietly beside her. 
 
 After the silent period, as the days went on, and Midsummer 
 Day drew nearer, there supervened a period of intermittent 
 delirium. In the evenings, especially when her temperature 
 rose, she became talkative and incoherent, and Catherine would 
 sometimes .tremble as she caught the sentences which, little by 
 little, built up the girl's hidden tragedy before her eyes. 
 London streets, London lights, London darkness, the agony of 
 an endless wandering, the little clinging puny life, which could 
 never be stilled or satisfied, biting cold, intolerable pain, the 
 cheerless workhouse order, and, finally, the arms without a 
 burden, the breast without a child these were the sharp 
 fragments of experience, so common, so terrible to the end of 
 time, which rose on the troubled surface of Mary Backhouse's 
 delirium, and smote the tender heart of the listener. 
 
 Then in the mornings she would lie suspicious and silent, 
 watching Catherine's face with the long gaze of exhaustion, as 
 though trying to find out from it whether her secret had escaped 
 her. The doctor, who had gathered the story of the ' bogle ' from 
 Catherine, to whom Jim had told it, briefly and reluctantly, and 
 with an absolute reservation of his own views on the matter, 
 recommended that if possible they should try and deceive her 
 as to the date of the day and month. Mere nervous excitement 
 might, he thought, be enough to kill her when the actual day 
 and hour came round. But all their attempts were useless. 
 Nothing distracted the intense sleepless attention with which 

 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 137 
 
 the darkened mind kept always in view that one absorbing 
 expectation. Words fell from her at night which seemed to 
 show that she expected a summons a voice along the fell, 
 calling her spirit into the dark. And then would come the 
 shriek, the struggle to get loose, the choked waking, the wander- 
 ing, horror-stricken eyes, subsiding by degrees into the old 
 silent watch. 
 
 On the morning of the 23d, when Robert, sitting at his work, 
 was looking at Burwood through the window in the flattering 
 belief that Catherine was the captive of the weather, she had 
 spent an hour or more with Mary Backhouse, and the austere 
 influences of the visit had perhaps had more share than she 
 knew in determining her own mood that day. The world 
 seemed such dross, the pretences of personal happiness so 
 hollow and delusive, after such a sight ! The girl lay dying 
 fast, with a look oi extraordinary attentiveness in her face, 
 hearing every noise, every footfall, and, as it seemed to 
 Catherine, in a mood of inward joy. She took, moreover, some 
 notice of her visitor. As a rough tomboy of fourteen, she had 
 shown Catherine, who had taught her in the school sometimes, 
 and had especially won her regard on one occasion by a present 
 of some article of dress, a good many uncouth signs of affection. 
 On the morning in question Catherine fancied she saw some- 
 thing of the old childish expression once or twice. At any rate, 
 there was no doubt her presence was soothing, as she read in 
 her low vibrating voice, or sat silently stroking the emaciated 
 hand, raising it every now and then to her lips with a rush of 
 that intense pitifulness which was to her the most natural of 
 all moods. 
 
 The doctor, whom she met there, said that this Istate of calm 
 was very possibly only transitory. The night had been passed 
 in a succession of paroxysms, and they were almost sure to 
 return upon her, especially as he could get her to swallow none 
 of the sedatives which might have carried her in unconscious- 
 ness past the fatal moment. She would have none of them ; he 
 thought that she was determined to allow of no encroachments 
 on the troubled remnants of intelligence still left to her ; so the 
 only thing to be done was to wait and see the result. ' I will 
 come to-morrow,' said Catherine briefly ; ' for the day certainly, 
 longer if necessary.' She had long ago established her claim to 
 be treated seriously as a nurse, and Dr. Baker made no objection. 
 ' If she lives so long,' he said dubiously. ' The Backhouses and 
 Mrs. Irwin [the neighbour] shall be close at hand. I will come 
 in the afternoon and try to get her to take an opiate ; but I 
 can't give it her by force, and there is not the smallest chance 
 of her consenting to it.' 
 
 All through Catherine's own struggle and pain during these 
 two days the image of the dying girl had lain at her heart. It 
 served her as the crucifix serves the Romanist ; as she pressed 
 it into her thought, it recovered from time to time the failing
 
 138 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 forces of the will. Need life be empty because self was left 
 unsatisfied ? Now, as she neared the hamlet, the quality of her 
 nature reasserted itself. The personal want tugging at her 
 senses, the personal soreness, the cry of resentful love, were 
 silenced. What place had they in the presence of this lonely 
 agony of 'death, this mystery, this opening beyond? The old 
 heroic mood revived in her. Her step grew swifter, her carriage 
 more erect, and as she entered the farm kitchen she felt herself 
 once more ready in spirit for what lay before her. 
 
 From the next room there came a succession of husky sibilant 
 sounds, as though some one were whispering hurriedly and 
 continuously. 
 
 After her subdued greeting she looked inquiringly at Jim. 
 
 'She's in a taaking way' said Jim, who looked more 
 attenuated and his face more like a pink and white parchment 
 than ever. ' She's been knacking an' taaking a long while. She 
 woan't know ye. Luke ye,' he continued, dropping his voice as 
 he opened the ' house ' door for her ; ' ef you want ayder ov oos, 
 you jest call oot sharp ! Mrs. Irwin, she'll stay in wi' ye she's 
 not af eeard ! ' 
 
 The superstitious excitement which the looks and gestures of 
 the old man expressed touched Catherine's imagination, and 
 she entered the room with an inward shiver. 
 
 Mary Backhouse lay raised high on her pillows, talking to 
 herself or to imaginary other persons, with eyes wide open 
 but vacant, and senses conscious of nothing but the dream 
 world in which the mind was wandering. Catherine sat 
 softly down beside her, unnoticed, thankful for the chances of 
 disease. If this delirium lasted till the ghost-hour the time of 
 twilight, that is to say, which would begin about half-past 
 eight, and the duration of which would depend on the cloudiness 
 of the evening was over, or, better still, till midnight were 
 past, the strain on the girl's agonised senses might be relieved, 
 and death come at last in softer, kinder guise. 
 
 ' Has she been long like this ? ' she asked softly of the neigh- 
 bour who sat quietly knitting by the evening light. 
 
 The woman looked up and thought. 
 
 'Ay!' she said. 'Aa came in at tea-time, an' she's been 
 maistly taakin' ivver sence ! ' 
 
 The incoherent whisperings and restless movements, which 
 obliged Catherine constantly to replace the coverings over 
 the poor wasted and fevered body, went on for some time. 
 Catherine noticed presently, with a little thrill, that the light 
 was beginning to change. The weather was growing darker 
 and stormier the wind shook the house in gusts ; and the 
 farther shoulder of High Fell, seen in distorted outline through 
 the casemented window, was almost hidden by the trailing rain 
 clouds. The mournful western light coming from behind the 
 house struck the river here and there ; almost everything else 
 was gray and dark. A mountain ash, just outside the window,
 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 139 
 
 brushed the panes every now and then ; and in the silence 
 every surrounding sound the rare movements in the next 
 room, the voices of quarrelling children round the door of a 
 neighbouring house, the far-off barking of dogs made itself 
 distinctly audible. 
 
 Suddenly Catherine, sunk in painful reverie, noticed that the 
 mutterings from the bed had ceased for some little time. She 
 turned her chair, and was startled to find those weird eyes fixed 
 with recognition on herself. There was a curious malign 
 intensity, a curious triumph in them. 
 
 'It must be eight o'clock,' said the gasping voice ' eight 
 o'clock;' and the tone became a whisper, as though the idea thus 
 half involuntarily revealed had been drawn jealously back into 
 the strongholds of consciousness. 
 
 ' Mary, said Catherine, falling on her knees beside the bed, 
 and taking one of the restless hands forcibly into her own, 
 ' can't you put this thought away from you ? We are not the 
 playthings of evil spirits we are the children of God ! We are 
 in His hands. No evil thing can harm us against His will.' 
 
 It was the first time for many days she had spoken openly of 
 the thought which was in the mind of all, and her whole 
 pleading soul was in her pale, beautiful face. There was no 
 response in the sick girl's countenance, and again that look of 
 triumph, of sinister exultation. They had tried to cheat her 
 into sleeping, and living, and in spite of them, at the supreme 
 moment, every sense was awake and expectant. To what was 
 the materialised peasant imagination looking forward ? To an 
 actual call, an actual following to the free mountain-side, the 
 rush of the wind, the phantom figure floating on before her, 
 bearing her into the heart of the storm ? Dread was gone, 
 pain was gone ; there was only rapt excitement and fierce 
 anticipation. 
 
 ' Mary,' said Catherine again, mistaking her mood for one of 
 tense defiance and despair, ' Mary, if I were to go out now and 
 leave Mrs. Irwin with you, and if I were to go up all the way to 
 the top of Shanmoss and back again, and if I could tell you 
 there was nothing there, nothing ! if I were to stay out till the 
 dark has come it will be here in half an hour and you could 
 be quite sure when you saw me again, that there was nothing 
 near you but the dear old hills, and the power of God, could you 
 believe me and try and rest and sleep V 
 
 Mary looked at her intently. If Catherine could have seen 
 clearly in the dim light she would have caught something of 
 the cunning of madness slipping into the dying woman's 
 expression. While she waited for the answer there was a noise 
 in the kitchen outside, an opening of the outer door, and a 
 voice. Catherine's heart stood still. She had to make a super- 
 human effort to keep her attention fixed on Mary. 
 
 ' Go ! ' said the hoarse whisper close beside her, and the girl 
 lifted her wasted hand, and pushed her visitor from her. ' Go ! '
 
 140 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 it repeated insistently, with a sort of wild beseeching; then, 
 brokenly, the gasping breath interrupting, ' There's naw fear 
 naw fear fur the likes o' you ! ' 
 
 Catherine rose. 
 
 ' I'm not afraid,' she said gently, but her hand shook as she 
 pushed her chair back ; ' God is everywhere, Mary.' 
 
 She put on her hat and cloak, said something in Mrs. Irwin's 
 ear, and stooped to kiss the brow which to the shuddering sense 
 under her will seemed already cold and moist with the sweats 
 of death. Mary watched her go ; Mrs. Irwin, with the air of 
 one bewildered, drew her chair nearer to the settle ; and the 
 light of the fire, shooting and dancing through the June twilight, 
 threw such fantastic shadows over the face on the pillow that 
 all expression was lost. What was moving in the crazed mind ? 
 Satisfaction, perhaps, at having got rid of one witness, one jailer, 
 one of the various antagonistic forces surrounding her? She 
 had a dim frenzied notion she should have to fight for her 
 liberty when the call came, and she lay tense and rigid, waiting 
 the images of insanity whirling through her brain, while the 
 light slowly, slowly waned. 
 
 Catherine opened the door into the kitchen. The two 
 carriers were standing there, and .Robert Elsmere also stood 
 with his back to her, talking to them in an undertone. 
 
 He turned at the sound behind him, and his start brought a 
 sudden flush to Catherine's cheek. Her face, as the candle-light 
 struck it amid the shadows of the doorway, was like an angelic 
 vision to him the heavenly calm of it just exquisitely broken 
 by the wonder, the shock, of his presence. 
 
 ' You here ? ' he cried, coming up to her, and taking her hand 
 what secret instinct guided him ? close in both of his. ' I 
 never dreamt of it so late. My cousin sent me over she 
 wished for news.' 
 
 She smiled involuntarily. It seemed to her she had 
 expected this in some sort all along. But her self-possession 
 was complete. 
 
 ' The excited state may be over in a short time now,' she 
 answered him in a quiet whisper ; ' but at present it is at its 
 height. It seemed to please her ' and withdrawing her hand 
 she turned to John Backhouse ' when I suggested that I should 
 walk up to Shanmoss and back. I said I would come back to 
 her in half an hour or so, when the daylight was quite gone, and 
 prove to her there was nothing on the path.' 
 
 A hand caught her arm. It was Mrs. Irwin, holding the door 
 close with the other hand. 
 
 ' Miss Leyburn Miss Catherine ! Yur not gawin' oot not 
 gawin' oop that path?' The woman was fond of Catherine, and 
 looked deadly frightened. 
 
 ' Yes, I am, Mrs. Irwin but I shall be back very soon. Don't 
 leave her ; go back.' And Catherine motioned her back with a 
 little peremptory gesture.
 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 141 
 
 ' Doan't ye let 'ur, sir,' said the woman excitedly to Robert. 
 ' One's eneuf aa'm thinking.' And she pointed with a meaning 
 gesture to the room behind her. 
 
 Robert looked at Catherine, who was moving towards the 
 outer door. 
 
 ' I'll go with her,' he said hastily, his face lighting up. ' There 
 is nothing whatever to be afraid of, only don't leave your 
 patient.' 
 
 Catherine trembled as she heard the words, but she made no 
 sign, and the two men and the woman watched their departure 
 with blank uneasy wonderment. A second later they were on 
 the fell-side climbing a rough stony path, which in places was 
 almost a watercourse, and which wound up the fell towards a 
 tract of level swampy moss or heath, beyond which lay the 
 descent to Shanmoor. Daylight was almost gone ; the stormy 
 yellow west was being fast swallowed up in cloud ; below them 
 as they climbed lay the dark group of houses, with a light 
 twinkling here and there. All about them were black mountain 
 forms ; a desolate tempestuous wind drove a gusty rain into 
 their faces ; a little beck roared beside them, and in the 
 distance from the black gulf of the valley the swollen river 
 thundered. 
 
 Elsmere looked down on his companion with an indescribable 
 exultation, a passionate sense of possession which could hardly 
 restrain itself. He had come back that morning with a mind 
 clearly made up. Catherine had been blind indeed when she 
 supposed that any plan of his or hers would have been allowed 
 to stand in the way of that last wrestle with her, of which he 
 had planned all the methods, rehearsed all the arguments. But 
 when he reached the vicarage he was greeted with the news of 
 her absence. She was inaccessible it appeared for the day. No 
 matter ! The vicar and he settled in the fewest possible words 
 that he should stay till Monday, Mrs. Thornburgh meanwhile 
 looking on, saying what civility demanded, and surprisingly 
 little else. Then in the evening Mrs. Thornburgh had asked of 
 him with a manner of admirable indifference whether he felt 
 inclined for an evening walk to High Ghyll to inquire after 
 Mary Backhouse. The request fell in excellently with a lover's 
 restlessness, and Robert assented at once. The vicar saw him 
 go with puzzled brows and a quick look at his wife, whose head 
 was bent close over her worsted work. 
 
 It never occurred to Elsmere or if it did occur, he pooh- 
 poohed the notion that he should find Catherine still at her 
 post far from home on this dark stormy evening. But in the 
 glow of joy which her presence had brought him he was still 
 capable of all sorts of delicate perceptions and reasonings. His 
 quick imagination carried him through the scene from which 
 she had just momentarily escaped. He had understood the 
 exaltation of her look and tone. If love spoke at all, ringed 
 with such surroundings, it must be with its most inward and
 
 142 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 spiritual voice, as those speak who feel ' the Eternities ' about 
 them. 
 
 But the darkness hid her from him so well that he had to 
 feel out the situation for himself. He could not trace it in her 
 face. 
 
 ' We must go right up to the top of the pass,' she said to him 
 as he held a gate open for her which led them into a piece of 
 larch plantation on the mountain-side. ' The ghost is supposed 
 to walk along this bit of road above the houses, till it reaches 
 the heath on the top, and then it turns towards Bleacliff Tarn, 
 which lies higher up to the right, under High Fell.' 
 
 ' Do you imagine your report will have any effect ? ' 
 
 ' At any rate,' she said sighing, ' it seemed to me that it might 
 divert her thoughts a little from the actual horror of her own 
 summons. Anything is better than the torture of that one fixed 
 idea as she lies there.' 
 
 ' What is that ? ' said Robert, startled a little by some ghostly 
 sounds in front of them. The little wood was almost dark, and 
 he could see nothing. 
 
 ' Only a horse trotting on in front of us,' said Catherine ; 
 ' our voices frightened him, I suppose. We shall be out on the 
 fell again directly.' 
 
 And as they quitted the trees, a dark bulky form to the left 
 suddenly lifted a shadowy head from the grass, and clattered 
 down the slope. 
 
 A cluster of white -stemmed birches just ahead of them 
 caught whatever light was still left in the atmosphere, their 
 feathery tops bending and swaying against the sky. 
 
 ' How easily, with mind attuned, one could people this whole 
 path with ghosts ! ' said Robert. ' Look at those stems, and 
 that line of stream coming down to the right, and listen to the 
 wind among the fern.' 
 
 For they were passing a little gully deep in bracken, up 
 which the blast was tearing its tempestuous way. 
 
 Catherine shivered a little, and the sense of physical exhaus- 
 tion, which had been banished like everything else doubt, 
 humiliation, bitterness by the one fact of his presence, came 
 back on her. 
 
 ' There is something rather awful in this dark and storm,' she 
 said, and paused. 
 
 ' Would you have faced it alone ? ' he asked, his voice thrilling 
 her with a hundred different meanings. ' I am glad I prevented 
 it.' 
 
 ' I have no fear of the mountains,' she said, trembling. ' I 
 know them, and they me.' 
 
 ' But you are tired your voice is tired and the walk might 
 have been more of an effort than you thought it. Do you never 
 think of yourself 1 ' 
 
 ' Oh dear, yes,' said Catherine, trying to smile, and could find 
 nothing else to say. They walked on a few moments in silence,
 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 143 
 
 splashes of rain breaking in their faces. Robert's inward ex- 
 citement was growing fast. Suddenly Catherine's pulse stood 
 still. She felt her hand lifted, drawn within his arm, covered 
 close with his warm trembling clasp. 
 
 ' Catherine, let it stay there. Listen one moment. You gave 
 me a hard lesson yesterday, too hard I cannot learn it-^-I am 
 bold I claim you. Be my wife. Help me through this difficult 
 world. I have loved you from the first moment. Come to me. 
 Be kind to me.' 
 
 She could hardly see his face, but she could feel the passion 
 in his voice and touch. Her cheek seemed to droop against his 
 arm. He felt her tottering. 
 
 ' Let me sit down,' she said ; and after one moment of dizzy 
 silence he guided her to a rock, sinking down himself beside 
 her, longing, but not daring, to shelter her under his broad 
 Inverness cloak against the storm. 
 
 ' I told you,' she said, almost whispering, ' that I was bound, 
 tied to others.' 
 
 ' I do not admit your plea,' he said passionately ; ' no, not for 
 a moment. For two days have I been tramping over the moun- 
 tains thinking it out for yourself and me. Catherine, your 
 mother has no son she should find one in me. I have no sisters 
 give me yours. I will cherish them as any brother could. 
 Come and enrich my life ; you shall still fill and shelter theirs. 
 I dare not think what my future might be with you to guide, 
 to inspire, to bless dare not, lest with a word you should 
 plunge me into an outer darkness I cannot face.' 
 
 He caught her unresisting hand, and raised it to his lips. 
 
 ' Is there no sacredness,' he said brokenly, ' in the fate that 
 has brought us together out of all the world here in this 
 lonely valley ? Come to me, Catherine. You shall never .fail 
 the old ties, I promise you ; and new hands shall cling to you 
 new voices shall call you blessed.' 
 
 Catherine could hardly breathe. Every word had been like 
 balm upon a wound like a ray of intense light in the gloom 
 about them. Oh, where was this softness bearing her this 
 emptiness of all will, of all individual power ? She hid her eyes 
 with her other hand, struggling to recall that far away[moment 
 in Marrisdale. But the mind refused to work. Consciousness 
 seemed to retain nothing but the warm grasp of his hand the 
 tones of his voice. 
 
 He saw her struggle, and pressed on remorselessly. 
 
 'Speak to me say one little kind word. Oh, you cannot 
 send me away miserable and empty ! ' 
 
 She turned to him, and laid her trembling free hand on his 
 arm. He clasped them both with rapture. 
 
 ' Give me a little time.' 
 
 ' No, no,' he said, and it almost seemed to her that he was 
 smiling : ' time for you to escape me again, my wild mountain 
 bird ; time for you to think yourself and me into all sorts of
 
 144 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 moral mists ! No, you shall not have it. Here, alone with God 
 and the dark bless me or undo me. Send me out to the work 
 of life maimed and sorrowful, or send me out your knight, your 
 possession, pledged 
 
 But his voice failed him. What a note of youth, of imagina- 
 tion, of impulsive eagerness there was through it all ! The more 
 slowly -moving inarticulate nature was swept away by it. There 
 was but one object clear to her in the whole world of thought 
 or sense, everything else had sunk out of sight drowned in a 
 luminous mist. 
 
 He rose and stood before her as he delivered his ultimatum, 
 his tall form drawn up to its full height. In the east, across 
 the valley, above the farther buttress of High Fell, there was a 
 clearer strip of sky, visible for a moment among the moving 
 storm clouds, and a dim haloed moon shone out in it. Far away 
 a white-walled cottage glimmered against the fell ; the pools at 
 their feet shone in the weird passing light. 
 
 She lifted her head, and looked at him, still irresolute. Then 
 she too rose, and helplessly, like some one impelled by a will 
 not her own, she silently held out to him two white trembling 
 hands. 
 
 ' Catherine my angel my wife ! ' 
 
 There was something in the pale virginal grace of look and 
 form which kept his young passion in awe. But he bent his 
 head again over those yielded hands, kissing them with dizzy 
 unspeakable joy. 
 
 About twenty minutes later Catherine and Robert, having 
 hurried back with all speed from the top of Shanmoss, reached 
 the farmhouse door. She knocked. No one answered. She 
 tried the lock ; it yielded, and they entered. No one in the 
 kitchen. She looked disturbed and conscience-stricken. 
 
 ' Oh ! ' she cried to him, under her breath ; ' have we been 
 too long?' And hurrying into the inner room she left him 
 waiting. 
 
 Inside was a mournful sight. The two men and Mrs. Irwin 
 stood close round the settle, but as she came nearer, Catherine 
 saw Mary Backhouse lying panting on her pillows, her breath 
 coming in loud gasps, her dress and all the coverings of the bed 
 showing signs of disorder and confusion, her black hair tossed 
 about her. 
 
 'It's bin awfu' work sence you left, miss,' whispered Mrs. 
 Irwin to Catherine excitedly, as she joined them. 'She thowt 
 she heerd soombody fleytin' and callin' it was t' wind came 
 skirlin' round t' place, an' she aV but thrown hirsel' oot o' t' 
 bed, an' aa shooted for Jim, and they came, and they and I 
 it's bin as much as we could a' du to hod 'er.' 
 
 ' Luke ! Steady ! ' exclaimed Jim. ' She'll try it again.' 
 
 For the hands were moving restlessly from side to side, and 
 the face was working again. There was one more desperate 

 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 145 
 
 effort to rise, which the two men checked gently enough, but 
 effectually and then the exhaustion seemed complete. The 
 lids fell, and the struggle for breath was pitiful. 
 
 Catherine flew for some drugs which the doctor had left, and 
 shown her how to use. After some twenty minutes they seemed 
 to give relief, and the great haunted eyes opened once more. 
 
 Catherine held barley-water to the parched lips, and Mary 
 drank mechanically, her gaze still intently fixed on her nurse. 
 When Catherine put down the glass the eyes followed her with 
 a question which the lips had no power to frame. 
 
 Leave her now a little,' said Catherine to the others. ' The 
 fewer people and the more air the better. And please let the 
 door be open ; the room is too hot.' 
 
 They went out silently, and Catherine sank down beside the 
 bed. Her heart went out in unspeakable longing towards the 
 poor human wreck before her. For her there was no morrow 
 possible, no dawn of other and softer skies. All was over : life 
 was lived, and all its heavenly capabilities missed for ever. 
 Catherine felt her own joy hurt her, and her tears fell fast. 
 
 ' Mary,' she said, laying her face close beside the chill face on 
 the pillow, ' Mary, I went out ; I climbed all the path as far as 
 Shanmoss. There was nothing evil there. Oh, I must tell you ! 
 Can I make you understand ? I want you to feel that it is only 
 God and love that are real. Oh, think of them ! He would 
 not let you be hurt and terrified in your pain, poor Mary. He 
 loves you. He is waiting to comfort you to set you free from 
 pain for ever ; and He has sent you a sign by me.' . . . She 
 lifted her head from the pillow, trembling and hesitating. Still 
 that feverish questioning gaze on the face beneath her, as it lay 
 in deep shadow cast by a light on the window-sill some paces 
 away. 
 
 ' You sent me out, Mary, to search for something, the thought 
 of which has been tormenting and torturing you. You thought 
 God would let a dark lost spirit trouble you and take you away 
 from Him you, His child, whom He made and whom He loves ! 
 And listen ! While you thought you were sending me out to 
 face the evil thing, you were really my kind angel God's 
 messenger sending me to meet the joy of my whole life ! 
 
 'There was some one waiting here just now,' she went on 
 hurriedly, breathing her sobbing words into Mary's ear. ' Some 
 one who has loved me, and whom I love. But I had made him 
 sad, and myself ; then when you sent me out he came too : we 
 walked up that path, you remember, beyond the larchwooa, up 
 to the top, where the stream goes under the road. And there 
 he spoke to me 2 and I couldn t help it any more. And I pro- 
 mised to love him and be his wife. And if it hadn't been for 
 you, Mary, it would never have happened. God had put it into 
 your hand, this joy, and I bless you for it ! Oh, and Mary Mary 
 it is only for a little little while this life of ours ! Nothing 
 matters not our worst sin and sorrow but God, and our love 
 
 L
 
 146 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK i 
 
 to Him. I shall meet you some day I pray I may in His 
 sight and all will be well, the pain all forgotten all ! ' 
 
 She raised herself again and looked down with yearning 
 passionate pity on the shadowed form. Oh, blessed answer 
 of heart to heart ! There were tears forming under the heavy 
 lids, the corners of the lips were relaxed and soft. Slowly the 
 feeble hand sought her own. She waited in an intense expec- 
 tant silence. 
 
 There was a faint breathing from the lips ; she stooped and 
 caught it. 
 
 ' Kiss me ! ' said the whisper ; and she laid her soft fresh lips 
 to the parched mouth of the dying. When she lifted her head 
 again Mary still held her hand ; Catherine softly stretched out 
 hers for the opiate Dr. Baker had left ; it was swallowed without 
 resistance, and a quiet to which the invalid had been a stranger 
 for days stole little by little over the wasted frame. The grasp 
 of the fingers relaxed, the laboured breath came more gently, 
 and in a few more minutes she slept. Twilight was long over. 
 The ghost-hour was past, and the moon outside was slowly 
 gaining a wider empire in the clearing heavens. 
 
 It was a little after ten o'clock when Rose drew aside the 
 curtain at Burwood and looked out. 
 
 'There is the lantern,' she said to Agnes, 'just by the vicar- 
 age. How the night has cleared ! ' 
 
 She turned back to her book. Agnes was writing letters. 
 Mrs. Leyburn was sitting by the bit of fire that was generally 
 lit for her benefit in the evenings, her white shawl dropping 
 gracefully about her, a copy of the Comhill on her lap. But 
 she was not reading, she was meditating, and the girls thought 
 her out of spirits. The hall door opened. 
 
 ' There is some one with Catherine ! ' cried Rose, starting up. 
 Agnes suspended her letter. 
 
 ' Perhaps the vicar,' said Mrs. Leyburn, with a little sigh. 
 
 A hand turned the drawing-room door, and in the doorway 
 stood Elsmere. Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up the 
 little stairs behind him. 
 
 Elsmere's look was enough for the two girls. They under- 
 stood in an instant. Rose flushed all over. The first contact 
 with love is intoxicating to any girl of eighteen, even though 
 the romance be not hers. But Mrs. Leyburn sat bewildered. 
 
 Elsmere went up to her, stooped and took her hand. 
 
 'Will you give her to me, Mrs. Leyburn?' he said, his boyish 
 looks aglow, his voice unsteady. ' Will you let me be a son to 
 you?' 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn rose. He still held her hand. She looked up 
 at him helplessly. 
 
 'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, where is Catherine?' 
 
 ' I brought her home,' he said gently. ' She is mine, if you 
 will it. Give her to me again !'
 
 CHAP, x WESTMORELAND 147 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn's face worked pitifully. The rectory and the 
 wedding dress, which had lingered so regretfully in her thoughts 
 since her last sight of Catherine, sank out of them altogether. 
 
 ' She has been everything in the world to us, Mr. Elsmere.' 
 
 ' I know she has,' he said simply. ' She shall be everything 
 in the world to you still. I have had hard work to persuade 
 her. There will be no chance for me if you don't help me.' 
 
 Another breathless pause. Then Mrs. Ley burn timidly 
 drew him to her, and he stooped his tall head and kissed her 
 like a son. 
 
 'Oh, I must go to Catherine !' she said, hurrying away, her 
 pretty withered cheeks wet with tears. 
 
 Then the girls threw themselves on Elsmere. The talk was 
 all animation and excitement for the moment, not a tragic 
 touch in it. It was as well perhaps that Catherine was not 
 there to hear ! 
 
 ' I give you fair warning,' said Rose, as she bade him good- 
 night, ' that I don't know how to behave to a brother. And I 
 am equally sure that Mrs. Thornburgh doesn't know how to 
 behave to &Jianc&' 
 
 Robert threw up his arms in mock terror at the name, and 
 departed. 
 
 'We are abandoned,' cried Rose, flinging herself into the 
 chair again then with a little flash of half irresolute wicked- 
 ness ' and we are free ! Oh, I hope she will be happy !' 
 
 And she caught Agnes wildly round the neck as though she 
 would drown her first words in her last. 
 
 ' Madcap ! ' cried Agnes, struggling. ' Leave me at least a 
 little breath to wish Catherine joy !' 
 
 And they both fled upstairs. 
 
 There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms 
 than Mjs. Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation 
 downstairs she could not persuade herself to go to bed. She 
 first knocked up Sarah and communicated the news ; then she 
 sat down before a pier-glass in her own room studying the person 
 who had found Catherine Leyburn a husband. 
 
 ' My doing from beginning to end,' she cried with a triumph 
 beyond words. ' William has had nothing to do with it. Robert 
 has had scarcely as much. And to think how little I dreamt of 
 it when I began ! Well, to be sure, no one could have planned 
 marrying those two. There's no one but Providence could have 
 foreseen it they're so different. And after all it's done. Now 
 then, whom shall I have next year ?'
 
 BOOK II 
 
 SUEKEY
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 FAREWELL to the mountains ! 
 
 The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history 
 is to run its course is of a very different kind. In place of the 
 rugged northern nature a nature wild and solitary indeed, but 
 still rich, luxuriant, and friendly to the senses of the traveller, 
 even in its loneliest places. The heaths and woods of some 
 districts of Surrey are scarcely more thickly peopled than the 
 fells of Westmoreland ; the walker may wander for miles, and 
 still enjoy an untamed primitive earth, guiltless of boundary or 
 furrow, the undisturbed home of all that grows and flies, where 
 the rabbits, the lizards, and the birds five their life as they 
 please, either ignorant of intruding man or strangely little 
 incommoded by his neighbourhood. And yet there is nothing 
 forbidding or austere in these wide solitudes. The patches of 
 graceful birch -wood; the miniature lakes nestling among 
 them ; the brakes of ling pink, faintly scented, a feast for 
 every sense ; the stretches of purple heather, glowing into 
 scarlet under the touch of the sun ; the scattered farm-houses, 
 so mellow in colour, so pleasant in outline ; the general softness 
 and lavishness of the earth and all it bears, make these Surrey 
 commons not a wilderness but a paradise. Nature, indeed, here 
 is like some spoilt petulant child. She will bring forth nothing, 
 or almost nothing, for man's grosser needs. Ask her to bear 
 corn or pasture flocks, and she will be miserly and grudging. 
 But ask her only to be beautiful, enticing, capriciously lovely, 
 and she will throw herself into the task with all the abandon- 
 ment, all the energy, that heart could wish. 
 
 It is on the borders of one of the wilder districts of a county, 
 which is throughout a strange mixture of suburbanism and the 
 desert, that we next meet with Robert and Catherine Elsmere. 
 The rectory of Murewell occupied the highest point of a gentle 
 swell of ground which sloped through cornfields and woods to a 
 plain of boundless heather on the south, and climbed away on 
 the north towards the long chalk ridge of the Hog's Back. It 
 was a square white house pretending neither to beauty nor 
 state, a little awkwardly and barely placed, with only a small 
 stretch of grass and a low hedge between it and the road. A
 
 152 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK u 
 
 few tall firs climbing above the roof gave a little grace and 
 clothing to its southern side, and behind it there was a garden 
 sloping softly down towards the village at its foot a garden 
 chiefly noticeable for its grass walks, the luxuriance of the fruit 
 trees clinging to its old red walls, and the masses of pink and 
 white phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and 
 the gaiety of an Elizabethan song. Below in the hollow and to 
 the right lay the picturesque medley of the village roofs and 
 gables and chimneys, yellow-gray thatch, shining whitewash, 
 and mellowed brick, making a bright patchwork among the 
 softening trees, thin wreaths of blue smoke, like airy ribbons, 
 tangled through it all. Rising over the rest was a house of 
 some dignity. It had been an old manor-house, now it was half 
 ruinous and the village inn. Some generations back the squire 
 of the day had dismantled it, jealous that so big a house should 
 exist in the same parish as the Hall, and the spoils of it had 
 furnished the rectory ; so that the homely house was fitted 
 inside with mahogany doors and carved cupboard fronts, in 
 which Robert delighted, and in which even Catherine felt a 
 proprietary pleasure. 
 
 Altogether a quiet, rural, English spot. If the house had no 
 beauty, it commanded a world of loveliness. All around it - 
 north, south, and west there spread, as it were, a vast play- 
 ground of heather and wood and grassy common, in which the 
 few workaday patches of hedge and ploughed land seemed 
 ingulfed and lost. Close under the rectory windows, however, 
 was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the glebe, the largest 
 and fruitfulest of the neighbourhood. At the present moment 
 it was just ready for the reaper the golden ears had clearly 
 but a few more days or hours to ripple in the sun. It was 
 bounded by a dark summer-scorched belt of wood, and beyond, 
 over the distance, rose a blue pointed hill, which seemed to be 
 there only to attract and make a centre for the sunsets. 
 
 As compared with her Westmoreland life, the first twelve 
 months of wifehood had been to Catherine Elsmere a time of 
 rapid and changing experience. A few days out of their honey- 
 moon had been spent at Oxford. It was a week before the 
 opening of the October term, but many of the senior members 
 of the University were already in residence, and the stagnation 
 of the Long Vacation was over. Langham was up ; so was Mr. 
 Grey, and many another old friend of Robert's. The bride and 
 bridegroom were much feted in a quiet way. They dined in 
 many common rooms and bursaries ; they were invited to many 
 luncheons, whereat the superabundance of food and the length 
 of time spent upon it made the Puritan Catherine uncomfort- 
 able ; and Langham devoted himself to taking the wife through 
 colleges and gardens, Schools and Bodleian, in most orthodox 
 fashion, indemnifying himself afterwards for the sense of con- 
 straint her presence imposed upon him by a talk and a smoke 
 with Robert.
 
 CHAP, xi SURREY 153 
 
 He could not understand the Elsmere marriage. That a 
 creature so mobile, so sensitive, so susceptible as Elsmere should 
 have fallen in love with this stately silent woman, with her 
 very evident rigidities of thought and training, was only another 
 illustration of the mysteries of matrimony. He could not get 
 on with her, and after a while did not try to do so. 
 
 There could be no doubt as to Elsmere's devotion. He was 
 absorbed, wrapped up in her. 
 
 ' She has affected him,' thought the tutor, ' at a period of life 
 when he is more struck by the difficulty of being morally strong 
 than by the difficulty of being intellectually clear. The touch 
 of religious genius in her braces him like the breath of an Alpine 
 wind. One can see him expanding, glowing under it. ien ! 
 sooner he than I. To be fair, however, let me remember that 
 she decidedly does not like me which may cut me off from 
 Elsmere. However ' and Langham sighed over his fire ' what 
 have he and I to do with one another in the future ? By all the 
 laws of character something untoward might come out of this 
 marriage. But she will mould him, rather than he her. Besides, 
 she will have children and that solves most things.' 
 
 Meanwhile, if Langham dissected the bride as he dissected 
 most people, Robert, with that keen observation which lay 
 hidden somewhere under his careless boyish ways, noticed many 
 points of change about his old friend. Langham seemed to him 
 less human, more strange, than ever ; the points of contact 
 between him and active life were lessening in number term by 
 term. He lectured only so far as was absolutely necessary for 
 the retention of his post, and he spoke with wholesale distaste 
 of his pupils. He had set up a book on ' The Schools of Athens,' 
 but when Robert saw the piles of disconnected notes already 
 accumulated, he perfectly understood that the book was a mere 
 blind, a screen, behind which a difficult fastidious nature trifled 
 and procrastinated as it pleased. 
 
 Again, when Elsmere was an undergraduate Langham and 
 Grey had been intimate. Now, Langham's tone apropos of 
 Grey's politics and Grey's dreams of Church Reform was as 
 languidly sarcastic as it was with regard to most of the strenu- 
 ous things of life. 'Nothing particular is true,' his manner 
 said, ' and all action is a degrading pis-aller. Get through the 
 day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people 
 as may be ; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven's sake, 
 don't cant about it to other people ! ' 
 
 If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and 
 Henry Grey should certainly have understood each other. The 
 tutor liked the look of Elsmere's wife. His kindly brown eyes 
 rested on her with pleasure ; he tried in his shy but friendly 
 way to get at her, and there was in both of them a touch of 
 homeliness, a sheer power of unworldliness that should have 
 drawn them together. And indeed Catherine felt the charm, 
 the spell of this born leader of men. But she watched him with
 
 154 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 a sort of troubled admiration, puzzled, evidently, by the halo of 
 moral dignity surrounding him, which contended with something 
 else in her mind respecting him. Some words of Robert's, 
 uttered very early in their acquaintance, had set her on her 
 guard. Speaking of religion, Robert had said, ' Grey is not one 
 of us ' ; and Catherine, restrained by a hundred ties of training 
 and temperament, would not surrender herself, and could not if 
 she would. 
 
 Then had followed their home-coming to the rectory, and that 
 first institution of their common life, never to be forgotten for 
 the tenderness and the sacredness of it. Mrs. Elsmere had 
 received them, and had then retired to a little cottage of her 
 own close by. She had of course already made the acquaintance 
 of her daughter-in-law, for she had been the Thornburghs' guest 
 for ten days before the marriage in September, and Catherine, 
 moreover, had paid her a short visit earlier in the summer. 
 But it was now that for the first time she realised to the full 
 the character of the woman Robert had married. Catherine's 
 manner to her was sweetness itself. Parted from her own 
 mother as she was, the younger woman's strong filial instincts 
 spent themselves in tending the mother who had been the 
 guardian and life of Robert's youth. And Mrs. Elsmere in 
 return was awed by Catherine's moral force and purity of 
 nature, and proud of her personal beauty, which was so real, in 
 spite of the severity of the type, and to which marriage had 
 given, at any rate for the moment, a certain added softness and 
 brilliancy. 
 
 But there were difficulties in the way. Catherine was a little 
 too apt to treat Mrs. Elsmere as she would have treated her own 
 mother. But to be nursed and protected, to be screened from 
 draughts, and run after with shawls and stools was something 
 wholly new and intolerable to Mrs. Elsmere. She could not 
 away with it, and as soon as she had sufficiently lost her first 
 awe of her daughter-in-law she would revenge herself in all 
 sorts of droll ways, and with occasional flashes of petulant 
 Irish wit which would make Catherine colour and draw back. 
 Then Mrs. Elsmere, touched with remorse, would catch her by 
 the neck and give her a resounding kiss, which perhaps puzzled 
 Catherine no less than her sarcasm of a minute before. 
 
 Moreover Mrs. Elsmere felt ruefully from the first that 
 her new daughter was decidedly deficient in the sense of 
 humour. 
 
 ' I believe it's that father of hers,' she would say to herself 
 crossly. ' By what Robert tells me of him he must have been 
 one ot the people who get ill in their minds for want of a good 
 mouth-filling laugh now and then. The man who can't amuse 
 himself a bit out of the world is sure to get his head addled 
 somehow, poor creature.' 
 
 Certainly it needed a faculty of laughter to be always able 
 to take Mrs. Elsmere on the right side. For instance, Catherine
 
 CHAP, xi SURREY 155 
 
 was more often scandalised than impressed by her mother-in- 
 law's charitable performances. 
 
 Mrs. Elsmeres little cottage was filled with workhouse 
 orphans sent to her from different London districts. The train- 
 ing of these girls was the chief business of her life, and a very 
 odd training it was, conducted in the noisiest way and on the 
 most familiar terms. It was undeniable that the girls generally 
 did well, and they invariably adored Mrs. Elsmere, but Catherine 
 did not much like to think about them. Their household teach- 
 ing under Mrs. Elsmere and her old servant Martha as great 
 an original as herself was so irregular, their religious training 
 so extraordinary, the clothes in which they were allowed to 
 disport themselves so scandalous to the sober taste of the 
 rector's wife, that Catherine involuntarily regarded the little 
 cottage on the hill as a spot of misrule in the general order of 
 the parish. She would go in, say, at eleven o'clock in the morn- 
 ing, find her mother-in-law in bed, half-dressed, with all her 
 handmaidens about her, giving her orders, reading her letters 
 and the newspaper, cutting out her girls frocks, instructing 
 them in the fashions, or delivering little homilies on questions 
 suggested by the news of the day to the more intelligent of 
 them. The room, the whole house, would seem to Catherine in 
 a detestable litter. If so, Mrs. Elsmere never apologised for it. 
 On the contrary, as she saw Catherine sweep a mass of miscel- 
 laneous debris off a chair in search of a seat, the small bright 
 eyes would twinkle with something that was certainly nearer 
 amusement than shame. 
 
 And in a hundred other ways Mrs. Elsmere's relations with 
 the poor of the parish often made Catherine miserable. She 
 herself had the most angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows 
 and sinners ; but sin was sin to her, and when she saw Mrs. 
 Elsmere more than half attracted by the stronger vices, and in 
 many cases more inclined to laugh with what was human in 
 them than to weep over what was vile, Robert's wife would go 
 away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into 
 nothing harsh towards Robert's mother. 
 
 But fate allowed their differences, whether they were deep 
 or shallow, no time to develop. A week of bitter cold at the 
 beginning of January struck down Mrs. Elsmere, whose strange 
 ways of living were more the result of certain long-standing 
 delicacies of health than she had ever allowed any one to imagine. 
 A few days of acute inflammation of the lungs, borne with a 
 patience and heroism which showed the Irish character at its 
 finest a moment of agonised wrestling with that terror of 
 death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its 
 earliest consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory 
 and Robert found himself motherless. He and Catherine had 
 never left her since the beginning of the illness. In one of the 
 intervals towards the end, when there was a faint power of 
 speech, she drew Catherine's cheek down to her and kissed her.
 
 156 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 ' God bless you ! ' the old woman's voice said, with a solemnity 
 in it which Robert knew well, but which Catherine had never 
 heard before. ' Be good to him, Catherine be always good to 
 him!' 
 
 And she lay looking from the husband to the wife Math a 
 certain wistfulness which pained Catherine, she knew not why. 
 But she answered with tears and tender words, and at last the 
 mother's face settled into a peace which death did but confirm. 
 
 This great and unexpected loss, which had shaken to their 
 depths all the feelings and affections of his youth, had thrown 
 Elsmere more than ever on his wife. To him, made as it seemed 
 for love and for enjoyment, grief was a novel and difficult 
 burden. He felt with passionate gratitude that his wife helped 
 him to bear it so that he came out from it not lessened but 
 ennobled, that she preserved him from many a lapse of nervous 
 weariness and irritation into which his temperament might 
 easily have been betrayed. 
 
 And how his very dependence had endeared him to Catherine ! 
 That vibrating responsive quality in him, so easily mistaken 
 for mere weakness, which made her so necessary to him there 
 is nothing perhaps which wins more deeply upon a woman. 
 For all the while it was balanced in a hundred ways by the 
 illimitable respect which his character and his doings compelled 
 from those about him. To be the strength, the inmost joy of a 
 man who within the conditions of his life seems to you a hero 
 at every turn there is no happiness more penetrating for a 
 wife than this. 
 
 On this August afternoon the Elsmeres were expecting visi- 
 tors. Catherine had sent the pony-carriage to the station to 
 meet Rose and Langham, who was to escort her from Waterloo. 
 For various reasons, all characteristic, it was Rose's first visit 
 to Catherine's new home. 
 
 Now she had been for six weeks in London, and had been 
 persuaded to come on to her sister, at the end of her stay. 
 Catherine was looking forward to her coming with many 
 tremors. The wild ambitious creature had been not one atom 
 appeased by Manchester and its opportunities. She had gone 
 back to Whindale in April only to fall into more hopeless dis- 
 content than ever. ' She can hardly be civil to anybody,' Agnes 
 wrote to Catherine. ' The cry now is all " London " or at least 
 " Berlin," and she cannot imagine why papa should ever have 
 wished to condemn us to such a prison.' 
 
 Catherine grew pale with indignation as she read the words, 
 and thought of her father's short-lived joy in the old house and 
 its few green fields, or of the confidence which had soothed his 
 last moments, that it would be well there with his wife and 
 children, far from the hubbub of the world. 
 
 But Rose and her whims were not facts which could be 
 put aside. They would have to be grappled with, probably
 
 CHAP, xi SURREY 157 
 
 humoured. As Catherine strolled out into the garden, listening 
 alternately for Robert and for the carriage, she told herself that 
 it would be a difficult visit. And the presence of Mr. Langham 
 would certainly not diminish its difficulty. The mere thought 
 of him set the wife's young form stiffening. A cold breath 
 seemed to blow from Edward Langham, which chilled Catherine's 
 whole being. Why was Robert so fond of him ? 
 
 But the more Langham cut himself off from the world, the 
 more Robert clung to him in his wistful affectionate way. The 
 more difficult their intercourse became, the more determined 
 the younger man seemed to be to maintain it. Catherine 
 imagined that he often scourged himself in secret for the fact 
 that the gratitude which had once flowed so readily had now 
 become a matter of reflection and resolution. 
 
 'Why should we always expect to get pleasure from our 
 friends ? ' he had said to her once with vehemence. ' It should 
 be pleasure enough to love them.' And she knew very well of 
 whom he was thinking. 
 
 How late he was this afternoon. He must have been a long 
 round. She had news for him of great interest. The lodge- 
 keeper from the Hall had just looked in to tell the rector that 
 the squire and his widowed sister were expected home in four 
 days. 
 
 But, interesting as the news was, Catherine's looks as she 
 pondered it were certainly not looks of pleased expectation. 
 Neither of them, indeed, had much cause to rejoice in the 
 squire's advent. Since their arrival in the parish the splendid 
 Jacobean Hall had been untenanted. The squire, who was 
 abroad with his sister at the time of their coming, had sent a 
 civil note to the new rector on his settlement in the parish, 
 naming some common Oxford acquaintances, and desiring him 
 to make what use of the famous Murewell Library he pleased. 
 ' I hear of you as a friend to letters,' he wrote ; ' do my books 
 a service by using them.' The words were graceful enough. 
 Robert had answered them warmly. He had also availed him- 
 self largely of the permission they had conveyed. We shall see 
 presently that the squire, though absent, had already made a 
 deep impression on the young man's imagination. 
 
 But unfortunately he came across the squire in two capac- 
 ities. Mr. Wendover was not only the owner of Murewell, he 
 was also the owner of the whole land of the parish, where, how- 
 ever, by a curious accident of inheritance, dating some genera- 
 tions back, and implying some very remote connection between 
 the Wendover and Elsmere families, he was not the patron of 
 the living. Now the more Elsmere studied him under this 
 aspect, the deeper became his dismay. The estate was entirely 
 in the hands of an agent who had managed it for some fifteen 
 years, and of whose character the rector, before he had been 
 two months in the parish, had formed the very poorest opinion. 
 Robert, entering upon his duties with the ardour of the modern
 
 158 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 reformer, armed not only with charity but with science, found 
 himself confronted by the opposition of a man who combined 
 the shrewdness of an attorney with the callousness of a drunkard. 
 It seemed incredible that a great landowner should commit his 
 interests and the interests of hundreds of human beings to the 
 hands of such a person. 
 
 By and by, however, as the rector penetrated more deeply 
 into the situation, he found his indignation transferring itself 
 more and more from the man to the master. It became clear to 
 him that in some respects Henslowe suited the squire admirably. 
 It became also clear to him that the squire had taken pains for 
 years to let it be known that he cared not one rap for any 
 human being on his estate in any other capacity than as a rent- 
 payer or wage-receiver. What ! Live for thirty years in that 
 great house, and never care whether your tenants and labourers 
 lived like pigs or like men, whether the old people died of damp, 
 or the children of diphtheria, which you might have prevented ! 
 Robert's brow grew dark over it. 
 
 The click of an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreami- 
 ness at once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. 
 In another moment Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a 
 holly stick in his hand, his face aglow with health and exercise 
 and kindling at the sight of his wife. She hung on his arm, 
 and, with his hand laid tenderly on hers, he asked her how she 
 fared. She answered briefly, but with a little flush, her eyes 
 raised to his. She was within a few weeks of motherhood. 
 
 Then they strolled along talking. He gave her an account 
 of his afternoon, which, to judge from the worried expression 
 which presently effaced the joy of their meeting, had been spent 
 in some unsuccessful effort or other. They paused after a while, 
 and stood looking over the plain before them to a spot beyond 
 the nearer belt of woodland, where from a little hollow about 
 three miles off there rose a cloud of bluish smoke. 
 
 ' He will do nothing ! ' cried Catherine, incredulous. 
 
 ' Nothing ! It is the policy of the estate, apparently, to let 
 the old and bad cottages fall to pieces. He sneers at one 
 for supposing any landowner has money for "philanthropy" 
 just now. If the people don't like the houses they can go. I 
 told him I should appeal to the squire as soon as he came 
 home.' 
 
 'What did he say?' 
 
 ' He smiled, as much as to say, " Do as you like, and be a fool 
 for your pains." How the squire can let that man tyrannise 
 over the estate as he does, I cannot conceive. Oh, Catherine, I 
 am full of qualms about the squire ! ' 
 
 ' So am I,' she said, with a little darkening of her clear look. 
 'Old Benham has just been in to say they are expected on 
 Thursday.' 
 
 Robert started. ' Are these our last days of peace ? ' he said 
 wistfully ' the last days of our honeymoon, Catherine ? '
 
 CHAP, xi SURREY 159 
 
 She smiled at him with a little quiver of passionate feeling 
 under the smile. 
 
 ' Can anything touch that ? ' she said under her breath. 
 
 ' Do you know,' he said presently, his voice dropping, ' that it 
 is only a month to our wedding day ? Oh, my wife, have I kept 
 my promise is the new life as rich as the old ? ' 
 
 She made no answer, except the dumb sweet answer that 
 love writes on eyes and lips. Then a tremor passed over her. 
 
 ' Are we too happy ? Can it be well be right ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, let us take it like children ! ' he cried, with a shiver, 
 almost petulantly. ' There will be dark hours enough. It is so 
 good to be happy.' 
 
 She leant her cheek fondly against his shoulder. To her life 
 always meant self-restraint, self-repression, self-deadening, if 
 need be. The Puritan distrust of personal joy as something dan- 
 gerous and ensnaring was deep ingrained in her. It had no 
 natural hold on him. 
 
 They stood a moment hand in hand fronting the cornfield 
 and the sun-filled west, while the afternoon breeze blew back 
 the man's curly reddish hair, long since restored to all its natural 
 abundance. 
 
 Presently Eobert broke into a broad smile. 
 
 ' What do you suppose Langham has been entertaining Rose 
 with on the way, Catherine ? I wouldn't miss her remarks to- 
 night on the escort we provided her for a good deal.' 
 
 Catherine said nothing, but her delicate eyebrows went up a 
 little. Robert stooped and lightly kissed her. 
 
 ' You never performed a greater act of virtue even in your 
 life, Mrs. Elsmere, than when you wrote Langham that nice 
 letter of invitation.' 
 
 And then the young rector sighed, as many a boyish memory 
 came crowding upon him. 
 
 A sound of wheels ! Robert's long legs took him to the gate 
 in a twinkling, and he flung it open just as Rose drove up in 
 fine style, a thin dark man beside her. 
 
 Rose lent her bright cheek to Catherine's kiss, and the two 
 sisters walked up to the door together, while Robert and Lang- 
 ham loitered after them talking. 
 
 ' Oh, Catherine ! ' said Rose under her breath, as they got into 
 the drawing-room, with a little theatrical gesture, ' why on earth 
 did you inflict that man and me on each other for two mortal 
 hours ? ' 
 
 ' Sh-sh ! ' said Catherine's lips, while her face gleamed with 
 laughter. 
 
 Rose sank flushed upon a chair, her eyes glancing up with a 
 little furtive anger in them as the two gentlemen entered the 
 room. 
 
 ' You found each other easily at Waterloo ? ' asked Robert. 
 
 1 Mr. Langham would never have found me,' said Rose drily ; 
 ' but I pounced on him at last just, I believe, as he was begin-
 
 160 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 ning to cherish the hope of an empty carriage and the solitary 
 enjoyment of his Saturday Review.' 
 
 Langham smiled nervously. ' Miss Leyburn is too hard on a 
 blind man,' he said, holding up his eyeglass apologetically ; ' it 
 was my eyes, not my will, that were at fault.' 
 
 Rose's lip curled a little. 'And Robert,' she cried, bending 
 forward as though something had just occurred to her, ' do tell 
 me I vowed I would ask is Mr. Langham a Liberal or a Con- 
 servative ? He doesn't know ! ' 
 
 Robert laughed, so did Langham. 
 
 ' Your sister.' he said, flushing, ' will have one so very precise 
 in all one says. 
 
 He turned his handsome olive face towards her, an unwonted 
 spark of animation lighting up his black eyes. It was evident 
 that he felt himself persecuted, but it was not so evident whether 
 he enjoyed the process or disliked it. 
 
 ' On dear, no ! ' said Rose nonchalantly. ' Only I have just 
 come from a house where everybody either loathes Mr. Gladstone 
 or would die for him to-morrow. There was a girl of seven and 
 a boy of nine who were always discussing " Coercion " in the 
 corners of the schoolroom. So, of course, I have grown political 
 top, and began to catechise Mr. Langham at once, and when he 
 said " he didn't know," I felt I should like to set those children 
 at him ! They would soon put some principles into him ! ' 
 
 'It is not generally lack of principle, Miss Rose,' said her 
 brother-in-law, ' that turns a man a doubter in politics, but too 
 much ! ' 
 
 And while he spoke, his eyes resting on Langham, his smile 
 broadened as he recalled all those instances in their Oxford 
 past, when he had taken a humble share in one of the herculean 
 efforts on the part of Langham's friends, which were always 
 necessary whenever it was a question of screwing a vote out of 
 him on any debated University question. 
 
 ' How dull it must be to have too much principle ! ' cried 
 Rose. ' Like a mill choked with corn. No bread because the 
 machine can't work ! ' 
 
 ' Defend me from my friends ! ' cried Langham, roused. 
 'Elsmere, when did I give you a right to caricature me in 
 this way 1 If I were interested,' he added, subsiding into his 
 usual hesitating ineffectiveness, ' I suppose I should know my 
 own mind.' 
 
 And then seizing the muffins, he stood presenting them to 
 Rose as though in deprecation of any further personalities. 
 Inside him there was a hot protest against an unreasonable 
 young beauty whom he had done his miserable best to entertain 
 for two long hours, and who in return had made him feel him- 
 self more of a fool than he had done for years. Since when had 
 young women put on all these airs ? In his young days they 
 knew their place. 
 
 Catherine meanwhile sat watching her sister. The child was
 
 CHAP, xi SURREY 161 
 
 more beautiful than ever, but in other outer respects the Rose 
 of Long Whindale had undergone much transformation. The 
 puffed sleeves, the aesthetic skirts, the naive adornments of bead 
 and shell, the formless hat, which it pleased her to imagine 
 'after Gainsborough,' had all disappeared. She was clad in 
 some soft fawn-coloured garment, cut very much in the fashion ; 
 her hair was closely rolled and twisted about her lightly- 
 balanced head ; everything about her was neat and fresh and 
 tight -fitting. A year ago she had been a damsel from the 
 ' Earthly Paradise ' ; now, so far as an English girl can achieve 
 it, she might have been a model for Tissot. In this phase, as in 
 the other, there was a touch of extravagance. The girl was 
 developing fast, but had clearly not yet developed. The rest- 
 lessness, the self -consciousness of Long Whindale were still 
 there ; but they spoke to the spectator in different ways. 
 
 But in her anxious study of her sister Catherine did not for- 
 get her place of hostess. ' Did our man bring you through the 
 park, Mr. Langham ? ' she asked him timidly. 
 
 ' Yes. What an exquisite old house ! ' he said, turning to 
 her, and feeling through all his critical sense the difference 
 between the gentle matronly dignity of the one sister and the 
 young self-assertion of the other. 
 
 ' Ah,' said Robert, ' I kept that as a surprise ! Did you ever 
 see a more perfect place ? ' 
 
 'What date?' 
 
 'Early Tudor as to the oldest part. It was built by a 
 relation of Bishop Fisher's ; then largely rebuilt under James 
 I. Elizabeth stayed there twice. There is a trace of a visit of 
 Sidney's. Waller was there, and left a copy of verses in the 
 library. Evelyn laid out a great deal of the garden. Lord 
 Clarendon wrote part of his History in the garden, et cetera, 
 et cetera. The place is steeped in associations, and as beautiful 
 as a dream to begin with.' 
 
 ' And the owner of all this is the author of The Idols of the 
 Marketplace ? ' 
 
 Robert nodded. 
 
 ' Did you ever meet him at Oxford ? I believe he was there 
 once or twice during my time, but I never saw him.' 
 
 'Yes,' said Langham, thinking. 'I met him at dinner at the 
 Vice-Chancellor's, now I remember. A bizarre and formidable 
 person very difficult to talk to,' he added reflectively. 
 
 Then as he looked up he caught a sarcastic twitch of Rose 
 Leyburn's lip and understood it in a moment. Incontinently 
 he forgot the squire and fell to asking himself what had pos- 
 sessed him on that luckless journey down. He had never 
 seemed to himself more perverse, more unmanageable; and 
 for once his philosophy did not enable him to swallow the cer- 
 tainty that this slim flashing creature must have thought him 
 a morbid idiot with as much sangfroid as usual. 
 
 Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question,
 
 162 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 and presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room. On their 
 way they passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitat- 
 ing, and then with a bright flush on the face, which had such 
 maternal calm in it already, she threw her arm round Rose and 
 drew her in. It was a white empty room, smelling of the roses 
 outside, and waiting in the evening stillness for the life that 
 was to be. Rose looked at it all at the piles of tiny garments, 
 the cradle, the pictures from Retsch's ' Song of the Bell,' which 
 had been the companions of their own childhood, on the walls 
 and something stirred in the girl's breast. 
 
 ' Catherine, I believe you have everything you want, or you 
 soon will have ! ' she cried, almost with a kind of bitterness, 
 laying her hands on her sister's shoulders. 
 
 ' Everything but worthiness ! ' said Catherine softly, a mist 
 rising in her calm gray eyes. ' And you, Roschen,' she added 
 wistfully, 'have you been getting a little more what you 
 want?' 
 
 ' What's the good of asking ? ' said the girl, with a little shrug 
 of impatience. 'As if creatures like me ever got what they 
 want ! London has been good fun certainly if one could get 
 enough of it. Catherine, how long is that marvellous person 
 going to stay ? ' and she pointed in the direction of Langham's 
 room. 
 
 ' A week,' said Catherine, smiling at the girl's disdainful tone. 
 ' I was afraid you didn't take to him.' 
 
 ' I never saw such a being before,' declared Rose ' never ! 
 I thought I should never get a plain answer from him about 
 anything. He wasn't even quite certain it was a fine day ! I 
 wonder if you set fire to him whether he would be sure it hurt ! 
 A week, you say ? Heigh ho ! what an age ! ' 
 
 ' Be kind to him,' said Catherine, discreetly veiling her own 
 feelings, and caressing the curly golden head as they moved 
 towards the door. ' He's a poor lone don, and he was so good 
 to Robert ! ' 
 
 ' Excellent reason for you, Mrs. Elsmere,' said Rose, pouting ; 
 ' but ' 
 
 Her further remarks were cut short by the sound of the 
 front-door bell. 
 
 ' Oh, I had forgotten Mr. Newcome ! ' cried Catherine, start- 
 ing. ' Come down soon, Rose, and help us through.' 
 
 ' Who is he ? ' inquired Rose sharply. 
 
 'A High Church clergyman near here, whom Robert asked 
 to tea this afternoon,' said Catherine, escaping. 
 
 Rose took her hat off very leisurely. The prospect down- 
 stairs did not seem to justify despatch. She lingered and 
 thought of 'Lohengrin' and Albani, of the crowd of artistic 
 friends that had escorted her to Waterloo, of the way in 
 which she had been applauded the night before, of the joys 
 of playing Brahms with a long-haired pupil of Rubinstein's, 
 who had dropped on one knee and kissed her hand at the end
 
 CHAP, xii SURREY 163 
 
 of it, etc. During the last six weeks the colours of ' this thread- 
 bare world ' had been freshening before her in marvellous 
 fashion. And now, as she stood looking out, the quiet fields 
 opposite, the sight of a cow pushing its head through the hedge, 
 the infinite sunset sky, the quiet of the house, filled her with a 
 sudden depression. How dull it all seemed how wanting in 
 the glow of life ! 
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 MEANWHILE downstairs a curious little scene was passing, 
 watched by Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had 
 retreated into a corner of his own as soon as another visitor 
 appeared. Beside Catherine sat a Ritualist clergyman in cas- 
 sock and long cloak a saint clearly, though perhaps, to judge 
 from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed to quiver 
 through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the 
 saint's wasted unearthly look, the ascetic brow high and narrow, 
 the veins showing through the skin, and a personality as mag- 
 netic as it was strong. 
 
 Catherine listened to the new-comer, and gave him his tea, 
 with an aloofness of manner which was not lost on Langham. 
 ' She is the Thirty -nine Articles in the flesh ! ' he said to him- 
 self. ' For her there must neither be too much nor too little. 
 How can Elsmere stand it 1 ' 
 
 Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat bal- 
 ancing his long person over the arm of a chair listening to the 
 recital of some of the High Churchman's parish troubles with a 
 slight half -embarrassed smile. The vicar of Mottringham was 
 always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring out took 
 shape in Langham's sarcastic sense as a sort of classical epic, 
 with the High Churchman as a new champion of Christendom, 
 harassed on all sides by pagan parishioners, crass church- 
 wardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine's fine face grew 
 more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite 
 blind to it. Women never entered into his calculations except 
 as sisters or as penitents. At a certain diocesan conference he 
 had discovered a sympathetic fibre in the young rector of Mure- 
 well, which had been to the imperious persecuted zealot like 
 water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn by the same 
 quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to the 
 St. Anselm's undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out 
 with as much freedom as if all his companions had been as 
 ready as he was to die for an alb, or to spend half their days in 
 piously circumventing a bishop. 
 
 But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, 
 from Mottringham and its intrigues to London and its teeming 
 East. Robert was leading, his eye now on the apostolic-looking
 
 164 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 priest, now on his wife. Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had 
 his way. Then it came out that behind these battles of kites 
 and crows at Mottringham, there lay an heroic period, when the 
 pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London poverty, leaving 
 health and youth and nerves behind him in the meUe. Robert 
 dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with 
 difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an 
 Erastian bishop what Christian dare parade ten years of love 
 to God and man? And presently round Elsmere's lip there 
 dawned a little smile of triumph. Catherine had shaken off her 
 cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was bending forward eagerly 
 listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and facts were 
 beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in the 
 sharp-featured priest sank out of sight ; the face glowed with 
 inward light ; the stature of the man seemed to rise ; the angel 
 in him unsheathed its wings. Suddenly a story of the slums 
 that Mr. Newcome was telling a story of the purest Christian 
 heroism told in the simplest way came to an end, and Catherine 
 leaned towards him with a long quivering breath. 
 
 ' Oh, thank you, thank you ! That must have been a joy, a 
 privilege ! ' 
 
 Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise. 
 
 ' Yes, it was a privilege,' he said slowly the story had been 
 an account of the rescue of a young country lad from a London 
 den of thieves and profligates 'you are right ; it was just that.' 
 
 And then some sensitive inner fibre of the man was set 
 vibrating, and he would talk no more of himself or his past, do 
 what they would. 
 
 So Robert had hastily to provide another subject, and he fell 
 upon that of the squire. 
 
 Mr. Newcome's eyes flashed. 
 
 ' He is coming back ? I am sorry for you, Elsmere. " Woe is 
 me that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have my 
 habitation among the tents of Kedar ! " ' 
 
 And he fell back in his chair, his lips tightening, his thin 
 long hand lying along the arm of it, answering to that general 
 impression of combat, of the spiritual athlete, that hung about 
 him. 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Robert brightly, as he leant against the 
 mantelpiece looking curiously at his visitor. ' The squire is a 
 man of strong character, of vast learning. His library is one of 
 the finest in England, and it is at my service. I am not con- 
 cerned with Ms opinions.' 
 
 ' Ah, I see,' said Newcome in his driest voice, but sadly. ' You 
 are one of the people who believe in what you call tolerance I 
 remember.' 
 
 ' Yes, that is an impeachment to which I plead guilty,' said 
 Robert, perhaps with equal dryness ; ' and you have your 
 worries driven you to throw tolerance overboard ? ' 
 
 Newcome bent forward quickly. Strange glow and intensity
 
 CHAP, xii SURREY 165 
 
 of the fanatical eyes strange beauty of the wasted persecuting 
 lips ! 
 
 ' Tolerance ! ' he said with irritable vehemence ' tolerance ! 
 Simply another name for betrayal, cowardice, desertion^nothing 
 else. God, Heaven, Salvation on the one side, the devil and hell 
 on the other and one miserable life, one wretched sin-stained 
 will, to win the battle with ; and in such a state of things 
 you ' he dropped his voice, throwing out every word with 
 a scornful, sibilant emphasis 'you would have us behave as 
 though our friends were our enemies and our enemies our 
 friends, as though eternal misery were a bagatelle and our 
 faith a mere alternative. / stand for Christ, and His foes are 
 mine.' 
 
 ' By which I suppose you mean,' said Robert quietly, ' that 
 you would shut your door on the writer of The Idols of the 
 Market-place ? ' 
 
 ' Certainly.' ^ 
 
 And the priest rose, his whole attention concentrated on 
 Robert, as though some deeper-lying motive were suddenly 
 brought into play than any suggested by the conversation 
 itself. 
 
 ' Certainly. Judge not so long as a man has not judged him- 
 self, only till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian's path 
 is clear. We are but soldiers under orders. What business have 
 we to be truce-making on our own account ? The war is not 
 ours, but God's ! ' 
 
 Robert's eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself 
 in such a quick passage of arms as all such natures as his 
 delight in, when his look travelled past the gaunt figure of the 
 Ritualist vicar to his wife. A sudden pang smote, silenced him. 
 She was sitting with her face raised to Newcome ; and her 
 beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion of sympathy. 
 It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed, the 
 satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, 
 and the colour flushed over all his young boyish face. 
 
 ' To me.' he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed rather on her 
 than on Newcome, ' a clergyman has enough to do with those 
 foes of Christ he cannot choose but recognise. There is no 
 making truce with vice or cruelty. Why should we complicate 
 our task and spend in needless struggle the energies we might 
 give to love and to our brother 1 ' 
 
 His wife turned to him. There was trouble in her look, then 
 a swift lovely dawn of something indescribable. Newcome 
 moved away with a gesture that was half bitterness, half 
 weariness. 
 
 ' Wait, my friend,' he said slowly, ' till you have watched that 
 man's books eating the very heart out 01 a poor creature as I 
 have. When you have once seen Christ robbed of a soul that 
 might have been His, by the infidel of genius, you will loathe 
 all this Laodicean cant of tolerance as I do ! '
 
 166 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK a 
 
 There was an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyeglass 
 on, was carefully examining the make of a carved paper-knife 
 lying near him. The strained preoccupied mind of the High 
 Churchman had never taken the smallest account of his presence, 
 of which Robert had been keenly, not to say humorously, con- 
 scious throughout. 
 
 But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, 
 and addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common interest. 
 Newcome, in a kind of dream which seemed to have suddenly 
 descended on him, stood near them, his priestly cloak falling in 
 long folds about him, his ascetic face grave and rapt. Gradually, 
 however, the talk of the two men dissipated the mystical cloud 
 about him. He began to listen, to catch the savour of Langham's 
 modes of speech, and of his languid indifferent personality. 
 
 ' I must go,' he said abruptly, after a minute or two, breaking 
 in upon the friends' conversation. 'I shall hardly get home 
 before dark.' 
 
 He took a cold punctilious leave of Catherine, and a still 
 colder and slighter leave of Langham. Elsmere accompanied 
 him to the gate. 
 
 On the way the older man suddenly caught him by the 
 arm. 
 
 ' Elsmere, let me I am the elder by so many years let me 
 speak to you. My heart goes out to you ! ' 
 
 And the eagle face softened ; the harsh commanding pres- 
 ence became enveloping, magnetic. Robert paused and looked 
 down upon him, a quick light of foresight in his eye. He felt 
 what was coming. 
 
 And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from 
 Newcome's inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered 
 passion of years against certain ' dangerous tendencies ' the elder 
 priest discerned in the younger, against the worship of intellect 
 and science as such which appeared in Elsmere's talk, in Els- 
 mere's choice of friends. It was the eternal cry of the mystic 
 of all ages. 
 
 ' Scholarship ! learning ! ' Eyes and lips flashed into a vehe- 
 ment scorn. 'You allow them a value in themselves, apart 
 from the Christian's test. It is the modern canker, the modern 
 curse ! Thank God, my years in London burnt it out of me ! 
 Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all these curious 
 triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to worship ? 
 Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal sym- 
 pathy 1 Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression ! a 
 time for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less than the 
 lusts of the body, a time when it is better to believe than to 
 know, to pray than to understand ! ' 
 
 Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together, New- 
 come's gaze of fiery appeal fixed upon him. 
 
 ' We are differently made, you and I,' said the young rector 
 at last with difficulty. ' Where you see temptation I see oppor-
 
 CHAP, xii SURREY 167 
 
 tunity. I cannot conceive of God as the Arch-plotter against 
 His own creation !' 
 
 Newcome dropped his hold abruptly. 
 
 'A groundless optimism,' he said with harshness. 'On the 
 track of the soul from birth to death there are two sleuth- 
 hounds Sin and Satan. Mankind for ever flies them, is for 
 ever vanquished and devoured. I see life always as a thread- 
 like path between abysses along which man creeps' and his 
 gesture illustrated the words 'with bleeding hands and feet 
 towards one narrow solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn 
 to the right hand or the left " I will repay, saith the Lord ! " ' 
 
 Elsmere drew himself up suddenly ; the words seemed to him 
 a blasphemy. Then something stayed the vehement answer on 
 his lips. It was a sense of profound intolerable pity. What a 
 maimed life ! what an indomitable soul ! Husbandhood, father- 
 hood, and all the sacred education that flows from human joy 
 for ever self -forbidden, and this grim creed for recompense ! 
 
 He caught Newcome's hand with a kind of filial eagerness. 
 
 'You are a perpetual lesson to me,' he said, most gently. 
 ' When the world is too much with me, I think of you and am 
 rebuked. God bless you ! But I know myself. If I could see 
 life and God as you see them for one hour, I should cease to be 
 a Christian in the next ! ' 
 
 A flush of something like sombre resentment passed over 
 Newcome's face. There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, 
 an element which makes opposition a torment. He turned 
 abruptly away, and Robert was left alone. 
 
 It was a still clear evening, rich in the languid softness and 
 balm which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere 
 walked back to the house, his head uplifted to the sky which 
 lay beyond the cornfield, his whole being wrought into a pas- 
 sionate protest a passionate invocation of all things beautiful 
 and strong and free, a clinging to life and nature as to something 
 wronged and outraged. 
 
 Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down to 
 warn him that it was late and that Langham had gone to dress ; 
 but she stood lingering by his side after her message was given, 
 and he made no movement to go in. He turned to her, the 
 exaltation gradually dying out of his face, and at last he stooped 
 and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike him. She clasped 
 both hands on his arm and stood pressing towards him as though 
 to make amends for she knew not what. Something some 
 sharp momentary sense of difference, of antagonism, had hurt 
 that inmost fibre which is the conscience of true passion. She 
 did the most generous, the most ample penance for it as she 
 stood there talking to him of half -indifferent things, but with a 
 magic, a significance of eye and voice which seemed to take all the 
 severity from her beauty and make her womanhood itself. 
 
 At the evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it seemed
 
 168 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 to Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of college rooms 
 in vacation, that everything looked flat and stale beside her, 
 beside the flash of her white arms, the gleam of her hair, the 
 confident grace of every movement. He thought her much too 
 self-conscious and self-satisfied ; and she certainly did not make 
 herself agreeable to him ; but for all that he could hardly take 
 his eyes off her ; and it occurred to him once or twice to envy 
 Robert the easy childish friendliness she showed to him, and 
 to him alone of the party. The lack of real sympathy between 
 her and Catherine was evident to the stranger at once 
 what, indeed, could the two have in common ? He saw that 
 Catherine was constantly on the point of blaming, and Rose 
 constantly on the point of rebelling. He caught the wrinkling 
 of Catherine's brow as Rose presently, in emulation apparently 
 of some acquaintances she had been making in London, let slip 
 the names of some of her male friends without the 'Mr.,' or 
 launched into some bolder affectation than usual of a compre- 
 hensive knowledge of London society. The girl, in spite of all 
 her beauty, and her fashion, and the little studied details of her 
 dress, was in reality so crude, so much of a child under it all, 
 that it made her audacities and assumptions the more absurd, 
 and he could see that Robert was vastly amused by them. 
 
 But Langham was not merely amused by her. She was too 
 beautiful and too full of character. 
 
 It astonished him to find himself afterwards edging over to 
 the corner where she sat with the rectory cat on her knee an 
 inferior animal, but the best substitute for Chattie available. 
 So it was, however ; and once in her neighbourhood he made 
 another serious effort to get her to talk to him. The Elsmeres 
 had never seen him so conversational. He dropped his para- 
 doxical melancholy ; he roared as gently as any sucking dove ; 
 and Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm's, as the 
 evening went on, some hesitating commonplaces worthy of a 
 bashful undergraduate on the subject of the boats and Com- 
 memoration, had to beat a hasty retreat, so greatly did the 
 situation tickle his sense of humour. 
 
 But the tutor made his various ventures under a discouraging 
 sense of failure. What a capricious ambiguous creature it was, 
 how fearless, how disagreeably alive to all his own damaging 
 peculiarities ! Never had he been so piqued for years, and as 
 he floundered about trying to find some common ground where 
 he and she might be at ease, he was conscious throughout of her 
 mocking indifferent eyes, which seemed to be saying to him all 
 the time, ' You are not interesting no, not a bit ! You are 
 tiresome, and I see through you, but I must talk to you, I sup- 
 pose, faute de mieux.' 
 
 Long before the little party separated for the night Lang- 
 ham had given it up, and had betaken himself to Catherine, 
 reminding himself with some sharpness that he had come down 
 to study his friend's life, rather than the humours of a provoking
 
 CHAP, xn SURREY 169 
 
 girl. How still the summer night was round the isolated 
 rectory ; how fresh and spotless were all the appointments of 
 the house ; what a Quaker neatness and refinement everywhere ! 
 He drank in the scent of air and flowers with which the rooms 
 were filled ; for the first time his fastidious sense was pleasantly 
 conscious of Catherine's grave beauty ; and even tne mystic 
 ceremonies of family prayer had a certain charm for him, pagan 
 as he was. How much dignity and persuasiveness it has still, 
 he thought to himself, this commonplace country life of ours, on 
 its best sides ! 
 
 Half -past ten arrived. Rose just let him touch her hand ; 
 Catherine gave him a quiet good-night, with various hospitable 
 wishes for his nocturnal comfort, and the ladies withdrew. He 
 saw Robert open the door for his wife, and catch her thin white 
 fingers as she passed him with all the secrecy and passion of a 
 lover. 
 
 Then they plunged into the study, he and Robert, and smoked 
 their fill. The study was an astonishing medley. Books, natural 
 history specimens, a half -written sermon, fishing-rods, cricket- 
 bats, a huge medicine cupboard all the main elements of 
 Elsmere's new existence were represented there. In the draw- 
 ing-room with his wife and his sister-in-law he had been as 
 much of a boy as ever ; here clearly he was a man, very much 
 in earnest. What about 1 What did it all come to ? Can the 
 English country clergyman do much with his life and his 
 energies ? Langham approached the subject with his usual 
 scepticism. 
 
 Robert for a while, however, did not help him to solve it. He 
 fell at once to talking about the squire, as though it cleared his 
 mind to talk out his difficulties even to so ineffective a coun- 
 sellor as Langham. Langham, indeed, was but faintly inter- 
 ested in the squire's crimes as a landlord, but there was a 
 certain interest to be got out of the struggle in Elsmere's mind 
 between the attractiveness of the squire, as one of the most 
 difficult and original personalities of English letters, and that 
 moral condemnation of him as a man of possessions and ordi- 
 nary human responsibilities with which the young reforming 
 rector was clearly penetrated. So that, as long as he could 
 smoke under it, he was content to let his companion describe 
 to him Mr. Wendover's connection with the property, his acces- 
 sion to it in middle life after a long residence in Germany, his 
 ineffectual attempts to play the English country gentleman, 
 and his subsequent complete withdrawal from the life about 
 him. 
 
 ' You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives in 
 that huge place,' said Robert with energy. ' He is not unpopular 
 exactly with the poor down here. When they want to belabour 
 anybody they lay on at the agent, Henslowe. On the whole, I 
 have come to the conclusion the poor like a mystery. They 
 never see him ; when he is here the park is shut up ; the
 
 170 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK a 
 
 common report is that he walks at night ; and he lives alone 
 in that enormous house with his books. The county folk have all 
 quarrelled with him, or nearly. It pleases him to get a few of 
 the humbler people about, clergy, professional men, and so on, 
 to dine with him sometimes. And he often fills the Hall, I am 
 told, with London people for a day or two. But otherwise he 
 knows no one, and nobody knows him.' 
 
 ' But you say he has a widowed sister ? How does she relish 
 the kind of life ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, by all accounts,' said the rector with a shrug, ' she is as 
 little like other people as himself. A queer elfish little creature, 
 they say, as fond of solitude down here as the squire, and full 
 of hobbies. In her youth she was about the court. Then she 
 married a canon of Warham, one of the popular preachers, I 
 believe, of the day. There is a bright little cousin of hers, a 
 certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here, and tells me 
 stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little aristocrat 
 imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never 
 got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as 
 hungry now, after her long fast, for titles and big -wigs, as 
 though she were the purest parvenu. The squire of course 
 makes mock of her, and she has no influence with him. How- 
 ever, there is something naive in the stories they tell of her. I 
 feel as if I might get on with her. But the squire ! ' 
 
 And the rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying 
 his boots with a certain dolefulness. 
 
 Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of con- 
 versation presented to him as an epicure treats foods, felt at 
 this point that he had had enough of the Wendovers, and 
 started something else. 
 
 ' So you physic bodies as well as minds ? ' he said, pointing to 
 the medicine cupboard. 
 
 ' I should think so ! ' cried Robert, brightening at once. ' Last 
 winter I causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with 
 my own hand. Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I 
 just had to do it. And if the state of part of the parish remains 
 what it is, it's a pleasure I may promise myself most years. But 
 it shan't remain what it is.' 
 
 And the rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and 
 gave one or two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend 
 stretched before him in the depths of an armchair. 
 
 ' I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall 
 have their drains ! ' 
 
 ' It seems to me,' said Langham, musing, ' that in my youth 
 people talked about Ruskin ; now they talk about drains.' 
 
 'And quite right too. Dirt and drains, Catherine says I 
 have gone mad upon them. It's all very well, but they are the 
 foundations of a sound religion.' 
 
 'Dirt, drains, and Darwin,' said Langham meditatively, 
 taking up Darwin's Earthworms, which lay on the study table
 
 CHAP, xii SURREY 171 
 
 beside him, side by side with a volume of Grant Allen's Sketches. 
 ' I didn't know you cared for this sort of thing ! ' 
 
 Robert did not answer for a moment, and a faint flush stole 
 into his face. 
 
 ' Imagine, Langham ! ' he said presently, ' I had never read 
 even The Origin of Species before I came here. We used to take 
 the thing half for granted, I remember, at Oxford, in a more or 
 less modified sense. But to drive the mind through all the 
 details of the evidence, to force one's self to understand the 
 whole hypothesis and the grounds for it, is a very different 
 matter. It is a revelation.' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Langham ; and could not forbear adding, ' but it 
 is a revelation, my friend, that has not always been held to 
 square with other revelations.' 
 
 In general these two kept carefully off the religious ground. 
 The man who is religious by nature tends to keep his treasure 
 hid from the man who is critical by nature, and Langham was 
 much more interested in other things. But still it had always 
 been understood that each was free to say what he would. 
 
 ' There was a natural panic,' said Robert, throwing back his 
 head at the challenge. ' Men shrank and will always shrink, 
 say what you will, from what seems to touch things dearer to 
 them than life. But the panic is passing. The smoke is clear- 
 ing away, and we see that the battle-field is falling into new 
 lines. But the old truth remains the same. Where and when 
 and how you will, but somewhen and somehow, God created the 
 heavens and the earth ! ' 
 
 Langham said nothing. It had seemed to him for long that 
 the clergy were becoming dangerously ready to throw the Old 
 Testament overboard, and all that it appeared to him to imply 
 was that men's logical sense is easily benumbed where their 
 hearts are concerned. 
 
 'Not that every one need be troubled with the new facts,' 
 resumed Robert after a while, going back to his pipe. ' Why 
 should they ? We are not saved by Darwinism. I should never 
 press them on my wife, for instance, with all her clearness and 
 courage of mind. 
 
 His voice altered as he mentioned his wife grew extraordin- 
 arily soft, even reverential. 
 
 'It would distress her?' said Langham interrogatively, and 
 inwardly conscious of pursuing investigations begun a year 
 before. 
 
 ' Yes, it would distress her. She holds the old ideas as she 
 was taught them. It is all beautiful to her, what may seem 
 doubtful or grotesque to others. And why should I or any one 
 else trouble her ? I above all, who am not fit to tie her shoe- 
 strings.' 
 
 The young husband's face seemed to gleam in the dim light 
 which fell upon it. Langham involuntarily put up his hand in 
 silence and touched his sleeve. Robert gave him a quiet friendly
 
 172 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 look, and the two men instantly plunged into some quite trivial 
 and commonplace subject. 
 
 Langham entered his room that night with a renewed sense 
 of pleasure in the country quiet, the peaceful flower- scented 
 house. Catherine, who was an admirable housewife, had put 
 out her best guest-sheets for his benefit, and the tutor, accus- 
 tomed for long years to the second-best of college service, looked 
 at their shining surfaces and frilled edges, at the freshly matted 
 floor, at the flowers on the dressing-table, at the spotlessness of 
 everything in the room, with a distinct sense that matrimony 
 had its advantages. He had come down to visit the Elsmeres, 
 sustained by a considerable sense of virtue. He still loved 
 Elsmere and cared to see him. It was a much colder love, no 
 doubt, than that which he had given to the undergraduate. But 
 the man altogether was a colder creature, who for years had 
 been drawing in tentacle after tentacle, and becoming more and 
 more content to live without his kind. Robert's parsonage, 
 however, and Robert's wife had no attractions for him ; and it 
 was with an effort that he had made up his mind to accept the 
 invitation which Catherine had made an effort to write. 
 
 And, after all, the experience promised to be pleasant. His 
 fastidious love for the quieter, subtler sorts of beauty was 
 touched by the Elsmere surroundings. And whatever Miss 
 Leyburn might be, she was not commonplace. The demon of 
 convention had no large part in her I Langham lay awake for 
 a time analysing his impressions of her with some gusto, and 
 meditating, with a whimsical candour which seldom failed him, 
 on the manner in which she had trampled on him, and the 
 reasons why. 
 
 He woke up, however, in a totally different frame of mind. 
 He was pre-eminently a person of moods, dependent, probably, 
 as all moods are, on certain obscure physical variations. And 
 his mental temperature had run down in the night. The house, 
 the people who had been fresh and interesting to him twelve 
 hours before, were now the burden he had more than half 
 expected them to be. He lay and thought of the unbroken 
 solitude of his college rooms, of Senancour s flight from human 
 kind, of the uselessness of all friendship, the absurdity of all 
 effort, and could hardly persuade himself to get up and face a 
 futile world, which had, moreover, the enormous disadvantage 
 for the moment of being a new one. 
 
 Convention, however, is master even of an Obermann. That 
 prototype of all the disillusioned had to cut himself adrift from 
 the society of the eagles on the Dent du Midi, to go and hang 
 like any other ridiculous mortal on the Paris law-courts. Lang- 
 ham, whether he liked it or no, had to face the parsonic break- 
 fast and the parsonic day. 
 
 He had just finished dressing when the sound of a girl's voice 
 drew him to the window, which was open. In the garden stood 
 Rose, on the edge of the sunk fence dividing the rectory domain
 
 CHAP, xii SURREY 173 
 
 from the cornfield. She was stooping forward playing with 
 Robert's Dandie Dinmont. In one hand she held a mass of 
 poppies, which showed a vivid scarlet against her blue dress ; 
 the other was stretched out seductively to the dog leaping 
 round her. A crystal buckle flashed at her waist ; the sunshine 
 caught the curls of auburn hair, the pink cheek, the white 
 moving hand, the lace ruffles at her throat and wrist. The 
 lithe glittering figure stood thrown out against the heavy 
 woods behind, the gold of the cornfield, the blues of the distance. 
 All the gaiety and colour which is as truly representative of 
 autumn as the gray languor of a September mist had passed 
 into it. 
 
 Langham stood and watched, hidden, as he thought, by the 
 curtain, till a gust of wind shook the casement window beside 
 him, and threatened to blow it in upon him. He put out his 
 hand perforce to save it, and the slight noise caught Hose's ear. 
 She looked up ; her smile vanished. ' Go down, Dandie,' she 
 said severely, and walked quickly into the house with as much 
 dignity as nineteen is capable of. 
 
 At breakfast the Elsmeres found their guest a difficulty. But 
 they also, as we know, had expected it. He was languor itself ; 
 none of their conversational efforts succeeded : and Rose, study- 
 ing him out of the corners of her eyes, felt that it would be of 
 no use even to torment so strange and impenetrable a being. 
 Why on earth should people come and visit their friends if 
 they could not keep up even the ordinary decent pretences of 
 society ? 
 
 Robert had to go off to some clerical business afterwards, and 
 Langham wandered out into the garden by himself. As he 
 thought of his Greek texts and his untenanted Oxford rooms, 
 he had the same sort of craving that an opium-eater has cut off 
 from his drugs. How was he to get through ? 
 
 Presently he walked back into the study, secured an armful 
 of volumes, and carried them out. True to himself in the 
 smallest things, he could never in his life be content with the 
 companionship of one book. To cut off the possibility of choice 
 and change in anything whatever was repugnant to him. 
 
 He sat himself down under the shade of a great chestnut near 
 the house, and an hour glided pleasantly away. As it happened, 
 however, he did not open one of the books he had brought with 
 him. A thought had struck him as he sat down, and he went 
 groping in his pockets in search of a yellow-covered brochure, 
 which, when found, proved to be a new play by Dumas, just 
 about to be produced by a French company in London. Lang- 
 ham, whose passion for the French theatre supplied him, as we 
 know, with a great deal of life without the trouble of living, was 
 going to see it, and always made a point of reading the piece 
 beforehand. 
 
 The play turned upon a typical French situation, treated in 
 a manner rather more French than usual. The reader shrugged
 
 174 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 his shoulders a good deal as he read on. ' Strange nation ! ' he 
 muttered to himself after an act or two. ' How they do revel 
 in mud ! ' 
 
 Presently, just as the fifth act was beginning to get hold of 
 him with that force which, after all, only a French playwright 
 is master of, he looked up and saw the two sisters coming round 
 the corner of the house from the great kitchen garden, which 
 stretched its grass paths and tangled flower-masses down the 
 further slope of the hill. The transition was sharp from Dumas's 
 heated atmosphere of passion and crime to the quiet English 
 rectory, its rural surroundings, and the figures of the two 
 Englishwomen advancing towards him. 
 
 Catherine was in a loose white dress with a black lace scarf 
 draped about her head and form. Her look hardly suggested 
 youth, and there was certainly no touch of age in it. Ripeness, 
 maturity, serenity these were the chief ideas which seemed to 
 rise in the mind at sight of her. 
 
 ' Are you amusing yourself, Mr. Langham ? ' she said, stop- 
 
 glng beside him and retaining with slight imperceptible force 
 ose's hand, which threatened to slip away. 
 
 ' Very much. I have been skimming through a play, which 
 I hope to see next week, by way of preparation.' 
 
 Rose turned involuntarily. Not wishing to discuss Marianne 
 with either Catherine or her sister, Langham had just closed 
 the book and was returning it to his pocket. But she had 
 caught sight of it. 
 
 'You are reading Marianne,' she exclaimed, the slightest 
 possible touch of wonder in her tone. 
 
 ' Yes, it is Marianne,' said Langham, surprised in his turn. 
 He had very old-fashioned notions about the limits of a girl's 
 acquaintance with the world, knowing nothing, therefore, as 
 may be supposed, about the modern young woman, and he was 
 a trifle scandalised by Rose's accent of knowledge. 
 
 ' I read it last week,' she said carelessly ; ' and the Piersons ' 
 turning to her sister 'have promised to take me to see it 
 next winter if Desforets comes again, as every one expects.' 
 
 'Who wrote it?' asked Catherine innocently. The theatre 
 not only gave her little pleasure, but wounded in her a hundred 
 deep unconquerable instincts. But she had long ago given up 
 in despair the hope of protesting against Rose s dramatic in- 
 stincts with success. 
 
 ' Dumas fils' said Langham drily. He was distinctly a good 
 deal astonished. 
 
 Rose looked at him, and something brought a sudden flame 
 into her cheek. 
 
 ' It is one of the best of his,' she said defiantly. ' I have read 
 a good many others. Mrs. Pierson lent me a volume. And 
 when I was introduced to Madame Desforts last week, she 
 agreed with me that Marianne is nearly the best of all.' 
 
 All this, of course, with the delicate nose well in air.
 
 CHAP, xii SURREY 175 
 
 ' You were introduced to Madame Desfprets ? ' cried Langham, 
 surprised this time quite out of discretion. Catherine looked 
 at him with anxiety. The reputation of the black-eyed little 
 French actress, who had been for a year or two the idol of the 
 theatrical public of Paris and London, had reached even to her, 
 and the tone of Langham's exclamation struck her painfully. 
 
 ' I was,' said Hose proudly. ' Other people may think it a 
 disgrace. / thought it an honour ! ' 
 
 Langham could not help smiling, the girl's naivete was so 
 evident. It was clear that, if she had read Marianne, she had 
 never understood it. 
 
 ' Rose, you don't know ! ' exclaimed Catherine, turning to her 
 sister with a sudden trouble in her eyes. ' I don't think Mrs. 
 Pierson ought to have done that, without consulting mamma 
 especially.' 
 
 ' Why not ? ' cried Rose vehemently. Her face was burning, 
 and her heart was full of something like hatred of Langham, 
 but she tried hard to be calm. 
 
 'I think,' she said, with a desperate attempt at crushing 
 dignity, ' that the way in which all sorts of stories are believed 
 against a woman, just because she is an actress, is disgraceful ! 
 Just because a woman is on the stage, everybody thinks they 
 may throw stones at her. I know, because because she told 
 me,' cried the speaker, growing, however, half embarrassed as 
 she spoke, ' that she feels the things that are said of her deeply ! 
 She has been ill, very ill, and one of her friends said to me, 
 " You know it isn't her work, or a cold, or anything else that's 
 made her ill it's calumny ! " And so it is.' 
 
 The speaker flashed an angry glance at Langham. She was 
 sitting on the arm of the cane chair into which Catherine had 
 fallen, one hand grasping the back of the chair for support, one 
 pointed foot beating the ground restlessly in front of her, her 
 small full mouth pursed indignantly, the greenish -gray eyes 
 flashing and brilliant. 
 
 As for Langham, the cynic within him was on the point of 
 uncontrollable laughter. Madame Desforets complaining of 
 calumny to this little Westmoreland maiden ! But his eyes 
 involuntarily met Catherine's, and the expression of both fused 
 into a common wonderment amused on his side, anxious on 
 hers. ' What a child, what an infant it is ! ' they seemed to 
 confide to one another. Catherine laid her hand softly on 
 Rose's, and was about to say something soothing, which might 
 secure her an opening for some sisterly advice later on, when 
 there was a sound of calling from the gate. She looked up and 
 saw Robert waving to her. Evidently he had just run up from 
 the school to deliver a message. She hurried across the drive 
 to him and afterwards into the house, while he disappeared. 
 
 Rose got up from her perch on the armchair and would have 
 followed, but a movement of obstinacy or Quixotic wrath, or 
 both, detained her.
 
 176 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 'At any rate, Mr. Langham,' she said, drawing herself up, 
 and speaking with the most lofty accent, ' if you don't know 
 anything personally about Madame Desforets, I think it would 
 be much fairer to say nothing and not to assume at once that 
 all you hear is true ! ' 
 
 Langham had rarely felt more awkward than he did then, 
 as he sat leaning forward under the tree, this slim indignant 
 creature standing over him, and his consciousness about equally 
 divided between a sense of her absurdity and a sense of her 
 prettiness. 
 
 ' You are an advocate worth having, Miss Leyburn ; ' he said 
 at last, an enigmatical smile he could not restrain playing about 
 his mouth. ' I could not argue with you ; I had better not try.' 
 
 Rose looked at him, at his dark regular face, at the black eyes 
 which were much vivider than usual, perhaps because they 
 could not help reflecting some of the irrepressible memories of 
 Madame Desforets and her causes cdlebres which were cours- 
 ing through the brain behind them, and with a momentary 
 impression of rawness, defeat, and yet involuntary attraction, 
 which galled her intolerably, she turned away and left him. 
 
 In the afternoon Robert was still unavailable, to his own 
 great chagrin, and Langham summoned up all his resignation 
 and walked with the ladies. The general impression left upon 
 his mind by the performance was, first, that the dust of an 
 English August is intolerable, and, secondly, that women's 
 society ought only to be ventured on by the men who are made 
 for it. The views of Catherine and Rose may be deduced from 
 his with tolerable certainty. 
 
 But in the late afternoon, when they thought they had done 
 their duty by him, and he was again alone in the garden read- 
 ing, he suddenly heard the sounds of music. 
 
 Who was playing, and in that way ? He got up and strolled 
 past the drawing-room window to find out. 
 
 Rose had got hold of an accompanist, the timid dowdy daughter 
 of a local solicitor, with some capacity for reading, and was now, 
 in her lavish impetuous fashion, rushing through a quantity 
 of new music, the accumulations of her visit to London. She 
 stood up beside the piano, her hair gleaming in the shadow of 
 the drawing-room, her white brow hanging forward over her 
 violin as she peered her way through the music, her whole soul 
 absorbed in what she was doing. Langham passed unnoticed. 
 
 What astonishing playing ! Why had no one warned him of 
 the presence of such a gift in this dazzling, prickly, unripe 
 creature 1 He sat down against the wall of the house, as close 
 as possible, but out of sight, and listened. All the romance of 
 his spoilt and solitary life had come to him so far through 
 music, and through such music as this ! For she was play- 
 ing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein, interpreting all those 
 passionate voices of the subtlest moderns, through which the
 
 CHAP, xni SURREY 177 
 
 heart of our own day has expressed itself even more freely and 
 exactly than through the voice of literature. Hans Sachs' im- 
 mortal song, echoes from the love duets in ' Tristan und Isolde,' 
 fragments from a wild and alien dance-music, they rippled over 
 him in a warm intoxicating stream of sound, stirring associa- 
 tion after association, and rousing from sleep a hundred bygone 
 moods of feeling. 
 
 What magic and mastery in the girl's touch ! What power 
 of divination, and of rendering ! Ah ! she too was floating in 
 passion and romance, but of a different sort altogether from the 
 conscious reflected product of the man's nature. She was not 
 thinking of the past, but of the future ; she was weaving her 
 story that was to be into the flying notes, playing to the un- 
 known of her Whindale dreams, the strong ardent unknown, 
 ' insufferable, if he pleases, to all the world besides, but to me 
 heaven ! ' She had caught no breath yet of his coming, but her 
 heart was ready for him. 
 
 Suddenly, as she put down her violin, the French window 
 opened, and Langham stood before her. She looked at him 
 with a quick stiffening of the face which a minute before had 
 been all quivering and relaxed, and his instant perception of it 
 chilled the impulse which had brought him there. 
 
 He said something banal about his enjoyment, something 
 totally different from what he had meant to say. The moment 
 presented itself, but he could not seize it or her. 
 
 ' I had no notion you cared for music,' she said carelessly, as 
 she shut the piano, and then she went away. 
 
 Langham felt a strange fierce pang of disappointment. 
 What had he meant to do or say 1 ? Idiot! What common 
 ground was there between him and any such exquisite youth ? 
 What girl would ever see in him anything but the dull remains 
 of what once had been a man ! 
 
 CHAPTEK XIH 
 
 THE next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed 
 and home-sick as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, 
 not altogether intelligible to himself, thrown in, could only 
 brace himself to the prospect by the determination to take the 
 English rural Sunday as the subject of severe scientific investi- 
 gation. He would ' do it ' thoroughly. 
 
 So he donned a black coat and went to church with the rest. 
 There, in spite of his boredom with the whole proceeding, 
 Robert's old tutor was a good deal more interested by Robert's 
 sermon than he had expected to be. It was on the character of 
 David, and there was a note in it, a note of historical imagina- 
 tion, a power of sketching in a background of circumstance, 
 and of biting into the mind of the listener, as it were, by a detail 
 
 N
 
 178 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 or an epithet, which struck Langham as something new in his 
 experience of Elsmere. He followed it at first as one might 
 watch a game of skill, enjoying the intellectual form of it, and 
 counting the good points, but by the end he was not a little 
 carried away. The peroration was undoubtedly very moving, 
 very intimate, very modern, and Langham up to a certain 
 point was extremely susceptible to oratory, as he was to music 
 and acting. The critical judgment, however, at the root of 
 him kept coolly repeating as he stood watching the people defile 
 out of the church : ' This sort of thing will go down, will make 
 a mark ; Elsmere is at the beginning of a career !' 
 
 In the afternoon Robert, who was feeling deeply guilty 
 towards his wife, in that he had been forced to leave so much of 
 the entertainment of Langham to her, asked his old friend to 
 come for him to the school at four o'clock and take him for a 
 walk between two engagements. Langham was punctual, and 
 Robert carried him off first to see the Sunday cricket, which was 
 in full swing. During the past year the young rector had been 
 developing a number of outdoor capacities which were probably 
 always dormant in his Elsmere blood, the blood of generations 
 of country gentlemen, but which had never had full opportunity 
 before. He talked of fishing as Kingsley might have talked of 
 it, and, indeed, with constant quotations from Kingsley ; and 
 his cricket, which had been good enough at Oxford to get him 
 into his College eleven, had stood him in specially good stead 
 with the Murewell villagers. That his play was not elegant 
 they were not likely to find out ; his bowling they set small 
 store by ; but his batting was of a fine, slashing, superior sort 
 which soon carried the Murewell Club to a much higher position 
 among the clubs of the neighbourhood than it had ever yet 
 aspired to occupy. 
 
 The rector had no time to play on Sundays, however, and, 
 after they had hung about the green a little while, he took his 
 friend over to the Workmen's Institute, which stood at the edge 
 of it. He explained that the Institute had been the last achieve- 
 ment of the agent before Henslowe, a man who had done his 
 duty to the estate according to his lights, and to whom it was 
 owing that those parts of it, at any rate, which were most in 
 the public eye, were still in fair condition. 
 
 The Institute was now in bad repair and too small for the 
 place. ' But catch that man doing anything for us ! ' exclaimed 
 Robert hotly. 'He will hardly mend the roof now, merely, I 
 believe, to spite me. But come and see my new Naturalists' 
 Club.' 
 
 And he opened the Institute door. Langham followed in 
 the temper of one getting up a subject for examination. 
 
 Poor Robert ! His labour and his enthusiasm deserved a 
 more appreciative eye. He was wrapped up in his Club, which 
 had been the great success of his first year, and he dragged 
 Langham through it all, not indeed, sympathetic creature that he
 
 CHAP, xni SURREY 179 
 
 was, without occasional qualms. ' But after all,' he would say 
 to himself indignantly, ' I must do something with him.' 
 
 Langham, indeed, behaved with resignation. He looked at 
 the collections for the year, and was quite ready to take it for 
 granted that they were extremely creditable. Into the old- 
 fashioned window-sills glazed compartments had been fitted, 
 and these were now fairly filled with specimens, with eggs, 
 butterflies, moths, beetles, fossils, and what not. A case of 
 stuffed tropical birds presented by Robert stood in the centre of 
 the room ; another containing the birds of the district was close 
 by. On a table farther on stood two large open books, which 
 served as records of observations on the part of members of the 
 Club. In one, which was scrawled over with mysterious hiero- 
 glyphs, any one might write what he would. In the other, only 
 such facts and remarks as had passed the gauntlet of a Club 
 meeting were recorded in Robertas neatest hand. On the same 
 table stood jars full of strange creatures tadpoles and water 
 larvae of all kinds, over which Robert hung now absorbed, 
 poking among them with a straw, while Langham, to whom 
 only the generalisations of science were congenial, stood by and 
 mildly scoffed. 
 
 As they came out a great loutish boy, who had evidently been 
 hanging about waiting for the rector, came up to him, boorishly 
 touched his cap, and then, taking a cardboard box out of his 
 pocket, opened it with infinite caution, something like a tremor 
 of emotion passing over his gnarled countenance. 
 
 The rector's eyes glistened. 
 
 ' Hullo ! I say, Irwin, where in the name of fortune did 
 you get that ? You lucky fellow ! Come in, and let's look 
 it out!' 
 
 And the two plunged back into the Club together, leaving 
 Langham to the philosophic and patient contemplation of the 
 village green, its geese, its donkeys, and its surrounding fringe 
 of houses. He felt that quite indisputably life would have 
 been better worth living if, like Robert, he could have taken a 
 passionate interest in rare moths or common ploughboys : but 
 Nature having denied him the possibility, there was small use 
 in grumbling. 
 
 Presently the two naturalists came out again, and the boy 
 went off, bearing his treasure with him. 
 
 ' Lucky dog ! ' said Robert, turning his friend into a country 
 road leading out of the village, 'hes found one of the rarest 
 moths of the district. Such a hero he'll be in the Club to-morrow 
 night. It's extraordinary what a rational interest has done 
 for that fellow ! I nearly fought him in public last winter.' 
 
 And he turned to his friend with a laugh, and yet with a 
 little quick look of feeling in the gray eyes. 
 
 ' Magnificent, but not war,' said Langham drily. ' I wouldn't 
 have given much for your chances against those shoulders.' 
 
 'Oh, I don't know. I should have had a little science on my
 
 180 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 side, which counts for a great deal. We turned him out of the 
 Club for brutality towards the old grandmother he lives with 
 turned him out in public. Such a scene ! I shall never forget 
 the boy's face. It was like a corpse, and the eyes burning out 
 of it. He made for me, but the others closed up round, and we 
 got him put out.' 
 
 ' Hard lines on the grandmother,' remarked Langham. 
 
 ' She thought so poor old thing ! She left her cottage that 
 night, thinking he would murder her, and went to a friend. At 
 the end of a week he came into the friend's house, where she was 
 alone in bed. She cowered under the bedclothes, she told me, 
 expecting him to strike her. Instead of which he threw his 
 wages down beside her and gruffly invited her to come home. 
 " He wouldn't do her no mischief. Everybody dissuaded her, 
 but the plucky old thing went. A week or two afterwards she 
 sent for me and I found her crying. She was sure the lad was 
 ill, he spoke to nobody at his work. "Lord, sir !" she said, "it 
 do remind me, when he sits glowering at nights, of those folks 
 in the Bible, when the devils inside 'em kep' a-tearing 'em. 
 But he's like a new-born babe to me, sir never does me no 'arm. 
 And it do go to my heart, sir, to see how poorly he do take his 
 vittles !" So I made tracks for that lad,' said Robert, his eyes 
 kindling, his whole frame dilating. ' I found him in the fields 
 one morning. I have seldom lived through so much in half an 
 hour. In the evening I walked him up to the Club, and we re- 
 admitted him, and since then the boy has been like one clothed 
 and in his right mind. If there is any trouble in the Club I 
 set him on, and he generally puts it right. And when I was 
 laid up with a chill in the spring, and the poor fellow came 
 trudging up every night after his work to ask for me well, 
 never mind ! but it gives one a good glow at one's heart to 
 think about it.' 
 
 The speaker threw back his head impulsively, as though 
 defying his own feeling. Langham looked at him curiously. 
 The pastoral temper was a novelty to him, and the strong 
 development of it in the undergraduate of his Oxford recollec- 
 tions had its interest. 
 
 ' A quarter to six,' said Robert, as on their return from their 
 walk they were descending a low- wooded hill above the village, 
 and the church clock rang out. ' I must hurry, or I shall be late 
 for my story-telling.' 
 
 ' Story-telling ! ' said Langham, with a half -exasperated shrug. 
 ' What next ? You clergy are too inventive by half ! ' 
 
 Robert laughed a trifle bitterly. 
 
 ' I can't congratulate you on your epithets,' he said, thrusting 
 his hands far into his pockets. ' Good heavens, if we were if 
 we were inventive as a body, the Church wouldn't be where she 
 is in the rural districts ! My story-telling is the simplest thing 
 in the world. I began it in the winter with the object of some- 
 how or other getting at the imagination of these rustics. Force
 
 CHAP, xin SURREY 181 
 
 them for only half an hour to live some one else's life it is the 
 one thing worth doing with them. That's what I have been 
 aiming at. I told my stories all the winter Shakespeare, 
 Don Quixote, Dumas Heaven knows what ! And on the 
 whole it answers best. But now we are reading The Talis- 
 man. Come and inspect us, unless you're a purist about your 
 Scott ! None other of the immortals have such longueurs as he, 
 and we cut him freely.' 
 
 ' By all means,' said Langham ; ' lead on.' And he followed 
 his companion without repugnance. After all, there was some- 
 thing contagious in so much youth and hopefulness. 
 
 The story -telling was held in the Institute. 
 
 A group of men and boys were hanging round the door when 
 they reached it. The two friends made their way through, 
 greeted in the dumb friendly English fashion on all sides, and 
 Langham found himself in a room half-filled with boys and 
 youths, a few grown men, who had just put their pipes out, 
 lounging at the back. 
 
 Langham not only endured, but enjoyed the first part of the 
 hour that followed. Robert was an admirable reader, as most 
 enthusiastic imaginative people are. He was a master of all 
 those arts of look and gesture which make a spoken story telling 
 and dramatic, and Langham marvelled with what energy, after 
 his hard day's work and with another service before him, he 
 was able to throw himself into such a hors d'ceuvre as this. He 
 was reading to-night one of the most perfect scenes that even 
 the Wizard of the North has ever conjured : the scene in the 
 tent of Richard Lion-Heart, when the disguised slave saves the 
 life of the king, and Richard first suspects his identity. As he 
 read on, his arms resting on the high desk in front of him, and 
 his eyes, full of infectious enjoyment, travelling from the book 
 to his audience, surrounded by human beings whose confidence 
 he had won, and whose lives he was brightening from day to 
 day, he seemed to Langham the very type and model of a man 
 who had found his metier, found his niche in the world, and the 
 best means of filling it. If to attain to an ' adequate and mas- 
 terly expression of one's self ' be the aim of life, Robert was fast 
 achieving it. This parish of twelve hundred, souls gave him 
 now all the scope he asked. It was evident that he felt his 
 work to be rather above than below his deserts. He was con- 
 tent more than content to spend ability which would have 
 distinguished him in public life, or carried him far to the front 
 in literature, on the civilising of a few hundred of England's 
 rural poor. The future might bring him worldly success 
 Langham thought it must and would. Clergymen of Robert's 
 stamp are rare among us. But if so, it would be in response to 
 no conscious effort of his. Here, in the country living he had 
 so long dreaded and put from him, lest it should tax his young 
 energies too lightly, he was happy deeply, abundantly happy, 
 at peace with God, at one with man.
 
 182 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 Happy ! Langham, sitting at the outer corner of one of the 
 benches, by the open door, gradually ceased to listen, started on 
 other lines of thought by this realisation, warm, stimulating, 
 provocative, of another man's happiness. 
 
 Outside, the shadows lengthened across the green ; groups of 
 distant children or animals passed in and out of the golden 
 light-spaces ; the patches of heather left here and there glowed 
 as the sunset touched them. Every now and then his eye 
 travelled vaguely past a cottage garden, gay with the pinks and 
 carmines of the phloxes, into the cool browns and bluish-grays 
 of the raftered room beyond ; babies toddled across the road, 
 with stooping mothers in their train ; the whole air and scene 
 seemed to be suflused with suggestions of the pathetic expan- 
 siveness and helplessness of human existence, which, generation 
 after generation, is still so vulnerable, so confiding, so eager. 
 Life after life flowers out from the darkness and sinks back into 
 it again. And in the interval what agony, what disillusion ! 
 All the apparatus of a universe that men may know what it is 
 to hope and fail, to win and lose ! Happy ! in this world, 
 ' where men sit and hear each other groan.' His friend's con- 
 fidence only made Langham as melancholy as Job. 
 
 What was it based on ? In the first place, on Christianity 
 ' on the passionate acceptance of an exquisite fairy tale,' said 
 the dreaming spectator to himself, ' which at the first honest 
 challenge of the critical sense withers in our grasp ! That 
 challenge Elsmere has never given it, and in all probability 
 never will. No ! A man sees none the straighter for having a 
 wife he adores, and a profession that suits him, between him 
 and unpleasant facts ! ' 
 
 In the evening Langham, with the usual reaction of his 
 afternoon self against his morning self, felt that wild horses 
 should not take him to Church again, and, with a longing for 
 something purely mundane, he stayed at home with a volume of 
 Montaigne, while apparently all the rest of the household went 
 to evening service. 
 
 After a warm day the evening had turned cold and stormy ; 
 the west was streaked with jagged strips of angry cloud, the 
 wind was rising in the trees, and the temperature had suddenly 
 fallen so much that when Langham shut himself up in Robert's 
 study he did what he had been admonished to do in case of 
 need, set a light to the fire, which blazed out merrily into the 
 darkening room. Then he drew the curtains and threw him- 
 self down into Robert's chair with a sigh of Sybaritic satisfac- 
 tion. ' Good ! Now for something that takes the world less 
 naively,' he said to himself ; ' this house is too virtuous for 
 anything.' 
 
 He opened his Montaigne and read on very happily for half 
 an hour. The house seemed entirely deserted. 
 
 ' All the servants gone too ! ' he said presently, looking up
 
 CHAP, xni SURREY 183 
 
 and listening. ' Anybody who wants the spoons needn't trouble 
 about me. I don't leave this fire.' 
 
 And he plunged back again into his book. At last there was 
 a sound or the swing door which separated Robert's passage 
 from the front hall opening and shutting. Steps came quickly 
 towards the study, the handle was turned, and there on the 
 threshold stood Rose. 
 
 He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonish- 
 ment. She also started as she saw him. 
 
 ' I did not know any one was in,' she said awkwardly, the 
 colour spreading over her face. ' I came to look for a book.' 
 
 She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the dark- 
 ness of the doorway ? her long dress caught up round her in one 
 hand, the other resting on the handle. A gust of some delicate 
 perfume seemed to enter the room with her, and a thrill of 
 pleasure passed through Langham's senses. 
 
 ' Can I find anything for you ? ' he said, springing up. 
 
 She hesitated a moment, then apparently made up her mind 
 that it would be foolish to retreat, and, coming forward, she 
 said, with an accent as coldly polite as she could make it, 
 
 'Pray don't disturb yourself. I know exactly where to find it.' 
 
 She went up to the shelves where Robert kept his novels, 
 and began running her fingers over the books, with slightly 
 knitted brows and a mouth severely shut. Langham, still 
 standing, watched her and presently stepped forward. 
 
 ' You can't reach those upper shelves,' he said ; ' plea,se 
 let me.' 
 
 He was already beside her, and she gave way. 
 
 ' I want diaries, Aucliest&rj she said, still forbiddingly. ' It 
 ought to be there.' 
 
 ' Oh, that queer musical novel I know it quite well. No 
 sign of it here,' and he ran over the shelves with the practised 
 eye of one accustomed to deal with books. 
 
 'Robert must have lent it,' said Rose, with a little sigh. 
 ' Never mind, please. It doesn't matter,' and she was already 
 moving away. 
 
 ' Try some other instead,' he said, smiling, his arm still up- 
 stretched. ' Robert has no lack of choice.' His manner had an 
 animation and ease usually quite foreign to it. Rose stopped, 
 and her lips relaxed a little. 
 
 ' lie is very nearly as bad as the novel-reading bishop, who 
 was reduced at last to stealing the servant's Family Herald 
 out of the kitchen cupboard,' she said, a smile dawning. 
 
 Langham laughed. 
 
 ' Has he such an episcopal appetite for them ? That accounts 
 for the fact that when he and I begin to talk novels I am always 
 nowhere.' 
 
 ' I shouldn't have supposed you ever read them,' said Rose, 
 obeying an irresistible impulse, and biting her lip the moment 
 afterwards.
 
 184 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 'Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always 
 condemned to works on the " enclitic dt"1' he asked, his fine 
 eyes lit up with gaiety, and his head, of which the Greek out- 
 lines were ordinarily so much disguised by his stoop and 
 hesitating look, thrown back against the books behind him. 
 
 Natures like Langham's, in which the nerves are never 
 normal, have their moments of felicity, balancing their weeks 
 of timidity and depression. After his melancholy of the last 
 two days the tide of reaction had been mounting within him, 
 and the sight of Rose had carried it to its height. 
 
 She gave a little involuntary stare of astonishment. What 
 had happened to Robert's silent and finicking friend ? 
 
 'I know nothing of Oxford,' she said a little primly, in 
 answer to his question. ' I never was there but I never was 
 anywhere, I have seen nothing,' she added hastily, and, as Lang- 
 ham thought, bitterly. 
 
 'Except London, and the great world, and Madame Des- 
 f orets ! ' he answered, laughing. ' Is that so little 1 ' 
 
 She flashed a quick defiant look at him, as he mentioned 
 Madame Desforets, but his look was imperturbably kind and 
 gay. She could not help softening towards him. What magic 
 had passed over him ? 
 
 ' Do you know,' said Langham, moving, ' that you are stand- 
 ing in a draught, and that it has turned extremely cold ? ' 
 
 For she had left the passage-door wide open behind her, and 
 as the window was partially open the curtains were swaying 
 hither and thither, and her muslin dress was being blown in 
 coils round her feet. 
 
 ' So it has,' said Rose, shivering. ' I don't envy the Church 
 people. You haven't found me a book, Mr. Langham ? ' 
 
 ' I will find you one in a minute, if you will come and read 
 it by the fire,' he said, with his hand on the door. 
 
 She glanced at the fire and at him, irresolute. His breath 
 quickened. She too had passed into another phase. Was it the 
 natural effect of night, of solitude, of sex? At any rate, she 
 sank softly into the armchair opposite to that in which he had 
 been sitting. 
 
 ' Find me an exciting one, please.' 
 
 Langham shut the door securely, and went back to the book- 
 case, his hand trembling a little as it passed along the books. 
 He found Villette and offered it to her. She took it, opened it, 
 and appeared deep in it at once. He took the hint and went 
 back to his Montaigne. 
 
 The fire crackled cheerfully, the wind outside made every 
 now and then a sudden gusty onslaught on their silence, dying 
 away again as abruptly as it had risen. Rose turned the pages 
 of her book, sitting a little stiffly in her long chair, and Lang- 
 ham gradually began to find Montaigne impossible to read. He 
 became instead more and more alive to every detail of the 
 situation into which he had fallen. At last seeing, or imagining,
 
 CHAP, xni SURREY 185 
 
 that the fire wanted attending to, he bent forward and thrust 
 the poker into it. A burning coal fell on the hearth, and Rose 
 hastily withdrew her foot from the fender and looked up. 
 
 ' I am so sorry ! ' he interjected. ' Coals never do what 
 you want them to do. Are you very much interested in 
 Villette?' 
 
 ' Deeply,' said Rose, letting the book, however, drop on her 
 lap. She laid back her head with a little sigh, which she did 
 her best to check 2 half way through. What ailed her to-night ? 
 She seemed wearied ; for the moment there was no fight in her 
 with anybody. Her music, her beauty, her mutinous mocking 
 gaiety these things had all worked on the man beside her ; 
 but this new softness, this touch of childish fatigue, was 
 adorable. 
 
 ' Charlotte Bronte wrote it out of her Brussels experience, 
 didn't she 1 ' she resumed languidly. ' How sorry she must have 
 been to come back to that dull home and that awful brother 
 after such a break ! ' 
 
 ' There were reasons more than one that must have made her 
 sorry to come back,' said Langham reflectively. ' But how she 
 pined for her wilds all through ! I am afraid you don't find 
 your wilds as interesting as she found hers ? ' 
 
 His question and his smile startled her. 
 
 Her first impulse was to take up her book again, as a hint to 
 him that her likings were no concern of his. But something 
 checked it, probably the new brilliancy of that look of his, 
 which had suddenly grown so personal, so manly. Instead, 
 Villette slid a little farther from her hand, and her pretty head 
 still lay lightly back against the cushion. 
 
 'No, I dont find my wilds interesting at all,' she said for- 
 lornly. 
 
 ' You are not fond of the people as your sister is ? ' 
 
 'Fond of them?' cried Rose hastily. 'I should think not; 
 and what is more, they don't like me. It is quite intolerable 
 since Catherine left. I have so much more to do with them. 
 My other sister and I have to do all her work. It is dreadful to 
 have to work after somebody who has a genius for doing just 
 what you do worst.' 
 
 The young girl's hands fell across one another with a little 
 impatient gesture. Langham had a movement of the most 
 delightful compassion towards the petulant, childish creature. 
 It was as though their relative positions had been in some 
 mysterious way reversed. During their two days together she 
 had been the superior, and he had felt himself at the mercy of 
 her scornful sharp-eyed youth. Now, he knew not how or why, 
 Fate seemed to have restored to him something of the man's 
 natural advantage, combined, for once, with the impulse to 
 use it. 
 
 ' Your sister, I suppose, has been always happy in charity T ' 
 he said.
 
 186 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK u 
 
 ' Oh dear, yes,' said Rose irritably ; ' anything that has two 
 legs and is ill, that is all Catherine wants to make her happy.' 
 
 'And you want something quite different, something more 
 exciting ?' ' he asked, his diplomatic tone showing that he felt he 
 dared something in thus pressing her, but dared it at least with 
 his wits about him. Rose met his look irresolutely, a little 
 tremor of self-consciousness creeping over her. 
 
 ' Yes, I want something different, she said in a low voice and 
 paused ; then, raising herself energetically, she clasped her 
 hands round her knees. ' But it is not idleness I want. I want 
 to work, but at things I was born for ; I can't have patience 
 with old women, but I could slave all day and all night to play 
 the violin.' 
 
 ' You want to give yourself up to study then, and live with 
 musicians ? ' he said quietly. 
 
 She shrugged her shoulders by way of answer, and began 
 nervously to play with her rings. 
 
 That under-self which was the work and the heritage of her 
 father in her, and which, beneath all the wilfulnesses and de- 
 fiances of the other self, held its own moral debates in its own 
 way, well out of Catherine's sight generally, began to emerge, 
 wooed into the light by his friendly gentleness. 
 
 'But it is all so difficult, you see,' she said despairingly. 
 ' Papa thought it wicked to care about anything except religion. 
 If he had lived, of course I should never have been allowed to 
 study music. It has been all mutiny so far, every bit of it, 
 whatever I have been able to do.' 
 
 ' He would have changed with the times,' said Langham. 
 
 ' I know he would,' cried Rose. ' I have told Catherine so a 
 hundred times. People good people think quite differently 
 about art now, don't they, Mr. Langham ? ' 
 
 She spoke with perfect naivete. He saw more and more of 
 the child in her, in spite of that one striking development of 
 her art. 
 
 ' They call it the handmaid of religion,' he answered, smiling. 
 
 Rose made a little face. 
 
 ' I shouldn't,' she said, with frank brevity. ' But then there's 
 something else. You know where we live at the very ends of 
 the earth, seven miles from a station, in the very loneliest valley 
 of all Westmoreland. What's to be done with a fiddle in such 
 a place ? Of course, ever since papa died I've just been plotting 
 and planning to get away. But there's the difficulty,' and she 
 crossed one white finger over another as she laid out her case. 
 ' That house where we live has been lived in by Leyburns ever 
 since the Flood ! Horrid set they were, I know, because I 
 can't ever make mamma or even Catherine talk about them. 
 But still, when papa retired, he came back and bought the old 
 place from his brother. Such a dreadful, dreadful mistake ! ' 
 cried the child, letting her hands fall over her knee. 
 
 ' Had he been so happy there ? '
 
 CHAP, xin SURREY 187 
 
 ' Happy ! ' and Rose's lip curled. ' His brothers used to kick 
 and cuff him, his father was awfully unkind to him, he never 
 had a day's peace till he went to school, and after he went to 
 school he never came back for years and years and years, 
 till Catherine was fifteen. What could have made him so fond 
 of it?' 
 
 And again looking despondently into the fire she pondered 
 that far-off perversity of her father's. 
 
 ' Blood has strange magnetisms,' said Langham, seized as he 
 spoke by the pensive prettiness of the bent head and neck, ' and 
 they show themselves in the oddest ways.' 
 
 ' Then I wish they wouldn't,' she said irritably. ' But that 
 isn't all. He went there, not only because he loved that place, 
 but because he hated other places. I think he must have thought ' 
 and her voice dropped 'he wasn't going to live long he 
 wasn't well when he gave up the school and then we could 
 grow up there safe, without any chance of getting into mischief. 
 Catherine says he thought the world was getting very wicked 
 and dangerous and irreligious 2 and that it comforted him to 
 know that we should be out of it.' 
 
 Then she broke off suddenly. 
 
 'Do you know,' she went on wistfully, raising her beautiful 
 eyes to her companion, ' after all, he gave me my first violin 1 ' 
 
 Langham smiled. 
 
 ' I like that little inconsequence,' he said. 
 
 ' Then of course I took to it, like a duck to water, and it began 
 to scare him that I loved it so much. He and Catherine only 
 loved religion, and us, and the poor. So he always took it away 
 on Sundays. Then I hated Sundays, and would never be good 
 on them. One Sunday I cried myself nearly into a fit on the 
 dining-room floor because I mightn't have it. Then he came in, 
 and he took me up, and he tied a Scotch plaid round his neck, 
 and he put me into it, and carried me away right up on to the 
 hills, and he talked to me like an angel. He asked me not to 
 make him sad before God that he had given me that violin ; so 
 I never screamed again on Sundays ! ' 
 
 Her companion's eyes were not quite as clear as before. 
 
 ' Poor little naughty child,' he said, bending over to her. ' I 
 think your father must have been a man to be loved.' 
 
 She looked at him, very near to weeping, her face all working 
 with a soft remorse. 
 
 ' Oh, so he was so he was ! If he had been hard and ugly 
 to us, why, it would have been much easier for me ; but he was 
 so good ! And there was Catherine just like him, always 
 preaching to us what he wished. You see what a chain it's 
 been what a weight ! And as I must struggle must, because 
 I was I to get back into the world on the other side of the 
 mountains, and do what all the dear wicked people there were 
 doing, why, I have been a criminal all my life ! And that isn't 
 exhilarating always.'
 
 188 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 And she raised her arm and let it fall beside her with the 
 quick over-tragic emotion of nineteen. 
 
 ' I wish your father could have heard you play as I heard you 
 play yesterday,' he said gently. 
 
 She started. 
 
 ' Did you hear me that Wagner ? ' 
 
 He nodded, smiling. She still looked at him, her lips slightly 
 open. 
 
 ' Do you want to know what I thought ? I have heard much 
 music, you know.' 
 
 He laughed into her eyes, as much as to say, ' I am not quite 
 the mummy you thought me, after all ! ' And she coloured 
 slightly. 
 
 ' I have heard every violinist of any fame in Europe play, and 
 play often ; and it seemed to me that with time and work 
 you might play as well as any of them.' 
 
 The slight flush became a glow that spread from brow to chin. 
 Then she gave a long breath and turned away, her face resting 
 on her hand. 
 
 ' And I can't help thinking,' he went on, marvelling inwardly 
 at his own r6le of mentor ; and his strange enjoyment of it, 'that 
 if your father had lived till now, and had gone with the times a 
 little, as he must have gone, he would have learnt to take plea- 
 sure in your pleasure, and to fit your gift somehow into his 
 scheme of things.' 
 
 ' Catherine hasn't moved with the times,' said Rose dolefully. 
 
 Langham was silent. Gaucherie seized him again when it- 
 became a question of discussing Mrs. Elsmere, his own view was 
 so inconveniently emphatic. 
 
 ' And you think,' she went on, ' you really think, without 
 being too ungrateful to papa, and too unkind to the old Leyburn 
 ghosts ' and a little laugh danced through the vibrating voice 
 'I might try and get them to give up Burwood I might 
 struggle to have my way 1 I shall, of course I shall ! I never 
 was a meek martyr, and never shall be. But one can't help 
 having qualms, though one doesn't tell them to one's sisters and 
 cousins and aunts. And sometimes ' she turned her chin round 
 on her hand and looked at him with a delicious shy impulsive- 
 ness ' sometimes a stranger sees clearer. Do you think me a 
 monster, as Catherine does ? ' 
 
 Even as she spoke her own words startled her the confidence, 
 the abandonment of them. But she held to them bravely ; only 
 her eyelids quivered. She had absurdly misjudged this man, 
 and there was a warm penitence in her heart. How kind he 
 had been, how sympathetic ! 
 
 He rose with her last words, and stood leaning against the 
 mantelpiece, looking down upon her gravely, with the air, as it 
 seemed to her, of her friend, her confessor. Her white childish 
 brow, the little curls of bright hair upon her temples, her parted 
 lips, the pretty folds of the muslin dress, the little foot on the
 
 CHAP, xiv SURREY 189 
 
 fender every detail of the picture impressed itself once for all. 
 Langharn will carry it with him to his grave. 
 
 ' Tell me,' she said again, smiling divinely, as though to en- 
 courage him ' tell me quite frankly, down to the bottom, what 
 you think ? ' 
 
 The harsh noise of an opening door in the distance, and a 
 gust of wind sweeping through the house, voices and steps ap- 
 proaching. Rose sprang up, and, for the first time during all the 
 latter part of their conversation, felt a sharp sense of embar- 
 rassment. 
 
 ' How early you are, Robert ! ' she exclaimed, as the study 
 door opened, and Robert's wind-blown head and tall form, 
 wrapped in an Inverness cape, appeared on the threshold. ' Is 
 Catherine tired ? ' 
 
 ' Rather,' said Robert, the slightest gleam of surprise betray- 
 ing itself on his face. ' She has gone to bed, and told me to ask 
 you to come and say good-night to her.' 
 
 ' You got my message about not coming from old Martha ? ' 
 asked Rose. ' I met her on the common.' 
 
 ' Yes, she gave it us at the church door.' He went out again 
 into the passage to hang up his greatcoat. She followed, long- 
 ing to tell him that it was pure accident that took her to the 
 study, but she could not find words in which to do it, and could 
 only say good-night a little abruptly. 
 
 ' How tempting that fire looks ! ' said Robert, re-entering the 
 study. ' Were you very cold, Langham, before you lit it ? ' 
 
 ' Very,' said Langham, smiling, his arm behind his head, his 
 eyes fixed on the blaze ; ' but I have been delightfully warm and 
 happy since.' 
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 CATHERINE stopped beside the drawing-room window with a 
 start, caught by something she saw outside. 
 
 It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Lang- 
 ham strolling round the garden. A bystander would have been 
 puzzled by the sudden knitting of Catherine's brows over it. 
 
 Rose held a red parasol, which gleamed against the trees ; 
 Dandie leapt about her, but she was too busy talking to take 
 much notice of him. Talking, chattering, to that cold cynic of 
 a man, for whom only yesterday she had scarcely had a civil 
 word ! Catherine felt herself a prey to all sorts of vague un- 
 reasonable alarms. 
 
 Robert had said to her the night before, with an odd look : 
 ' Wifie, when I came in I found Langham and Rose had been 
 spending the evening together in the study. And I don't know 
 when I have seen Langham so brilliant or so alive as in our 
 smoking talk just now I
 
 190 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 Catherine had laughed him to scorn ; but, all the same, she 
 had been a little longer going to sleep than usual. She felt 
 herself almost as much as ever the guardian of her sisters, and 
 the old sensitive nerve was set quivering. And now there could 
 be no question about it Rose had changed her ground towards 
 Mr. Langham altogether. Her manner at breakfast was evi- 
 dence enough of it. 
 
 Catherine's self -torturing mind leapt on for an instant to all 
 sorts of horrors. That man ! and she and Robert responsible 
 to her mother and her dead father ! Never ! Then she scolded 
 herself back to common sense. Rose and he had discovered a 
 common subject in music and musicians. That would be quite 
 enough to account for the new-born friendship on Rose's part. 
 And in five more days, the limit of Langham's stay, nothing 
 very dreadful could happen, argued the reserved Catherine. 
 
 But she was uneasy, and after a bit, as that tSte-a-tete in the 
 garden still went on, she could not, for the life of her, help 
 interfering. She strolled out to meet them with some woollen 
 stuff hanging over her arm, and made a plaintive and smiling 
 appeal to Rose to come and help her with some preparations 
 for a mothers' meeting to be held that afternoon. Rose, who 
 was supposed by the family to be ' taking care ' of her sister at 
 a critical time, had a moment's prick of conscience, and went 
 off with a good grace. Langham felt vaguely that he owed 
 Mrs. Elsmere another grudge, but he resigned himself and took 
 out a cigarette, wherewith to console himself for the loss of his 
 companion. 
 
 Presently, as he stood for a moment turning over some new 
 books on the drawing-room table, Rose came in. She held an 
 armful of blue serge ; and, going up to a table in the window, 
 she took from it a little work-case, and was about to vanish 
 again when Langham went up to her. 
 
 ' You look intolerably busy,' he said to her, discontentedly. 
 
 ' Six dresses, ten cloaks, eight petticoats to cut out by luncheon 
 time,' she answered demurely, with a countenance of most Dorcas- 
 like seriousness, ' and if I spoil them I shall have to pay for the 
 stuff!' 
 
 He shrugged his shoulders and looked at her, smiling, still 
 master of himself and of his words. 
 
 ' And no music none at all ? Perhaps you don't know that 
 I too can accompany 1 ' 
 
 ' You play ! ' she exclaimed, incredulous. 
 
 'Try me/ 
 
 The light of his fine black eyes seemed to encompass her. 
 She moved backward a little, shaking her head. 'Not this 
 morning,' she said. ' Oh dear, no, not this morning ! I am 
 afraid you don't know anything about tacking or fixing, or the 
 abominable time they take. Well, it could hardly be expected. 
 There is nothing in the world ' and she shook her serge vindic- 
 tively ' that I hate so much ! '
 
 CHAP, xiv SURREY 191 
 
 ' And not this afternoon, for Robert and I go fishing. But 
 this evening ? ' he said, detaining her. 
 
 She nodded lightly, dropped her lovely eyes with a sudden 
 embarrassment, and went away with lightning quickness. 
 
 A minute or two later Elsmere laid a hand on his friend's 
 shoulder. ' Come and see the Hall, old fellow. It will be our 
 last chance, for the squire and his sister come back this after- 
 noon. I must parochialise a bit afterwards, but you shan't be 
 much victimised.' 
 
 Langham submitted, and they sallied forth. It was a soft 
 rainy morning, one of the first heralds of autumn. Gray mists 
 were drifting silently across the woods and the wide stubbles of 
 the now shaven cornfield, where white lines of reapers were at 
 work, as the morning cleared, making and stacking the sheaves. 
 After a stormy night the garden was strewn with debris, and 
 here and there noiseless prophetic showers of leaves were drop- 
 ping on the lawn. 
 
 Elsruere took his guest along a bit of common, where great 
 black junipers stood up like magnates in council above the 
 motley undergrowth of fern and heather, and then they turned 
 into the park. A great stretch of dimpled land it was, falling 
 softly towards the south and west, bounded by a shining twisted 
 river, and commanding from all its highest points a heathery 
 world of distance, now turned a stormy purple under the droop- 
 ing fringes of the rain clouds. They walked downwards from 
 the moment of entering it, till at last, when they reached a 
 wooded plateau about a hundred feet above the river, the house 
 itself came suddenly into view. 
 
 That was a house of houses ! The large main building, as 
 distinguished from the lower stone portions to the north which 
 represented a fragment of the older Elizabethan house, had 
 been in its day the crown and boast of Jacobean house-archi- 
 tecture. It was fretted and jewelled with Renaissance terra- 
 cotta work from end to end ; each gable had its lace work, each 
 window its carved setting. And yet the lines of the whole were 
 so noble, genius had hit the general proportions so finely, that 
 no effect of stateliness or grandeur had been missed through all 
 the accumulation of ornament. Majestic relic of a vanished 
 England, the house rose amid the August woods rich in every 
 beauty that site, and wealth, and centuries could give to it. The 
 river ran about it as though it loved it. The cedars which had 
 kept it company for well-nigh two centuries gathered proudly 
 round it ; the deer grouped themselves in the park beneath it, 
 as though they were conscious elements in a great whole of 
 loveliness. 
 
 The two friends were admitted by a housemaid who happened 
 to be busy in the hall, and whose red cheeks and general breath- 
 lessness bore witness to the energy of the storm of preparation 
 now sweeping through the house. 
 
 The famous hall to which Elsmere at once drew Langham's
 
 192 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK 11 
 
 attention was, however, in no way remarkable for size or height. 
 It told comparatively little of seignorial dignity, but it was as 
 though generation after generation had employed upon its per- 
 fecting the craft of its most delicate fingers, the love of its most 
 fanciful and ingenious spirits. Overhead, the stucco-work ceil- 
 ing, covered with stags and birds and strange heraldic creatures 
 unknown to science, had the deep creamy tint, the consistency 
 and surface of antique ivory. From the white and gilt frieze 
 beneath, untouched, so Robert explained, since the Jacobean 
 days when it was first executed, hung Renaissance tapestries 
 which would have made the heart's delight of any romantic 
 child, so rich they were in groves of marvellous trees hung with 
 red and golden fruits, in far-reaching palaces and rock-built 
 citadels, in flying shepherdesses and pursuing shepherds. Be- 
 tween the tapestries, again, there were breadths of carved 
 panelling, crowded with all things round and sweet, with 
 fruits and flowers and strange musical instruments, with flying 
 cherubs, and fair faces in laurel- wreathed medallions ; while in 
 the middle of the wall a great oriel window broke the dim 
 venerable surfaces of wood and tapestry with stretches of 
 jewelled light. Tables crowded with antiques, with Tanagra 
 figures or Greek vases, with Florentine bronzes or specimens 
 of the wilful vivacious wood -carving of seventeenth -century 
 Spain, stood scattered on the Persian carpets. And, to complete 
 the whole, the gardeners had just been at work on the corners 
 of the hall, and of the great window, so that the hard-won 
 subtleties of man's bygone handiwork, with which the splendid 
 room was encrusted from top to bottom, were masked and re- 
 lieved here and there by the careless easy splendour of flowers, 
 which had but to bloom in order to eclipse them all. 
 
 Robert was at home in the great pile, where for many months 
 he had gone freely in and out on his way to the library, and the 
 housekeeper only met him to make an apology for her working 
 dress, and to hand over to him the keys of the library bookcases, 
 with the fretful comment that seemed to have in it the ghostly 
 voice of generations of housemaids, 'Oh lor', sir, they are a 
 trouble, them books ! ' 
 
 From the drawing-rooms, full of a more modern and less 
 poetical magnificence, where Langham turned restless and re- 
 fractory, Elsmere with a smile took his guest silently back into 
 the hall, and opened a carved door behind a curtain. Passing 
 through, they found themselves in a long passage lighted by 
 small windows on the left-hand side. 
 
 ' This passage, please notice,' said Robert, ' leads to nothing 
 but the wing containing the library, or rather libraries, which 
 is the oldest part of the house. I always enter it with a kind 
 of pleasing awe ! Consider these carpets, which keep out every 
 sound, and look how everything gets older as we go on.' 
 
 For half-way down the passage the ceiling seemed to descend 
 upon their heads, the flooring became uneven, and woodwork
 
 CHAP, xiv SUKREY 193 
 
 and walls showed that they had passed from the Jacobean house 
 into the much older Tudor building. Presently Robert led the 
 way up a few shallow steps, pushed open a heavy door, also 
 covered by curtains, and bade his companion enter. 
 
 They found themselves in a low immense room, running at 
 right angles to the passage they had just quitted. The long 
 cliamond-paned window, filling almost half of the opposite wall, 
 faced the door by which they had come in ; the heavy carved 
 mantelpiece was to their right ; an open doorway on their left, 
 closed at present by tapestry hangings, seemed to lead into yet 
 other rooms. 
 
 The walls of this one were completely covered from floor to 
 ceiling with latticed bookcases, enclosed throughout in a frame 
 of oak carved in light classical relief by what appeared to be a 
 French hand of the sixteenth century. The chequered bindings 
 of the books, in which the creamy tints of vellum predominated, 
 lined the whole surface of the wall with a delicate sobriety of 
 colour ; over the mantelpiece, the picture of the founder of the 
 house a Holbein portrait, glorious in red robes and fur and 
 
 golden necklace seemed to gather up and give voice to all the 
 ignity and impressiveness of the room beneath him ; while on 
 the window side the book-lined wall was, as it were, replaced 
 by the wooded face of a hill, clothed in dark lines of trimmed 
 yews, which rose abruptly about a hundred yards from the 
 house and overshadowed the whole library wing. Between the 
 window and the hill, however, was a small old English garden, 
 closely hedged round with yew hedges, and blazing now with 
 every flower that an English August knows with sun-flowers, 
 tiger-lilies, and dahlias white and red. The window was low, 
 so that the flowers seemed to be actually in the room, challeng- 
 ing the pale tints of the books, the tawny browns and blues of 
 the Persian carpet, and the scarlet splendours of the courtier 
 over the mantelpiece. The room was lit up besides by a few 
 gleaming casts from the antique, by the 'Diane Chasseresse' 
 of the Louvre, by the Hermes of Praxiteles smiling with im- 
 mortal kindness on the child enthroned upon his arm, and by a 
 Donatello figure of a woman in marble, its subtle sweet auster- 
 ity contrasting with the Greek frankness and blitheness of its 
 companions. 
 
 Langham was penetrated at once by the spell of this strange 
 and beautiful place. The fastidious instincts which had been 
 half revolted by the costly accumulations, the overblown 
 splendours of the drawing-room, were abundantly satisfied here. 
 
 ' So it was here,' he said, looking round him, ' that that man 
 wrote The Idols of the Market-place ? ' 
 
 ' I imagine so,' said Robert ; ' if so, he might well have felt a 
 little more charity towards the human race in writing it. The 
 race cannot be said to have treated him badly on the whole. 
 But now look, Langham, look at these books the most precious 
 things are here.' 
 
 o
 
 194 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 And he turned the key of a particular section of the wall, 
 which was not only latticed but glazed. 
 
 ' Here is A Mirror for Magistrates. Look at the title-page ; 
 you will find Gabriel Harvey's name on it. Here is a first 
 edition of Astrophel and Stella, another of the Arcadia. They 
 may very well be presentation copies, for the Wendover of that 
 day is known to have been a wit and a writer. Imagine find- 
 ing them in situ like this in the same room, perhaps on the 
 same shelves, as at the beginning ! The other rooms on this 
 floor have been annexed since, but this room was always a 
 library.' 
 
 Langham took the volumes reverently from Robert's hands 
 into his own, the scholar's passion hot within him. That glazed 
 case was indeed a storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson's Under- 
 woods with his own corrections : a presentation copy of Andrew 
 Marvell's Poems, with autograph notes ; manuscript volumes of 
 letters, containing almost every famous name known to English 
 literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the 
 literary cream, in fact, of all the vast collection which filled 
 the muniment room upstairs ; books which had belonged to 
 Addison, to Sir William Temple, to Swift, to Horace Walpole ; 
 the first four folios of Shakespeare, all perfect, and most of the 
 quartos everything that the heart of the English collector 
 could most desire was there. And the charm of it was that only 
 a small proportion of these precious things represented con- 
 scious and deliberate acquisition. The great majority of them 
 had, as it were, drifted thither one by one, carried there by the 
 tide of English letters as to a warm and natural resting-place. 
 
 But Robert grew impatient, and hurried on his guest to other 
 things to the shelves of French rarities, ranging from Du 
 Bellay's Visions, with his autograph, down to the copy of Les 
 Mtmoires d'Outre-Tombe presented by Chateaubriand to Madame 
 Re"camier, or to a dainty manuscript volume in the fine writing 
 of Lamartine. 
 
 ' These,' Robert explained, ' were collected, I believe, by the 
 squire's father. He was not in the least literary, so they say, 
 but it had always been a point of honour to carry on the library, 
 and as he had learnt French well in his youth he bought French 
 things, taking advice, but without knowing much about them, 
 I imagine. It was in the room overhead,' said Robert, laying 
 down the book he held, and speaking in a lower key, ' so the 
 old doctor of the house told me a few weeks ago, that the same 
 poor soul put an end to himself twenty years ago.' 
 
 ' What in the name of fortune did he do that for ? ' 
 
 ' Mania,' said Robert quietly. 
 
 ' Whew ! ' said the other, lifting his eyebrows. ' Is that the 
 skeleton in this very magnificent cupboard ? ' 
 
 ' It has been the Wendover scourge from the beginning, so 
 I hear. Every one about here of course explains this man's 
 eccentricities by the family history. But I don't know,' said
 
 CHAP, xiv SURREY 195 
 
 .Robert, his lip hardening, 'it may be extremely convenient 
 sometimes to have a tradition of the kind. A man who knew 
 how to work it might very well enjoy all the advantages of 
 sanity and the privileges of insanity at the same time. The 
 poor old doctor I was telling you of old Meyrick who has 
 known the squire since his boyhood, and has a dog-like attach- 
 ment to him, is always hinting at mysterious excuses. When- 
 ever I let out to him, as I do sometimes, as to the state of the 
 property, he talks of "inherited melancholy," "rash judgments," 
 and so forth. I like the good old soul, but I don't believe much 
 of it. A man who is sane enough to make a great name for 
 himself in letters is sane enough to provide his estate with a 
 decent agent.' 
 
 ' It doesn't follow ' said Langham, who was, however, so deep 
 in a collection of Spanish romances and chronicles that the 
 squire's mental history did not seem to make much impression 
 upon him. ' Most men of letters are mad, and I should be in- 
 clined,' he added, with a sudden and fretful emphasis, ' to argue 
 much worse things for the sanity of your squire, Elsmere, from 
 the fact that this room is undoubtedly allowed to get damp 
 sometimes, than from any of those absurd parochial tests of 
 yours.' 
 
 And he held up a couple of priceless books, of which the 
 Spanish sheepskin bindings showed traces here and there of 
 moisture. 
 
 ' It is no use, I know, expecting you to preserve a moral sense 
 when you get among books,' said Robert with a shrug. ' I will 
 reserve my remarks on that subject. But you must really tear 
 yourself away from this room, Langham, if you want to see the 
 rest of the squire's quarters. Here you have what we may call 
 the ornamental sensational part of the library, that part of it 
 which would make a stir at Sotheby's ; the working parts are 
 all to come.' 
 
 Langham reluctantly allowed himself to be dragged away. 
 Robert held back the hangings over the doorway leading into 
 the rest of the wing, and, passing through, they found them- 
 selves in a continuation of the library totally different in char- 
 acter from the magnificent room they had just left. The walls 
 were no longer latticed and carved ; they were closely packed, 
 in the most business-like way, with books which represented 
 the squire's own collection, and were in fact a chart or his own 
 intellectual history. 
 
 ' This is how I interpret this room,' said Robert, looking round 
 it. ' Here are the books he collected at Oxford in the Tractarian 
 Movement and afterwards. Look here,' and he pulled out a 
 volume of St. Basil. 
 
 Langham looked, and saw on the title-page a note in faded 
 characters : ' Given to me by Newman at Oxford, in 1845.' 
 
 ' Ah, of course, he was one of them in '45 ; he must have left 
 them very soon after,' said Langham reflectively.
 
 196 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 Robert nodded. ' But look at them ! There are the Tracts, 
 all the Fathers, all the Councils, and masses, as you see, of Ang- 
 lican theology. Now look at the next case, nothing but 
 eighteenth century ! ' 
 
 ' I see, from the Fathers to the Philosophers, from Hooker 
 to Hume. How history repeats itself in the individual ! ' 
 
 ' And there again,' said Robert, pointing to the other side of 
 the room, ' are the results of his life as a German student.' 
 
 ' Germany ah, I remember ! How long was he there ? ' 
 
 'Ten years, at Berlin and Heidelberg. According to old 
 Meyrick, he buried his last chance of living like other men at 
 Berlin. His years of extravagant labour there have left marks 
 upon him physically that can never be effaced. But that book- 
 case fascinates me. Half the great names of modern thought 
 are in those books.' 
 
 And so they were. The first Langham opened had a Latin 
 dedication in a quavering old man's hand, ' Amico et discipulo 
 meo,' signed 'Fredericus Gulielmus Schelling.' The next bore 
 the autograph of Alexander von Humboldt, the next that of 
 Boeckh, the famous classic, and so on. Close by was Niebuhr's 
 History, in the title-page of which a few lines in the historian's 
 handwriting bore witness to much ' pleasant discourse between 
 the writer and Roger Wendover, at Bonn, in the summer of 
 1847.' Judging from other shelves farther down, he must also 
 have spent some time, perhaps an academic year, at Tubingen, 
 for here were most of the early editions of the Leben Jesu, with 
 some corrections from Strauss's hand, and similar records of 
 Baur, Ewald, and other members or opponents of the Tubingen 
 school. And so on, through the whole bookcase. Something of 
 everything was there Philosophy, Theology, History, Philology. 
 The collection was a medley, and made almost a spot of disorder 
 in the exquisite neatness and system of the vast gathering of 
 which it formed part. Its bond of union was simply that it 
 represented the forces of an epoch, the thoughts, the men, the 
 occupations which had absorbed the energies of ten golden years. 
 Every book seemed to be full of paper marks ; almost every 
 title-page was covered with minute writing, which, when exam- 
 ined, proved to contain a record of lectures, or conversations 
 with the author of the volume, sometimes a string of anecdotes 
 or a short biography, rapidly sketched out of the fulness of per- 
 sonal knowledge, and often seasoned with a subtle causticity 
 and wit. A history of modern thinking Germany, of that ' un- 
 extinguished hearth' whence the mind of Europe has been 
 kindled for three generations, might almost have been evolved 
 from that bookcase and its contents alone. 
 
 Langham, as he stood peering among the ugly, vilely-printed 
 German volumes, felt suddenly a kind of magnetic influence 
 creeping over him. The room seemed instinct with a harsh 
 commanding presence. The history of a mind and soul was 
 written upon the face of it ; every shelf, as it were, was an auto-
 
 CHAP, xiv SURREY 197 
 
 biographical fragment, an ' Apologia pro Vita Mea.' He drew 
 away from the books at last with the uneasy feeling of one who 
 surprises a confidence, and looked for Robert. Robert was at 
 the end of the room, a couple of volumes under his arm, anothei*, 
 which he was reading, in his hand. 
 
 ' This is my corner,' he said, smiling and flushing a little, as 
 his friend moved up to him. ' Perhaps you don't know that I 
 too am engaged upon a great work.' 
 
 ' A great work you ? 
 
 Langham looked at his companion as though to find out 
 whether his remark was meant seriously or whether he might 
 venture to be cynical. Elsmere writing ! Why should every- 
 body write books 1 It was absurd ! The scholar who knows 
 what toll scholarship takes of life is always apt to resent the 
 intrusion of the man of action into his domains. It looks to him 
 like a kind of ridiculous assumption that any one d'un cceur leger 
 can do what has cost him his heart's blood. 
 
 Robert understood something of the meaning of his tone, and 
 replied almost apologetically ; he was always singularly modest 
 about himself on the intellectual side. 
 
 'Well, Grey is responsible. He gave me such a homily 
 before I left Oxford on the absolute necessity of keeping up 
 with books, that I could do nothing less than set up a " subject 
 at once. Half the day," he used to say to me, "you will be 
 king of your world ; the other half be the slave of something 
 which will take you out of your world into the general world ; 
 and then he would quote to me that saying he was always bring- 
 ing into lectures I forget whose it is " The decisive events of 
 the world take place in the intellect. It is the mission of books 
 that they help one to remember it." Altogether it was striking, 
 coming from one who has always had such a tremendous respect 
 for practical life and work, and I was much impressed by it! 
 So blame him ! ' 
 
 Langham was silent. Elsmere had noticed that any allusion 
 to Grey found Langham less and less responsive. 
 
 'Well, what is the "great work"?' he said at last, abruptly. 
 
 'Historical. Oh, I should have written something without 
 Grey ; I have always had a turn for it since I was a child. But 
 he was clear that history was especially valuable especially 
 necessary to a clergyman. I felt he was right, entirely right. 
 So I took my Final Schools' history for a basis, and started on 
 the Empire, especially the decay of the Empire. Some day I 
 mean to take up one of the episodes in the great birth of Europe 
 the makings of France, I think, most likely. It seems to 
 lead farthest and tell most. I have been at work now nine 
 months.' 
 
 ' And are just getting into it ? ' 
 
 'Just about. I have got down below the surface, and am 
 beginning to feel the joys of digging ; ' and Robert threw back 
 his head with one of his most brilliant enthusiastic smiles. ' I
 
 198 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 have been shy about boring you with the thing, but the fact is, 
 I am very keen indeed ; and this library has been a godsend ! ' 
 
 'So I should think.' Langham sat down on one of the 
 carVed wooden stools placed at intervals along the bookcases 
 and looked at his friend, his psychological curiosity rising a 
 little. 
 
 'Tell me,' he said presently 'tell me what interests you 
 specially what seizes you in a subject like the making of 
 France, for instance ? ' 
 
 ' Do you really want to know ? ' said Robert, incredulously. 
 
 The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk 
 up and down, trying to answer Langham's question, and at the 
 same time to fix in speech a number of sentiments and impres- 
 sions bred in him by the work of the past few months. After a 
 while Langham began to see his way. Evidently the forces at 
 the bottom of this new historical interest were precisely the 
 same forces at work in Elsmere's parish plans, in his sermons, in 
 his dealings with the poor and the young forces of imagination 
 and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study 
 was not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumu- 
 lation which is the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, 
 of science. It was simply a passionate sense of the human 
 problems which underlie all the dry and dusty detail of history 
 and give it tone and colour, a passionate desire to rescue some- 
 thing more of human life from the drowning, submerging past, 
 to realise for himself and others the solidarity and continuity of 
 mankind's long struggle from the beginning until now. 
 
 Langham had had much experience of Elsmere's versatility 
 and pliancy, but he had never realised it so much as now, while 
 he sat listening to the vivid, many -coloured speech getting 
 quicker and quicker, and more and more telling and original as 
 Robert got more absorbed and excited by what he had to say. 
 He was endeavouring to describe to Langham the sort of book 
 he thought might be written on the rise of modern society in 
 Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the blood- 
 stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory 
 the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops 
 and its saints ; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind 
 all the fierce incoherence of the Empire's decay, the struggle of 
 Roman order and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of 
 German hardness ; above all, the war of orthodoxy ana heresy, 
 with its strange political complications. And then, discontented 
 still, as though the heart of the matter were still untouched, he 
 went on, restlessly wandering the while, with his long arms 
 linked behind him, 'throwing out' words at an object in his 
 mind, trying to grasp and analyse that strange sense which 
 haunts the student of Rome's decline as it once overshadowed the 
 infancy of Europe, that sense of a slowly departing majesty, of 
 a great presence just withdrawn, and still incalculably potent, 
 traceable throughout in that humbling consciousness of Goth or
 
 CHAP, xiv SURREY 199 
 
 Frank that they were but 'beggars hutting in a palace the 
 place had harboured greater men than they ! 
 
 'There is one thing,' Langham said presently, in his slow 
 nonchalant voice, when the tide of Robert's ardour ebbed for a 
 moment, 'that doesn't seem to have touched you yet. But you 
 will come to it. To my mind, it makes almost the chief in- 
 terest of history. It is just this. History depends on testimony. 
 What is the nature and the value of testimony at given times ? 
 In other words, did the man of the third century understand, or 
 report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the 
 sixteenth or the nineteenth 1 And if not, what are the differ- 
 ences, and what are the deductions to be made from them, if 
 any ? He fixed his keen look on Robert, who was now loung- 
 ing against the books, as though his harangue had taken it out 
 of him a little. 
 
 'Ah, well,' said the rector, smiling, 'I am only just coming to 
 that. As I told you, I am only now beginning to dig for my- 
 self. Till now it has all been work at second hand. I have 
 been getting a general survey of the ground as quickly as I 
 could with the help of other men's labours. Now I must go to 
 work inch by inch, and find out what the ground is made of. I 
 won't forget your point. It is enormously important, I grant 
 enormously,' he repeated reflectively. 
 
 ' I should r think it is,' said Langham to himself as he rose ; 
 ' the whole of orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance ! ' 
 
 There was not much more to be seen. A little wooden stair- 
 case led from the second library to the upper rooms, curious old 
 rooms, which had been annexed one by one as the squire 
 wanted them, and in which there was nothing at all neither 
 chair, nor table, nor carpet but books only. All the doors 
 leading from room to room had been taken off ; the old worm- 
 eaten boards had been roughly stained ; a few old French 
 engravings had been hung here and there where the encroach- 
 ing books left an opening ; but otherwise all was bare. There 
 was a curious charm in the space and air of these empty rooms, 
 with their latticed windows opening on to the hill, and letting 
 in day by day the summer sun-risings or the winter dawns, 
 which had shone upon them for more than three centuries. 
 
 ' This is my last day of privilege,' said Robert. ' Everybody 
 is shut out when once he appears, from this wing, and this part 
 of the grounds. This was his father's room,' and the rector led 
 the way into the last of the series ; ' and through there,' point- 
 ing to a door on the right, ' lies the waV to his own sleeping 
 room, which is of course connected with the more modern side 
 of the house.' 
 
 'So this is where that old man ventured "what Cato did 
 and Addison approved," ' murmured Langham, standing in the 
 middle of the room and looking round him. This particular 
 room was now used as a sort of lumber place, a receptacle for 
 the superfluous or ^useless books gradually thrown off by the
 
 200 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK u 
 
 great collection all around. There were innumerable volumes 
 in frayed or broken bindings lying on the ground. A niustv 
 smell hung over it all ; the gray light from outside, which 
 seemed to give only an added subtlety and charm to the other 
 portions of the ancient building through which they had been 
 moving, seemed here triste and dreary. Or Langham fancied it. 
 He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw 
 suddenly before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and 
 framed in the doorways facing him, an engraving of a Greuze 
 picture a girl's face turned over her shoulder, the hair waving 
 about her temples, the lips parted, the teeth gleaming, mirth 
 and provocation and tender yielding in every line. Langham 
 started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though 
 Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him. 
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 'Now, having seen our sight,' said Robert, as they left the 
 great mass of Mure well behind them, ' come and see our scandal. 
 Both run by the same proprietor, if you please. There is a 
 hamlet down there in the hollow ' and he pointed to a gray 
 speck in the distance ' which deserves a Royal Commission all 
 to itself, which is a, disgrace' and his tone warmed 'to any 
 country, any owner, any agent ! It is owned by Mr. Wendover, 
 and I see the pleasing prospect straight before me of beginning 
 my acquaintance with him by a fight over it. You will admit 
 that it is a little hard on a man who wants to live on good terms 
 with the possessor of the Mure well library to have to open 
 relations with him by a fierce attack on his drains and his 
 pigsties.' 
 
 He turned to his companion with a half-rueful spark of 
 laughter in his gray eyes. Langham hardly caught what he 
 said. He was far away in meditations of his own. 
 
 'An attack,' he repeated vaguely ; 'why an attack ?' 
 
 Robert plunged again into the great topic of which his quick 
 mind was evidently full. Langham tried to listen, but was 
 conscious that his friend's social enthusiasms bored him a great 
 deal. And side by side with the consciousness there slid in a 
 little stinging reflection that four years ago no talk of Elsmere's 
 could have bored him t 
 
 'What's the matte'r with this particular place?' he asked 
 languidly, at last, raising his eyes towards the group of houses 
 now beginning to emerge from the distance. 
 
 An angry red mounted in Robert's cheek. 
 
 'What isn't the matter with it? The houses, which were 
 built on a swamp originally, are falling into ruin ; the roofs, 
 the drains, the accommodation per head, are all about equally 
 scandalous. The place is harried with illness ; since I came
 
 CHAP, xv SURREY 201 
 
 there has been both fever and diphtheria there. They are all 
 crippled with rheumatism, but that they think nothing of ; the 
 English labourer takes rheumatism as quite in the day's bar- 
 gain ! And as to vice the vice that comes of mere endless 
 persecuting opportunity I can tell you one's ideas of personal 
 responsibility get a good deal shaken up by a place like this ! 
 And I can do nothing. I brought over Henslowe to lee the 
 place, and he behaved like a brute. He scoffed at all my com- 
 plaints, said that no landlord would be such a fool as to build 
 tresh cottages on such a site, that the old ones must just be 
 allowed to go to ruin ; that the people might live in them if 
 they chose, or turn out of them if they chose. Nobody forced 
 them to do either ; it was their own look-out.' 
 
 ' That was true,' said Langham, ' wasn't it ? ' 
 
 Robert turned upon him fiercely. 
 
 'Ah ! you think it so easy for those poor creatures to leave 
 their homes, their working places ! Some of them have been 
 there thirty years. They are close to the two or three farms 
 that employ them, close to the osier beds which give them extra 
 earnings in the spring. If they were turned out there is 
 nothing nearer than Murewell, and not a single cottage to be 
 found there. I don't say it is a landlord's duty to provide more 
 cottages than are wanted ; but if the labour is wanted, the 
 labourer should be decently housed. He is worthy of his hire, 
 and woe to the man who neglects or ill-treats him ! ' 
 
 Langham could not help smiling, partly at the vehemence of 
 the speech, partly at the lack of adjustment between his friend's 
 mood and his own. He braced himself to take the matter more 
 seriously, but meanwhile Robert had caught the smile, and his 
 angry eyes melted at once into laughter. 
 
 There I am, ranting as usual,' he said penitently. 'Took 
 you for Henslowe, I suppose ! Ah, well, never mind. I hear 
 the Provost has another book on the stocks.' 
 
 So they diverged into other things, talking politics and new 
 books, public men and what not, till, at the end of a long and 
 gradual descent through wooded ground, some two miles to the 
 north-west of the park, they emerged from the trees beneath 
 which they had been walking, and found themselves on a 
 bridge, a gray sluggish stream flowing beneath them, and the 
 hamlet they sought rising among the river flats on the farther 
 side. 
 
 ' There,' said Robert, stopping, ' we are at our journey's end. 
 Now then, what sort of a place of human habitation do you call 
 tliat 1 ' 
 
 The bridge whereon they stood crossed the main channel of 
 the river, which just at that point, however, parted into several 
 branches, and came meandering slowly down through a little 
 bottom or valley, filled with osier beds, long since robbed of 
 their year's growth of shoots. On the other side of the river, on 
 ground all but level with the osier beds which interposed be-
 
 202 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 tween them and the stream, rose a miserable group of houses, 
 huddled together as though their bulging walls and rotten roofs 
 could only maintain themselves at all by the help and support 
 which each wretched hovel gave to its neighbour. The mud 
 walls were stained with yellow patches of lichen, the palings 
 round the little gardens were broken and ruinous. Close beside 
 them aft was a sort of open drain or water-course, stagnant and 
 noisome, which dribbled into the river a little above the bridge. 
 Behind them rose a high gravel bank edged by firs, and a line 
 of oak trees against the sky. The houses stood in the shadow 
 of the bank looking north, and on this gray, lowering day, the 
 dreariness, the gloom, the squalor of the place were inde- 
 scribable. 
 
 ' Well, that is a God-forsaken hole ! ' said Langham, studying 
 it, his interest roused at last, rather, perhaps, by the Ruysdael- 
 like melancholy and picturesqueness of the scene than by its 
 human suggestiveness. ' I could hardly have imagined such a 
 place existed in southern England. It is more like a bit of 
 Ireland.' 
 
 ' If it were Ireland it might be to somebody's interest to ferret 
 it out,' said Robert bitterly. ' But these poor folks are out of 
 the world. They may be brutalised with impunity. Oh, such 
 a case as I had here last autumn ! A young girl of sixteen or 
 seventeen, who would have been healthy and happy anywhere 
 else, stricken by the damp and the poison of the place, dying in 
 six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the world but pre- 
 ventable cruelty and neglect ! It was a sight that burnt into my 
 mind, once for all, what is meant by a landlord's responsibility. 
 I tried, of course, to move her, but neither she nor her parents 
 elderly folk had energy enough for a change. They only 
 prayed to be let alone. I came over the last evening of her life 
 to give her the communion. " Ah, sir ! " said the mother to me 
 not bitterly that is the strange thing, they have so little bitter- 
 ness " if Mister 'Enslowe would jest a mended that bit 'o roof 
 of ours last winter, Bessie needn't have laid in the wet so many 
 nights as she did, and she coughin' fit to break your heart, for 
 all the things yer could put over 'er." ' 
 
 Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a 
 few minutes before, tremulous with feeling. ' Ah, well,' he said 
 at last with a long breath, moving away from the parapet of 
 the bridge on which he had been leaning, ' better be oppressed 
 than oppressor, any day ! Now, then, I must deliver my stores. 
 There's a child here Catherine and I have been doing our best 
 to pull through typhoid.' 
 
 They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading 
 to the hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, the 
 main sewer of the community, as Robert pointed out, and they 
 made their way through the filth surrounding one of the nearest 
 cottages. 
 
 A feeble elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow blood-
 
 CHAP, xv SURREY 203 
 
 less skin make him look much older than he actually was, opened 
 the door and invited them to come in. Robert passed on into 
 an inner room, conducted thither by a woman who had been 
 sitting working over the fire. Langham stood irresolute ; but 
 the old man's quavering ' kindly take a chair, sir ; you've come 
 a long way,' decided him, and he stepped in. 
 
 Inside the hovel was miserable indeed. It belonged to that 
 old and evil type which the efforts of the last twenty years have 
 done so much all over England to sweep away : four mud walls, 
 enclosing an oblong space about eight yards long, divided into 
 two unequal portions by a lath and plaster partition, with no 
 upper storey, a thatched roof, now entirely out of repair, and 
 letting in the rain in several places, and a paved floor little 
 better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous were the gaps 
 between the stones. The dismal place had no small adornings 
 none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and trivial, 
 are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing the 
 existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation 
 of the sheerest physical need ; and Langham, as he sat down 
 caught the sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, ac- 
 customed to the odours of damp meadows in times of ebbing 
 flood and festering sun, knows so well. As old Milsom began to 
 talk to him in his weak tremulous voice, the visitor's attention 
 was irresistibly held by the details about him. * Fresh as he was 
 from all the delicate sights, the harmonious colours and de- 
 lightful forms of the squire's house, they made an unusually 
 sharp impression on his fastidious senses. What does human 
 life become lived on reeking floors and under stifling roofs like 
 these? What strange abnormal deteriorations, physical and 
 spiritual, must it not inevitably undergo? Langham felt a 
 sudden inward movement of disgust and repulsion. 'For 
 heaven's sake, keep your superstitions ! ' he could have cried to 
 the whole human race, ' or any other narcotic that a grinding 
 fate has left you. What does anything matter to the mass of 
 mankind but a little ease, a little lightening of pressure on this 
 side or on that ? ' 
 
 Meanwhile the old man went maundering on, talking of the 
 weather, and of his sick child, and ' Mr. Elsmere,' with a kind of 
 listless incoherence which hardly demanded an answer, though 
 Langham threw in a word or two here and there. 
 
 Among other things, he began to ask a question or two about 
 Robert's predecessor, a certain Mr. Preston, who had left behind 
 him a memory of amiable evangelical indolence. 
 
 ' Did you see much of him ? ' he asked. 
 
 ' Oh law, no, sir ! ' replied the man, surprised into something 
 like energy. ' Never seed 'im more 'n once a year, and some- 
 times not that ! ' 
 
 'Was he liked here?' 
 
 'Well, sir, it was like this, you see. My wife, she's north- 
 country, she is, comes from Yorkshire ; sometimes she'd used to
 
 204 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 say to me, " Passon 'ee ain't much good, and passon 'ee ain't 
 much harm. 'Ee's no more good nor more 'arm, so fer as / can 
 see, nor a chip in a basin o' parritch." And that was just about 
 it, sir,' said the old man, pleased for the hundredth time with 
 his wife's bygone flight of metaphor and his own exact memory 
 of it. 
 
 As to the rector's tendance of his child, his tone was very cool 
 and guarded. 
 
 ' It do seem strange, sir, as nor he nor Doctor Grimes 'ull let 
 her have anything to put a bit of flesh on her, nothin' but them 
 messy things as he brings milk an' that. An' the beef jelly 
 lor, such a trouble ! Missis Elsmere, he tells my wife, strains 
 all the stuff through a cloth, she do ; never seed anythin' like it, 
 nor my wife neither. People is clever nowadays,' said the 
 speaker dubiously. Langham realised that, in this quarter of 
 his parish at any rate, his friend's pastoral vanity, if he had 
 any, would not find much to feed on. Nothing, to judge from 
 this specimen at least, greatly affected an inhabitant of Mile 
 End. Gratitude, responsiveness, imply health and energy, past 
 or present. The only constant defence which the poor have 
 against such physical conditions as those which prevailed at 
 Mile End is apathy. 
 
 As they came down the dilapidated steps at the cottage door, 
 Robert drew in "vfith avidity a long draught of the outer air. 
 
 ' Ugh ! ' he said with a sort of groan, ' that bedroom ! Nothing 
 gives one such a sense of the toughness of human life as to see 
 a child recovering, actually recovering, in such a pestilential 
 den ! Father, mother, grown-up son, girl of thirteen, and 
 
 grandchild, all huddled in a space just fourteen feet square, 
 angham ! ' and he turned passionately on his companion, what 
 defence can be found for a man who lives in a place like Mure- 
 well Hall, and can take money from human beings for the use 
 of a sty like that ? ' 
 
 ' Gently, my friend. Probably the squire, being the sort of 
 recluse he is, has never seen the place, or, at any rate, not for 
 years, and knows nothing about it ! ' 
 ' More shame for him ! ' 
 
 ' True in a sense,' said Langham, a little drily ; ' but as you 
 may want hereafter to make excuses for your man, and he may 
 give you occasion, I wouldn't begin by painting him to yourself 
 any blacker than need be.' 
 
 Eobert laughed, sighed and acquiesced. ' I am a hot-headed, 
 impatient kind of creature at the best of times,' he confessed. 
 ' They tell me that great things have been done for the poor 
 round here in the last twenty years. Something has been done, 
 certainly. But why are the old ways, the old evil neglect and 
 apathy, so long, so terribly long in dying ? This social progress 
 of ours we are so proud of is a clumsy limping jade at best! ' 
 
 They prowled a little more about the hamlet, every step 
 almost revealing some new source of poison and disease. Of
 
 CHAP, xv SURREY 205 
 
 their various visits, however, Langham remembered nothing 
 afterwards but a little scene in a miserable cottage, where they 
 found a whole family party gathered round the mid-day meal. 
 A band of puny, black, black-eyed children were standing or 
 sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three weeks 
 before, sat by the fire, deathly pale, a ' bad leg ' stretched out 
 before her on some improvised support, one baby on her lap and 
 another dark-haired bundle asleep in a cradle beside her. There 
 was a pathetic pinched beauty about the whole family. Even 
 the tiny twins were comparatively shapely ; all the other 
 children had delicate transparent skins, large eyes, and small 
 colourless mouths. The father, a picturesque handsome fellow, 
 looking as though he had gipsy blood in his veins, had opened 
 the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal, would have 
 retreated at once, in spite of the children's shy inviting looks, 
 but a glance past them at the mother's face checked the word 
 of refusal and apology on his lips, and he stepped in. 
 
 In after years Langham was always apt to see him in imagi- 
 nation as he saw him then, standing beside the bent figure of 
 the mother, his quick pitiful eyes taking in the pallor and 
 exhaustion of face and frame, his hand resting instinctively on 
 the head of a small creature that had crept up beside him, his 
 look all attention and softness as the woman feebly told him 
 some of the main facts of her state. The young rector at the 
 moment might have stood for the modern ' Man of Feeling,' as 
 sensitive, as impressionable, and as free from the burden of self, 
 as his eighteenth-century prototype. 
 
 On the way home Robert suddenly remarked to his com- 
 panion, ' Have you heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham 1 
 What did you think of it 1 ' 
 
 ' Extraordinary ! ' said Langham briefly. ' The most consider- 
 able gift I ever came across in an amateur.' 
 
 His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily. Robert threw 
 a quick observant look at him. 
 
 The difiiculty,' he exclaimed, ' is to know what to do with it ! ' 
 
 'Why do you make the difficulty? I gather she wants to 
 study abroad. What is there to prevent it r 
 
 Langham turned to his companion with a touch of asperity. 
 He could not stand it that Elsmere should be so much narrowed 
 and warped by that wife of his, and her prejudices. Why should 
 that gifted creature be cribbed, cabined, and confined in this 
 way? 
 
 I grant you,' said Robert, with a look of perplexity, ' there 
 is not much to prevent it.' 
 
 And he was silent a moment, thinking, on his side, very 
 tenderly of all the antecedents and explanations of that old- 
 world distrust of art and the artistic life so deeply rooted in his 
 wife, even though in practice and under his influence she had 
 made concession after concession. 
 
 'The great solution of all,' he said presently, brightening,
 
 206 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 ' would be to get her married. I don't wonder her belongings 
 dislike the notion of anything so pretty and so flighty going off 
 to live by itself. And to break up the home in Whindale would 
 be to undo everything their father did for them, to defy his 
 most solemn last wishes.' 
 
 ' To talk of a father's wishes, in a case of this kind, ten years 
 after his death, is surely excessive ? ' said Langham with dry 
 interrogation ; then, suddenly recollecting himself, ' I beg your 
 pardon, Elsmere. I am interfering.' 
 
 ' Nonsense,' said Robert brightly, ' I don't wonder, it seems 
 like a difficulty of our own making. Like so many difficulties, 
 it depends on character, present character, bygone character 
 ' And again he fell musing on his Westmoreland experi- 
 ences, and on the intensity of that Puritan type it had revealed 
 to him. 'However, as I said, marriage would be the natural 
 way out of it.' 
 
 An easy way, I should think,' said Langham, after a pause. 
 
 ' It won't be so easy to find the right man. She is a young 
 person with a future, is Miss Rose. She wants somebody in the 
 stream ; somebody with a strong hand who will keep her in 
 order and yet give her a wide range ; a rich man, I think she 
 hasn't the ways of a poor man's wife ; but, at any rate, some one 
 who will be proud of her, and yet have a full life of his own in 
 which she may share.' 
 
 'Your views are extremely clear,' said Langham, and his 
 smile had a touch of bitterness in it. ' If hers agree, I prophesy 
 you won't have long to wait. She has beauty, talent, charm 
 everything that rich and important men like.' 
 
 There was the slightest sarcastic note in the voice. Robert 
 winced. It was borne in upon one of the least worldly of mortals 
 that he had been talking like the veriest schemer. What vague 
 quick impulse had driven him on ? 
 
 By the time they emerged again upon the Murewell Green 
 the rain had cleared altogether away, and the autumnal morning 
 had broken into sunshine, which played mistily on the sleeping 
 woods, on the white fronts of the cottages, and the wide green 
 where the rain -pools glistened. On the hill leading to the 
 rectory there was the flutter of a woman's dress. As they 
 hurried on, afraid of being late for luncheon, they saw that it 
 was Rose in front of them. 
 
 Langham started as the slender figure suddenly defined itself 
 against the road. A tumult within, half rage, half feeling, 
 showed itself only in an added rigidity of the finely-cut features. 
 
 Rose turned directly she heard the steps and voices, and over 
 the dreaminess of her face there flashed a sudden brightness. 
 
 ' You have been a long time ! ' she exclaimed, saying the first 
 thing that came into her head, joyously, rashly, like the child she 
 in reality was. ' How many halt and maimed has Robert taken 
 you to see, Mr. Langham ? 
 
 'We went to Murewell first. The library was well worth
 
 CHAP, xv SURREY 207 
 
 seeing. Since then we have been a parish round, distributing 
 stores.' 
 
 Rose's look changed in an instant. The words were spoken 
 by the Langham 01 her earliest acquaintance. The man who 
 that morning had asked her to play to him had gone vanished 
 away. 
 
 ' How exhilarating ! ' she said scornfully. ' Don't you wonder 
 how any one can ever tear themselves away from the country ? ' 
 
 ' Rose, don't be abusive,' said Robert, opening his eyes at her 
 tone. Then, passing his arm through hers, he looked banter- 
 ingly down upon her. 'For the first time since you left the 
 metropolis you have walked yourself into a colour. It's becom- 
 ing and it s Murewell so be civil ! ' 
 
 ' Oh, nobody denies you a high place in milkmaids ! ' she said, 
 with her head in air and they went off into a minute's sparring. 
 
 Meanwhile Langham, on the other side of the road, walked 
 up slowly, his eyes on the ground. Once, when Ro'se's eye 
 caught him, a shock ran through her. There was already a 
 look of slovenly age about his stooping bookworm's gait. Her 
 companion of the night before handsome, animated, human 
 where was he? The girl's heart felt a singular contraction. 
 Then she turned and rent herself, and Robert found her more 
 mocking and sprightly than ever. 
 
 At the rectory gate Robert ran on to overtake a farmer on 
 the road. Rose stooped to open the latch ; Langham mechani- 
 cally made a quick movement forward to anticipate her. Their 
 fingers touched ; she drew hers hastily away and passed in, an 
 erect and dignified figure, in her curving garden hat. 
 
 Langham went straight up to his room, shut the door, and 
 stood before the open window, deaf and blind to everything 
 save an inward storm of sensation. 
 
 ' Fool ! Idiot ! ' he said to himself at last, with fierce stifled 
 emphasis, while a kind of dumb fury with himself and circum- 
 stance swept through him. 
 
 That he, the poor and solitary student whose only sources of 
 self-respect lay in the deliberate limitations, the reasoned and 
 reasonable renunciations he had imposed upon his life, should 
 have needed the reminder of his old pupil not to fall in love 
 with his brilliant ambitious sister ! His irritable self -conscious- 
 ness enormously magnified Elsmere's motive and Elsmere's 
 words. That golden vagueness and softness of temper which 
 had possessed him since his last sight of her gave place to one 
 of bitter tension. 
 
 With sardonic scorn he pointed out to himself that his im- 
 agination was still held by, his nerves were still thrilling under, 
 the mental image of a girl looking up to him as no woman had 
 ever looked a girl, white-armed, white-necked with softened 
 eyes of appeal and confidence. He bade himself mark that 
 during the whole of his morning walk with Robert down to its 
 last stage, his mind had been really absorbed in some prepos-
 
 208 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 terous dream he was now top self -contemptuous to analyse. 
 Pretty well for a philosopher, in four days ! What a ridiculous 
 business is life what a contemptible creature is man, how in- 
 capable of dignity, of consistency ! 
 
 At luncheon he talked rather more than usual, especially on 
 literary matters with Robert. Rose, too, was fully occupied in 
 giving Catherine a sarcastic account of a singing lesson she 
 had been administering in the school that morning. Catherine 
 winced sometimes at the tone of it. 
 
 That afternoon Robert, in high spirits, his rod over his 
 shoulder, his basket at his back, carried off his guest for a 
 lounging afternoon along the river. Elsmere enjoyed these 
 fishing expeditions like a boy. They were his holidays, relished 
 all the more because he kept a jealous account of them with his 
 conscience. He sauntered along, now throwing a cunning and 
 effectual fly, now resting, smoking, and chattering, as the fancy 
 took him. He found a great deal of the old stimulus and 
 piquancy in Langham's society, but there was an occasional 
 irritability in his companion, especially towards himself person- 
 ally, which puzzled him. After a while, indeed, he began to 
 feel himself the unreasonably cheerful person which he evidently 
 appeared to his companion. A mere ignorant enthusiast, 
 banished for ever from the realm of pure knowledge by certain 
 original and incorrigible defects after a few hours' talk with 
 Langham Robert's quick insight always showed him some image 
 of himself resembling this in his friend's mind. 
 
 At last he turned restive. He had been describing to Lang- 
 ham his acquaintance with the Dissenting minister of the place 
 a strong coarse-grained fellow of sensuous excitable tempera- 
 ment, famous for his noisy 'conversion meetings,' and for a 
 gymnastic dexterity in the quoting and combining of texts, 
 unrivalled in Robert's experience. Some remark on the Dis- 
 senter's logic, made, perhaps, a little too much in the tone of the 
 Churchman conscious of University advantages, seemed to 
 irritate Langham. 
 
 ' You think your Anglican logic in dealing with the Bible so 
 superior ! On the contrary, I am all for your Ranter. He is 
 your logical Protestant. Historically, you Anglican parsons are 
 where you are and what you are, because ^Englishmen, as a 
 whole, like attempting the contradictory like, above all, to 
 eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and 
 maintains you for its own purposes. But that is another 
 matter.' 
 
 Robert smoked on a moment in silence. Then he flushed and 
 laid down his pipe. N 
 
 ' We are all fools in your eyes, I know ! A la bonne heure ! 
 I have been to the University, and talk what he is pleased to 
 call " philosophy " therefore Mr. Colson denies me faith. You 
 have always, in your heart of hearts, denied me knowledge. 
 But I cling to both in spite of you.'
 
 CHAP, xv SURREY 209 
 
 There was a ray of defiance, of emotion, in his look. Lang- 
 ham met it in silence. 
 
 ' I deny you nothing,' he said at last, slowly. ' On the con- 
 trary, I believe you to be the possessor of all that is best worth 
 having in life and mind.' 
 
 His irritation had all died away. His tone was one of inde- 
 scribable depression, and his great black eyes were fixed on 
 Robert with a melancholy which startled his companion. By a 
 subtle transition Elsmere felt himself touched with a pang of 
 profound pity for the man who an instant before had seemed to 
 
 )se as his scornful superior. He stretched out his hand, and 
 id it on his friend's shoulder. 
 
 Rose spent the afternoon in helping Catherine with various 
 parochial occupations. In the course of them Catherine asked 
 many questions about Long Whindale. Her thoughts clung to 
 the hills, to the gray farmhouses, the rough men and women 
 inside them. But Rose gave her small satisfaction. 
 
 ' Poor old Jim Backhouse ! ' said Catherine, sighing. ' Agnes 
 tells me he is quite bedridden now.' 
 
 'Well, and a good thing for John, don't you think,' said 
 Rose briskly, covering a parish library book the while in a way 
 which made Catherine's fingers itch to take it from her, ' and 
 for us 1 It's some use having a carrier now.' 
 
 Catherine made no reply. She thought of the 'noodle' 
 fading out of life in the room where Mary Backhouse died ; she 
 actually saw the white hair, the blurred eyes, the palsied hands, 
 the poor emaciated limbs stretched along the settle. Her heart 
 rose, but she said nothing. 
 
 'And has Mrs. Thornburgh been enjoying her summer?' 
 
 ' Oh ! I suppose so,' said Rose, her tone indicating a quite 
 measureless indifference. ' She had another young Oxford man 
 staying with her in June a missionary and it annoyed her 
 very much that neither Agnes nor I would intervene to prevent 
 his resuming his profession. She seemed to think it was a 
 question of saving him from being eaten, and apparently he 
 would have proposed to either of us.' 
 
 Catherine could not help laughing. 'I suppose she still 
 thinks she married Robert and me.' 
 
 ' Of course. So she did.' 
 
 Catherine coloured a little, but Rose's hard lightness of tone 
 was unconquerable. 
 
 ' Or if she didn't,' Rose resumed, ' nobody could have the heart 
 to rob her of the illusion. Oh, by the way, Sarah has been 
 under warning since June ! Mrs. Thornburgh told her desper- 
 ately that she must either throw over her young man, who was 
 picked up drunk at the vicarage gate one night, or vacate the 
 vicarage kitchen. Sarah cheerfully accepted her month's notice, 
 and is still making the vicarage jams and walking out with the 
 young man every Sunday. Mrs. Thornburgh sees that it will 
 
 p
 
 210 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 require a convulsion of nature to get rid either of Sarah or the 
 young man, and has succumbed.' 
 
 ' And the Tysons ? And that poor Walker girl ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, dear me, Catherine ! ' said Rose, a strange dispropor- 
 tionate flash of impatience breaking through. ' Every one in 
 Long Whindale is always just where and what they were last 
 year. I admit they are born and die, but they do nothing else 
 of a decisive kind.' 
 
 Catherine's hands worked away for a while, then she 
 laid down her book and said, lifting her clear large eyes on 
 her sister, 
 
 ' Was there never a time when you loved the valley, Rose ? ' 
 
 ' Never ! ' cried Rose. 
 
 Then she pushed away her work, and leaning her elbows on 
 the table turned her brilliant face to Catherine. There was 
 frank mutiny in it. 
 
 'By the way, Catherine, are you going to prevent mamma 
 from letting me go to Berlin for the winter 1 ' 
 
 ' And after Berlin, Rose ? ' said Catherine, presently, her gaze 
 bent upon her work. 
 
 'After Berlin? What next?' said Rose recklessly. 'Well, 
 after Berlin I shall try to persuade mamma and Agnes, I sup- 
 pose, to come and back me up in London. We could still be 
 some months of the year at Burwood.' 
 
 Now she had said it out. But there was something else 
 surely goading the girl than mere intolerance of the family 
 tradition. The hesitancy, the moral doubt of her conversation 
 with Langham, seemed to have vanished wholly in a kind of 
 acrid self-assertion. 
 
 Catherine felt a shock sweep through her. It was as though 
 all the pieties of life, all the sacred assumptions and self- 
 surrenders at the root of it, were shaken, outraged by the girl's 
 tone. 
 
 ' Do you ever remember,' she said, looking up, while her voice 
 trembled, ' what papa wished when he was dying ? ' 
 
 It was her last argument. To Rose she had very seldom used 
 it in so many words. Probably, it seemed to her too strong, too 
 sacred, to be often handled. 
 
 But Rose sprang up, and pacing the little workroom with her 
 white wrists locked behind her, she met that argument with all 
 the concentrated passion which her youth had for years been 
 storing up against it. Catherine sat presently overwhelmed, 
 bewildered. This language of a proud and tameless individu- 
 ality, this modern gospel of the divine right of self -development 
 her soul loathed it ! And yet, since that night in Marrisdale, 
 there had been a new yearning in her to understand. 
 
 Suddenly, however. Rose stopped, lost her thread. Two 
 figures were crossing the lawn, and their shadows were thrown 
 far beyond them by the fast disappearing sun. 
 
 She threw herself down on her chair again with an abrupt
 
 CHAP, xvi SURREY 211 
 
 ' Do you see they have come back ? We must go and dress.' 
 
 And as she spoke she was conscious of a new sensation alto- 
 gether the sensation of the wild creature lassoed on the prairie, 
 of the bird exchanging in an instant its glorious freedom of 
 flight for the pitiless meshes of the net. It was stifling her 
 whole nature seemed to fight with it. 
 
 Catherine rose and began to put away the books they had 
 been covering. She had said almost nothing in answer to Rose's 
 tirade. When she was ready she came and stood beside her 
 sister a moment, her lips trembling. At last she stooped and 
 kissed the girl the kiss of deep suppressed feeling and went 
 away. Rose made no response. 
 
 Unmusical as she was, Catherine pined for her sister's music 
 that evening. Robert was busy in his study, and the hours 
 seemed interminable. After a little difficult talk Langham 
 subsided into a book and a corner. But the only words of 
 which he was conscious for long were the words of an inner 
 dialogue. ' I promised to play for her. Go and offer then ! 
 Madness ! let me keep away from her. If she asks me, of course 
 I will go. She is much too proud, and already she thinks me 
 guilty of a rudeness.' 
 
 Then, with a shrug, he would fall to his book again, abomin- 
 ably conscious, however, all the while of the white figure 
 between the lamp and the open window, and of the delicate 
 head and cheek lit up against the trees and the soft August 
 dark. 
 
 When the time came to go to bed he got their candles for the 
 two ladies. Rose just touched his hand with cool fingers. 
 
 ' Good-night, Mr. Langham. You are going in to smoke with 
 Robert, I suppose ? ' 
 
 Her bright eyes seemed to look him through. Their mocking 
 hostility seemed to say to him as plainly as possible : ' Your 
 purgatory is over go, smoke and be happy ! ' 
 
 ' I will go and help him wind up his sermon,' he said, with an 
 attempt at a laugh, and moved away. 
 
 Rose went upstairs, and it seemed to her that a Greek brow, 
 and a pair of wavering melancholy eyes, went before her in the 
 darkness chased along the passages by the light she held. She 
 gained her room, and stood by the window, seized again by that 
 stifling sense of catastrophe, so strange, so undefined. Then 
 she shook it off with an angry laugh, and went to work to 
 see how far her stock of light dresses had suffered by her London 
 dissipations. 
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE next morning after breakfast the rectory party were in 
 the garden the gentlemen smoking, Catherine and her sister 
 strolling arm - in - arm among the flowers. Catherine's vague
 
 212 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 terrors of the morning before had all taken to themselves wings. 
 It seemed to her that Hose and Mr. Langham had hardly 
 spoken to each other since she had seen them walking about 
 together. Robert had already made merry over his own alarms, 
 and hers, and she admitted he was in the right. As to her talk 
 with Rose her deep meditative nature was slowly working upon 
 and digesting it. Meanwhile, she was all tenderness to her 
 sister, and there was even a reaction of pity in her heart towards 
 the lonely sceptic who had once been so good to Robert. 
 
 Robert was just bethinking himself that it was time to go off 
 to the school, when they were all startled by an unexpected visitor 
 a short old lady, in a rusty black dress and bonnet, who 
 entered the drive and stood staring at the rectory party, a tiny 
 hand in a black thread glove shading the sun from a pair of 
 wrinkled eyes. 
 
 ' Mrs. Darcy ! ' exclaimed Robert to his wife after a moment's 
 perplexity, and they walked quickly to meet her. 
 
 Rose and Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the 
 others joined them, and then for a while the attention of every- 
 body in the group was held by the squire's sister. She was 
 very small, as thin and light as thistle-down, ill-dressed, and as 
 communicative as a babbling child. The face and all the 
 features were extraordinarily minute, and moreover, blanched 
 and etherealised by age. She had the elfish look of a little 
 withered fairy godmother. And yet through it all it was clear that 
 she was a great lady. There were certain poses and gestures 
 about her, which made her thread gloves and rusty skirts seem 
 a mere whim and masquerade, adopted, perhaps deliberately, 
 from a high-bred love of congruity, to suit the country lanes. 
 
 She had come to ask them all to dinner at the Hall on the 
 following evening, and she either brought or devised on the 
 spot the politest messages from the squire to the new rector, 
 which pleased the sensitive Robert and silenced for the moment 
 his various misgivings as to Mr. Wendover's advent. Then she 
 stayed chattering, studying Rose every now and then out of her 
 strange little eyes, restless and glancing as a bird's, which took 
 stock also of the garden, of the flower-beds, of Elsmere's lanky 
 frame, and of Elsmere's handsome friend in the background. She 
 was most odd when she was grateful, and she was grateful for the 
 most unexpected things. She thanked Elsmere effusively for com- 
 ing to live there, 'sacrificing yourself so nobly to us country folk,' 
 and she thanked him with an appreciative glance at Langham, for 
 having his clever friends to stay with him. ' The squire will be so 
 
 E leased. My brother, you know, is very clever ; oh yes, fright- 
 illy clever !' 
 
 And then there was a long sigh, at which Elsmere could 
 hardly keep his countenance. 
 
 She thought it particularly considerate of them to have been 
 to see the squire's books. It would make conversation so easy 
 when they came to dinner.
 
 CHAP, xvi SURREY 213 
 
 ' Though I don't know anything about his books. He doesn't 
 like women to talk about books. He says they only pretend 
 even the clever ones. Except, of course, Madame de Stael. He 
 can only say she was ugly, and I don't deny it. But I have 
 about used up Madame de Stael,' she added, dropping into 
 another sigh as soft and light as a child's. 
 
 Robert was charmed with her, and even Langham smiled. 
 And as Mrs. Darcy adored ' clever men,' ranking them, as the 
 London of her youth had ranked them, only second to ' persons 
 of birth,' she stood among them beaming, becoming more and 
 more whimsical and inconsequent, more and more deliciously 
 incalculable, as she expanded. At last she fluttered off, only, 
 however, to come hurrying back, with little, short, scudding 
 steps, to implore them all to come to tea with her as soon as 
 possible in the garden that was her special hobby, and in her 
 last new summer-house. 
 
 ' I build two or three every summer,' she said. ' Now, there 
 are twenty -one ! Roger laughs at me,' and there was a 
 momentary bitterness in the little eerie face, ' but how can one 
 live without hobbies? That's one then I've two more. My 
 album oh, you will all write in my album, won't you 1 When 
 I was young when I was Maid of Honour ' and she drew 
 herself up slightly 'everybody had albums. Even the dear 
 Queen herself ! I remember how she made M. Guizot write in 
 it ; something quite stupid, after all. Those hobbies the 
 garden and the album are quite harmless, aren't they ? They 
 hurt nobody, do they?' Her voice dropped a little, with a 
 pathetic expostulating intonation in it, as of one accustomed to 
 be rebuked. 
 
 ' Let me remind you of a saying of Bacon's,' said Langham, 
 studying her, and softened perforce into benevolence. 
 
 ' Yes, yes,' said Mrs. Darcy in a flutter of curiosity. 
 
 ' God Almighty first planted a garden,' he quoted ; ' and 
 indeed, it is the purest of all human pleasures.' 
 
 'Oh, but how delightful /' cried Mrs. Darcy, clasping her 
 diminutive hands in their thread gloves. ' You must write that 
 in my album, Mr. Langham, that very sentence ; oh, how clever 
 of you to remember it ! What it is to be clever and have a 
 brain ! But, then I've another hobby ' 
 
 Here, however, she stopped, hung her head and looked 
 depressed. Robert, with a little ripple of laughter, begged her 
 to explain. 
 
 'No,' she said plaintively, giving a quick uneasy look at him, 
 as though it occurred to her that it might some day be his 
 pastoral duty to admonish her. ' No, it's wrong. I know it is 
 only I can't help it. Never mind. You'll know soon.' 
 
 And again she turned away, when, suddenly, Rose attracted 
 her attention, and she stretched out a/thin white bird-claw of a 
 hand and caught the girl's arm. 
 
 ' There won't be much to amuse j^ou to-morrow, my dear, and
 
 214 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 there ought to be you're so pretty ! ' Rose blushed furiously 
 and tried to draw her hand away. ' No, no ! don't mind, don't 
 mind. I didn't at your age. Well, we'll do our best. But your 
 own party is so charming!' and she looked round the little 
 circle, her gaze stopping specially at Langham before it returned 
 to Rose. ' After all, you will amuse each other.' 
 
 Was there any malice in the tiny withered creature 1 Rose, 
 unsympathetic and indifferent as youth commonly is when its 
 own affairs absorb it, had stood coldly outside the group which 
 was making much of the squire's sister. Was it so the strange 
 little visitor revenged herself ? 
 
 At any rate Rose was left feeling as if some one had pricked 
 her. While Catherine and Elsmere escorted Mrs. Darcy to the 
 gate she turned to go in, her head thrown back stag-like, her 
 cheek still burning. Why should it be always open to the old 
 to annoy the young with impunity ? 
 
 Langham watched her mount the first step or two ; his eye 
 travelled up the slim figure so instinct with pride and will 
 and something in him suddenly gave way. It was like a man 
 who feels his grip relaxing on some attacking thing he has been 
 holding by the throat. 
 
 He followed her hastily. 
 
 'Must you go in? And none of us have paid our respects 
 yet to those phloxes in the back garden ? ' 
 
 Oh woman flighty woman ! An instant before, the girl, 
 sore and bruised in every fibre, she only half knew why, was 
 thirsting that this man might somehow offer her his neck that 
 she might trample on it. He offers it, and the angry instinct 
 wavers, as a man wavers in a wrestling match when his oppo- 
 nent unexpectedly gives ground. She paused, she turned her 
 white throat. His eyes upturned met hers. 
 
 ' The phloxes did you say ? ' she asked, coolly redescending 
 the steps. ' Then round here, please.' 
 
 She led the way, he followed, conscious of an utter relaxation 
 of nerve and will which for the moment had something intoxi- 
 cating in it. 
 
 ' There are your phloxes,' she said, stopping before a splendid 
 line of plants in full blossom. Her self-respect was whole again ; 
 her spirits rose at a bound. ' I don't know why you admire 
 them so much. They have no scent, and they are only pretty 
 in the lump,' and she broke off a spike of blossom, studied it a 
 little disdainfully, and threw it away. 
 
 He stood beside her, the southern glow and life of which it 
 was intermittently capable once more lighting up the strange 
 face. 
 
 'Give me leave to enjoy everything countrified more than 
 usual,' he said. ' After this morning it will be so long before I 
 see the true country again.' 
 
 He looked, smiling, rouf>d on the blue and white brilliance of 
 the sky, clear again after a reght of rain ; on the sloping garden,
 
 CHAP, xvi SURREY 215 
 
 on the village beyond, on the hedge of sweet peas close beside 
 them, with its blooms 
 
 ' On tiptoe for a flight, 
 With wings of gentle flush o'er delicate white. ' 
 
 ' Oh ! Oxford is countrified enough,' she said indifferently, 
 moving down the broad grass-path which divided the garden 
 into two equal portions. 
 
 ' But I am leaving Oxford, at any rate for a year,' he said 
 quietly. ' I am going to London.' 
 
 Her delicate eyebrows went up. ' To London ? ' Then, in a 
 tone of mock meekness and sympathy, ' How you will dislike it ! ' 
 
 'Dislike it why?' 
 
 ' Oh ! because ' she hesitated, and then laughed her daring 
 girlish laugh 'because there are so many stupid people in 
 London ; the clever people are not all picked out like prize 
 apples, as I suppose they are in Oxford.' 
 
 ' At Oxford! ' repeated Laiigham, with a kind of groan. ' At 
 Oxford 1 You imagine that Oxford is inhabited only by clever 
 people ? ' 
 
 'I can only judge by what I see,' she said demurely. 'Every 
 Oxford man always behaves as if he were the cream of the 
 universe. Oh ! I don't mean to be rude,' she cried, losing for 
 a moment her defiant control over herself, as though afraid of 
 having gone too far. ' I am not the least . disrespectful, really. 
 When you and Robert talk, Catherine and I feel quite as humble 
 as we ought.' 
 
 The words were hardly out before she could have bitten the 
 tongue that spoke them. He had made her feel her indiscretions 
 of Sunday night as she deserved to feel them, and now after 
 three minutes conversation she was on the verge of fresh ones. 
 Would she never grow up, never behave like other girls ? That 
 word humble I It seemed to burn her memory. 
 
 Before he could possibly answer she barred the way by a 
 question as short and dry as possible 
 
 ' What are you going to London for ? ' 
 
 'For many reasons,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'I 
 have told no one yet not even Elsmere. And indeed I go 
 back to my rooms for a while from here. But as soon as Term 
 begins I become a Londoner.' 
 
 They had reached the gate at the bottom of the gai'den, and 
 were leaning against it. She was disturbed, conscious, lightly 
 flushed. It struck her as another gaucherie on her part that 
 she should have questioned him as to his plans. What did his 
 life matter to her * 
 
 He was looking away from her, studying the half -ruined, 
 degraded manor house spread out below them. Then suddenly 
 he turned 
 
 ' If I could imagine for a moment it would interest you to 
 hear my reasons for leaving Oxford, I could not flatter myself
 
 216 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK 11 
 
 you would see any sense in them. I know that Robert will 
 think them moonshine; nay, more, that they will give him 
 pain.' 
 
 He smiled sadly. The tone of gentleness, the sudden breach 
 in the man's melancholy reserve affected the girl beside him for 
 the second time, precisely as they had affected her the first time. 
 The result of twenty -four hours' resentful meditation turned 
 out to be precisely nil. Her breath came fast, her proud look 
 melted, and his quick sense caught the change in an instant. 
 
 ' Are you tired of Oxford ? ' the poor child asked him, almost 
 shyly. 
 
 ' Mortally ! ' he said, still smiling. ' And what is more im- 
 portant still, Oxford is tired of me. I have been lecturing 
 there for ten years. They have had more than enough of me.' 
 
 ' Oh ! but Robert said ' began Rose impetuously, then 
 
 stopped, crimson, remembering many things Robert had said. 
 
 ' That I helped him over a few stiles r returned Langham 
 calmly. ' Yes, there was a time when I was capable of that 
 there was a time when I could teach, and teach with pleasure.' 
 He paused. Rose could have scourged herself .for the tremor 
 she felt creeping over her. Why should it be to her so new and 
 strange a thing that a man, especially a man of these years and 
 this calibre, should confide in her, should speak to her intimately 
 of himself ? After all, she said to herself angrily, with a terri- 
 fied sense of importance, she was a child no longer, though her 
 mother and sisters would treat her as one. 'When we were 
 chatting the other night,' he went on, turning to her again as 
 he stood leaning on the gate, ' do you know what it was struck 
 me most ? ' 
 
 His tone had in it the most delicate, the most friendly defer- 
 ence. But Rose flushed furiously. 
 
 ' That girls are very ready to talk about themselves, I imagine,' 
 she said scornfully. 
 
 ' Not at all ! Not for a moment* No, but it seemed to me 
 so pathetic, so strange that anybody should wish for anything 
 so much as you wished for the musician's life.' 
 
 ' And you never wish for anything ? ' she cried. 
 
 ' When Elsmere was at college,' he said, smiling, ' I believe I 
 wished he should get a first class. This year I have certainly 
 wished to say good-bye to St. Anselm's, and to turn my back 
 for good and all on my men. I can't remember that I have 
 wished for anything else for six years.' 
 
 She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely 
 languid, or was it from him that the emotion she felt invading 
 herself first started 1 She tried to shake it off. 
 
 'And / am just a bundle of wants,' she said, half -mockingly. 
 ' Generally speaking I am in the condition of being ready to 
 barter all I have for some folly or other one in the morning, 
 another in the afternoon. What have you to say to such people, 
 Mr. Langham ? '
 
 CHAP, xvi SURREY 217 
 
 Her eyes challenged him magnificently, mostly out of sheer 
 nervousness. But the face they rested on seemed suddenly to 
 turn to stone before her. The life died out of it. It grew still 
 and rigid. 
 
 ' Nothing,' he said quietly. ' Between them and me there is 
 a great gulf fixed. I watch them pass, and I say to myself : 
 " There are the living that is how they look, how they speak ! 
 Realise once for all that you have nothing to do with them. 
 Life is theirs belongs to them. You are already outside it. 
 Go your way, and be a spectre among the active and the happy 
 no longer."' 
 
 He leant his back against the gate. Did he see her ? Was 
 he conscious of her at all in this rare impulse of speech which 
 had suddenly overtaken one of the most withdrawn and silent 
 of human beings ? All her airs dropped off her ; a kind of 
 fright seized her ; and involuntarily she laid her hand on his 
 arm. 
 
 ' Don't don't Mr. Langham ! Oh, don't say such things ! 
 Why should you be so unhappy 1 Why should you talk so 1 
 Can no one do anything ? Why do you live so much alone ? 
 Is there no one you care about ? ' 
 
 He turned. What a vision ! His artistic sense absorbed it in 
 an instant the beautiful tremulous lip, the drawn white brow. 
 For a moment he drank in the pity, the emotion, of those eyes. 
 Then a movement of such self -scorn as even he had never 
 felt swept through him. He gently moved away ; her hand 
 dropped. 
 
 ' Miss Leyburn,' he said, gazing at her, his olive face 
 singularly pale, 'don't waste your pity on me, for Heaven's 
 sake. Some madness made me behave as I did just now. Years 
 ago the same sort of idiocy betrayed me to your brother ; never 
 before or since. I ask your pardon, humbly,' and his tone 
 seemed to scorch her, 'that this second fit or ranting should 
 have seized me in your presence.' 
 
 But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone 
 too far. He stopped and looked at her piteously, the features 
 quivering. It was as though the man's whole nature had for 
 the moment broken up, become disorganised. She could not bear 
 it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to have been laid bare to 
 her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he caught them, 
 stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary 
 scene to both a kind of lifetime. 
 
 Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort. 
 
 ' That was adorable of you,' he said with a long breath. ' But 
 I stole it I despise myself. Why should you pity me 1 What 
 is there to pity me for 1 My troubles, such as I have, are my 
 own making every one.' 
 
 And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The 
 tears of excitement were in her eyes. 
 
 ' Won't you let me be your friend ? ' she said, trembling, with
 
 218 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 a kind of reproach. ' I thought the other night we were to 
 
 be friends. Won't you tell me ' 
 
 ' More of yourself ? ' her eyes said, but her voice failed her. 
 And as for him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circum- 
 stance, of individual character, seemed to drop from her. He 
 forgot the difference of years ; he saw her no longer as she 
 was a girl hardly out of the schoolroom, vain, ambitious, 
 dangerously responsive, on whose crude romantic sense he was 
 wantonly playing ; she was to him pure beauty, pure woman. 
 For one tumultuous moment the cold critical instinct which 
 had been for years draining his life of all its natural energies 
 was powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never 
 been sweet before. 
 
 _ So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, of 
 his cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of happi- 
 ness and success at college, of his first attempts to make himself 
 a power among younger men, of the gradual dismal failure of 
 all his efforts, the dying down of desire and ambition. From 
 the general narrative there stood out little pictures of individual 
 persons or scenes, clear cut and masterly of his father, the 
 Gainsborough churchwarden ; of his Methodistical-mother, who 
 had all her life lamented her own beauty as a special snare of 
 Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to see 
 her son on the ground that his opinions ' had vexed his father ' ; 
 of his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to com- 
 municate it ; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face 
 with an undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone 
 on Alpine heights, of something cold, impotent and baffling in 
 himself, which was to stand for ever between him and action, 
 between him and human affection ; the growth of the critical 
 pessimist sense which laid the axe to the root of enthusiasm 
 after enthusiasm, friendship after friendship which made 
 other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a skeleton at the 
 feast : and the persistence through it all of a kind of hunger 
 for lire and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more 
 powerless to satisfy : all these Langham put into words with 
 an extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was 
 something in him which found a kind of pleasure in the long 
 analysis, which took pains that it should be infinitely well 
 done. 
 
 Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of 
 literature she would have realised that she was witnessing a 
 masterly dissection of one of those many morbid growths of 
 which our nineteenth century psychology is full. But she was 
 anything but literary, and she could not analyse her excitement. 
 The man's physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity of what 
 he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect her. 
 And through it all there was the strange girlish pride that this 
 should have befallen her ; a first crude intoxicating sense of the 
 power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a
 
 OHAP. xvi SURREY 219 
 
 desperate anxiety to be equal to the occasion, to play her part 
 well 
 
 ' So you see,' said Langham at last, with a great effort (to do 
 him justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of con- 
 versation ; ' all these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the 
 most unfit man in the world for a college tutor. The under- 
 graduates regard me as a shilly-shallying pedant. On my part,' 
 he added drily, ' I am not slow to retaliate. Every term I live 
 I find the young man a less interesting animal. I regard the 
 whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge ! It 
 has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.' 
 
 And for one curious instant he looked out over the village, 
 his fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual 
 irritation, of which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She 
 stood bewildered, silent, longing childishly to speak, to influence 
 him, but not knowing what cue to take. 
 
 'And then ' he went on presently (but was the strange 
 being speaking to her?) 'so long as I stay there, worrying 
 those about me, and eating my own heart put, I am cut off from 
 the only life that might be mine, that I might find the strength 
 to live.' 
 
 The words were low and deliberate. After his moment of 
 passionate speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began 
 to feel strangely remote from him. 
 
 ' Do you mean the life of the student ? ' she asked him after a 
 pause, timidly. 
 
 Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her. 
 
 ' Of the dreamer, rather.' 
 
 And as her eyes still questioned, as he was still moved by the 
 spell of her responsiveness, he let the new wave of feeling break 
 in words. Vaguely at first, and then with a growing flame and 
 force, he fell to describing to her what the life of thought may 
 be to the thinker, and those marvellous moments which belong 
 to that life when the mind which has divorced itself from desire 
 and sense sees spread out before it the vast realms of knowledge, 
 and feels itself close to the secret springs and sources of being. 
 And as he spoke, his language took an ampler turn, the element 
 of smallness which attaches to all mere personal complaint 
 vanished, his words flowed, became eloquent, inspired, till the 
 bewildered child beside him, warm through and through as she 
 was with youth and passion, felt for an instant by sheer 
 fascinated sympathy the cold spell, the ineffable prestige, of the 
 thinker's voluntary death in life. 
 
 But only for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill 
 smote her to the heart. 
 
 ' You make me shiver,' she cried, interrupting him. ' Have 
 those strange things I don't understand them made you 
 happy ? Can they make any one happy ? Oh no, no ! Happi- 
 ness is to be got from living, seeing, experiencing, making 
 friends, enjoying nature ! Look at the world, Mr. Langham ! '
 
 220 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 she said, with bright cheeks, half smiling at her own magnilo- 
 quence, her hand waving over the view before them. ' What 
 has it done that you should hate it so? If you can't put up 
 with people you might love nature. I I can't be content with 
 nature, because I want some life first. Up in Whindale there is 
 too much nature, not enough life. But if I had got through life 
 if it had disappointed me then I should love nature. I keep 
 saying to the mountains at home : " Not now, not now ; I want 
 something else, but afterwards if I can't get it, or if I get too 
 much of it, why then I will love you, live with you. You are 
 my second string, my reserve. You and art and poetry." ' 
 
 'But everything depends on feeling,' he said softly, but 
 lightly, as though to keep the conversation from slipping back 
 into those vague depths it had emerged from ; ' and if one has 
 forgotten how to feel if when one sees or hears something 
 beautiful that used to stir one, one can only say " I remember 
 it moved me once ! " if feeling dies, like life, like physical force, 
 but prematurely, long before the rest of the man ! ' 
 
 She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism. 
 
 ' Oh, I cannot imagine it ! ' she cried. ' I shall feel to my 
 last hour.' Then, after a pause, in another tone, 'But, Mr. 
 Langham, you say music excites you, Wagner excites you ? ' 
 
 ' Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,' 
 he admitted, smiling. 
 
 'Well then,' and she looked at him persuasively, 'why not 
 give yourself up to music ? It is so easy so little trouble to 
 one's self it just takes you and carries you away.' 
 
 Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious prob- 
 ably through these admonitions of hers that the situation had 
 absurdity in it. 
 
 'It is not my metier] he said hastily. 'The self that enjoys 
 music is an outer self, and can only bear with it for a short 
 time. No, Miss Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the college will 
 sing a Te Deum, I shall settle down in London, I shall keep a 
 big book going, and cheat the years after all, I suppose, as well 
 as most people.' 
 
 ' And you will know, you will remember,' she said faltering, 
 reddening, her womanliness forcing the words out of her, ' that 
 you have friends : Robert^ my sister all of us 1 ' 
 
 He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their 
 eyes met each was struck once more with the personal beauty 
 of the other. His eyes shone their black depths seemed all 
 tenderness. 
 
 ' I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,' he said 
 slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself 
 swept off her feet into a world of tragic mysterious emotion. 
 She all but put her hand into his again, asking him childishly 
 to hope, to be consoled. But the maidenly impulse restrained 
 her, and once more he leant on the gate, burying his face in 
 his hands.
 
 CHAP. XVTI SURREY 221 
 
 Suddenly he felt himself utterly tired, relaxed. Strong 
 nervous reaction set in. What had all this scene, this tragedy, 
 been about ? And then in another instant was that sense of 
 the ridiculous again clamouring to be heard. He the man of 
 thirty-five confessing himself, making a tragic scene, playing 
 Manfred or Cain to this adorable half -fledged creature, whom 
 he had known five days ! Supposing Elsmere had been there 
 to hear Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh ! As he leant 
 over the gate he found himself quivering with impatience to 
 be away by himself out of reach the critic in him making 
 the most bitter remorseless mock of all these heroics and 
 despairs the other self had been indulging in. But for the 
 life of him he could not find a word to say a move to make. 
 He stood hesitating, gauche, as usual. 
 
 ' Do you know, Mr. Langham,' said Rose lightly, by his side, 
 ' that there is no time at all left for you to give me good advice 
 in? That is an obligation still hanging over you. I don't 
 mean to release you from it, but if I don't go in now and finish 
 the covering of those library books, the youth of Murewell will 
 be left without any literature till Heaven knows when ! ' 
 
 He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into 
 common mundanity. 
 
 ' Hang literature hang the parish library ! ' he said with a 
 laugh as he moved after her. Yet his real inner feeling towards 
 that parish library was one of infinite friendliness. 
 
 ' Hear these men of letters ! ' she said scornfully. But she 
 was happy ; there was a glow on her cheek. 
 
 A bramble caught her dress ; she stopped and laid her white 
 hand to it, but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and between 
 them they wrenched it away, but not till those soft slim fingers 
 had several times felt the neighbourhood of his brown ones, and 
 till there had flown through and through him once more, as she 
 stooped over him, the consciousness that she was young, that 
 she was beautiful, that she had pitied him so sweetly, that they 
 were alone. 
 
 'Rose!' 
 
 It was Catherine calling Catherine, who stood at the end 
 of the grass-path, with eyes all indignation and alarm. 
 
 Langham rose quickly from the ground. 
 
 He felt as though the gods had saved him or damned him 
 which ? 
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 MUBEWELL RECTORY during the next forty-eight hours was the 
 scene of much that might have been of interest to a psychologist 
 gifted with the power of divining his neighbours. 
 
 In the first place Catherine's terrors were all alive again
 
 222 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 Robert had never seen her so moved since those days of storm 
 and stress before their engagement. 
 
 ' I cannot bear it ! ' she said to Robert at night in their room. 
 ' I cannot bear it ! I hear it always in my ears : " What hast 
 thou done with thy sister?" Oh, Robert, don't mind, dear, 
 though he is your friend. My father would have shrunk from 
 him with horror An alien from the household of faith ! An 
 enemy to the Cross of Christ / ' 
 
 She flung out the words with low intense emphasis and 
 frowning brow, standing rigid by the window, her hands locked 
 behind her. Robert stood by her much perplexed, feeling him- 
 self a good deal of a culprit, but inwardly conscious that he 
 knew a great deal more about Langham than she did. 
 
 ' My dear wine,' he said to her, ' I am certain Langham has 
 no intention of marrying.' 
 
 ' Then more shame for him,' cried Catherine, flushing. ' They 
 could not have looked more conscious, Robert, when I found 
 them together, if he had just proposed.' 
 
 ' What, in five days ? ' said Robert, more than half inclined 
 to banter his wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine 
 made no answer. ' I believe with men of that sort,' he said at 
 last, ' relations to women are never more than half -real always 
 more or less literature acting. Langham is tasting an experi- 
 ence, to be bottled up for future use.' 
 
 It need hardly be said, however, that Catherine got small 
 consolation out of this point of view. It seemed to her Robert 
 did not take the matter quite rightly. 
 
 ' After all, darling,' he said at last, kissing her, ' you can act 
 dragon splendidly; you have already so can I. And you 
 really cannot make me believe in anything very tragic in a 
 week.' 
 
 But Catherine was conscious that she had already played the 
 dragon hard, to very little purpose. In the forty hours that 
 intervened between the scene in the garden and the squire's 
 dinner-party, Robert was always wanting to carry off Langham, 
 Catherine was always asking Rose's help in some household 
 business or other. In vain. Langham said to himself calmly, 
 this time, that Elsmere and his wife were making a foolish mis- 
 take in supposing that his friendship with Miss Leyburn was 
 anything to be alarmed about, that they would soon be amply 
 convinced of it themselves, and meanwhile he should take his 
 own way. And as for Rose, they had no sooner turned back all 
 three from the house to the garden than she had divined every- 
 thing in Catherine's mind, and set herself against her sister 
 with a wilful force in which many a past irritation found 
 expression. 
 
 How Catherine hated the music of that week ! It seemed to 
 her she never opened the drawing-room door but she saw Lang- 
 ham at the piano, his head with its crown of glossy, curling 
 black hair, and his eyes lit with unwonted gleams of laughter
 
 CHAP, xvn SURREY 223 
 
 and sympathy, turned towards Rose, who was either chatting 
 wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional, or 
 taking off the ways of some famous teacher ; or else, which was 
 worse, playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound 
 now as soft and delicate as first love, now as full and grand 
 as storm waves on an angry coast. And the sister going with 
 compressed lip to her work-table would recognise sorely that 
 never had the girl looked so handsome, and never had the 
 lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her. 
 
 As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene 
 in the garden he had rated, satirised, examined himself in the 
 most approved introspective style. One half of him declared 
 that scene to have been the heights of melodramatic absurdity ; 
 the other thought of it with a thrill of tender gratitude towards 
 the young pitiful creature who had evoked it. After all, why, 
 because he was alone in the world and must remain so, should 
 he feel bound to refuse this one gift of the gods, the delicate 
 passing gift of a girl's a child's friendship? As for her, the 
 man's very real, though wholly morbid, modesty scouted, the 
 notion of love on her side. He was a likely person for a beauty 
 on the threshold of life and success to fall in love with ; but she 
 meant to be kind to him, and he smiled a little inward indul- 
 gent smile over her very evident compassion, her very evident 
 intention of reforming him, reconciling him to life. And, 
 finally, he was incapable of any further resistance. He had 
 gone too far with her. Let her do what she would with him, 
 dear child, with the sharp tongue and the soft heart, and the 
 touch of genius and brilliancy which made her future so inter- 
 esting ! He called his age and his disillusions to the rescue ; 
 he posed to himself as stooping to her in some sort of elder- 
 brotherly fashion ; and if every now and then some disturbing 
 memory of that strange scene between them would come to 
 make his present r6le less plausible, or some whim of hers made 
 it difficult to play, why then at bottom there was always the 
 consciousness that sixty hours, or thereabouts, would see him 
 safely settled in that morning train to London. Throughout it 
 is probable that that morning train occupied the saving back- 
 ground of his thoughts. 
 
 The two days passed by, and the squire's dinner-party 
 arrived. About seven on the Thursday evening a party of 
 four might have been seen hurrying across the park Langham 
 and Catherine in front, Elsmere and Rose behind. Catherine 
 had arranged it so, and Langham, who understood perfectly 
 that his friendship with her young sister was not at all to Mrs. 
 Elsmere's taste, and who had by now taken as much of a dislike 
 to her as his nature was capable of, was certainly doing nothing 
 to make his walk with her otherwise than difficult. And every 
 now and then some languid epigram would bring Catherine s 
 eyes on him with a fiery gleam in their gray depths. Oh, four- 
 teen more hours and she would have shut the rectory gate on
 
 224 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 this most unwelcome of intruders ! She had never felt so 
 vindictively anxious to see the last of any one in her life. 
 There was in her a vehemence of antagonism to the man's 
 manner, his pessimism, his infidelity, his very ways of speaking 
 and looking, which astonished even herself. 
 
 Robert's eager soul meanwhile, for once irresponsive to 
 Catherine's, was full of nothing but the squire. At last the 
 moment was come, and that dumb spiritual friendship he had 
 formed through these long months with the philosopher and the 
 savant was to be tested by sight and speech of the man. He 
 bade himself a hundred times pitch his expectations low. But 
 curiosity and hope were keen, in spite of everything. 
 
 Ah, those parish worries ! Robert caught the smoke of Mile 
 End in the distance, curling above the twilight woods, and laid 
 about him vigorously with his stick on the squire's shrubs, as 
 he thought of those poisonous hovels, those ruined lives ! But, 
 after all, it might be mere ignorance, and that wretch Hens- 
 lowe might have been merely trading on his master's morbid 
 love of solitude. 
 
 And then all men have their natural conceits. Robert 
 Elsmere would not have been the very human creature he was 
 if, half-consciously, he had not counted a good deal on his own 
 powers of influence. Life had been to him so far one long 
 social success of the best kind. Very likely as he walked on to 
 the great house over whose threshold lay the answer to the 
 enigma of months, his mind gradually filled with some naive 
 young dream of winning the squire, playing him with all sorts 
 of honest arts, beguiling him back to life to his kind. 
 
 Those friendly messages of his through Mrs. Darcy had been 
 very pleasant. 
 
 ' I wonder whether my Oxford friends have been doing me a 
 good turn with the squire,' he said to Rose, laughing. 'He 
 knows the provost, of course. If they talked me over it is to be 
 hoped my scholarship didn't come up. Precious little the 
 provost used to think of my abilities for Greek prose ! ' 
 
 Rose yawned a little behind her gloved hand. Robert had 
 already talked a good deal about the squire, and he was cer- 
 tainly the only person in the group who was thinking of him. 
 Even Catherine, absorbed in other anxieties, had forgotten to 
 feel any thrill at their approaching introduction to the man 
 who must of necessity mean so much to herself and Robert. 
 
 'Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere,' said the butler, throwing 
 open the carved and gilded doors. 
 
 Catherine following her husband, her fine grave head and 
 beautiful neck held a little more erect than usual was at first 
 conscious of nothing but the dazzle of western light which 
 flooded the room, striking the stands of Japanese lilies, and the 
 white figure of a clown in the famous Watteau opposite the 
 window.
 
 CHAP, xvn SURREY 225 
 
 Then she found herself greeted by Mrs. Darcy, whose odd 
 habit of holding her lace handkerchief in her right hand on 
 festive occasions only left her two fingers for her guests. The 
 mistress of the Hall as diminutive and elf -like as ever in spite 
 of the added dignity of her sweeping silk and the draperies of 
 black lace with which her tiny head was adorned kept tight 
 hold of Catherine, and called a gentleman standing in a group 
 just behind her. 
 
 ' Roger, here are Mr. and Mrs. Robert Elsmere. Mr. Elsmere, 
 the squire remembers you in petticoats, and I'm not sure that 
 I don t too.' 
 
 Robert, smiling, looked beyond her to the advancing figure 
 of the squire, but if Mr. Wendover heard his sister's remark he 
 took no notice of it. He held out his hand stiffly to Robert, 
 bowed to Catherine and Rose before extending to them the 
 same formal greeting, and just recognised Langham as having 
 met him at Oxford. 
 
 Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with 
 whom he had been engaged on their entrance. His manner had 
 been reserve itself. The hauteur of the grandee on his own 
 ground was clearly marked in it, and Robert could not help 
 fancying that towards himself there had even been something 
 more. And not one of those phrases which, under the circum- 
 stances, would have been so easy and so gracious, as to Robert's 
 childish connection with the place, or as to the squire's remem- 
 brance of his father, even though Mrs. Darcy had given him a 
 special opening of the kind. 
 
 The young rector instinctively drew himself together, like 
 one who has received a blow, as he moved across to the other- 
 side of the fireplace to shake hands with the worthy family 
 doctor, old Meyrick, who was already well known to him. 
 Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too had felt their re- 
 ception at the squire's hands to be a chilling one, sat down to 
 talk to Mrs. Darcy, disagreeably conscious the while that Rose 
 and Langham left to themselves were practically tete-a-tete, and 
 that, moreover, a large stand of flowers formed a partial screen 
 between her and them. She could see, however, the gleam of 
 Rose's upstretched neck, as Langham, who was leaning on the 
 piano beside her, bent down to talk to her ; and when she 
 looked next she caught a smiling motion of Langham's head 
 and eyes towards the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover's 
 grandmother, and was certain when he stooped afterwards to 
 say something to his companion, that he was commenting on a 
 certain surface likeness there was between her and the young 
 auburn-haired beauty of the picture. Hateful ! And they 
 would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty. 
 
 The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of 
 the squire a tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in 
 London society for her relationships, her audacity, and the salon 
 which in one way or another she managed to collect round her ; 
 
 Q
 
 226 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK 11 
 
 her dark, thin, irritable-looking husband ; two neighbouring 
 clerics the first, by name Longstafie, a somewhat inferior 
 specimen of the cloth, whom Robert cordially disliked ; and the 
 other, Mr. Bickerton, a gentle Evangelical, one of those men 
 who help to ease the harshness of a cross-grained world, and to 
 reconcile the cleverer or more impatient folk in it to the worries 
 of living. 
 
 Lady Charlotte was already known by name to the Elsmeres 
 as the aunt of one of their chief friends of the neighbourhood 
 the wife of a neighbouring squire whose property joined that 
 of Murewell Hall, one Lady Helen Varley, of whom more 
 presently. Lady Charlotte was the sister of the Duke of 
 Sedbergh, one of the greatest of dukes, and the sister also of 
 Lady Helen's mother, Lady Wanless. Lady Wanless had died 
 prematurely, and her two younger children, Helen and Hugh 
 Flaxman, creatures both of them of unusually fine and fiery 
 quality, had owed a good deal to their aunt. There were 
 family alliances between the Sedberghs and the Wendovers, and 
 Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping up with the squire. 
 She adored cynics and people who said piquant things, and it 
 amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the 
 squire's timid, crack-brained, ridiculous little sister. 
 
 As to Dr. Meyrick, he was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. 
 His gray hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed 
 head ; he wore an old-fashioned neck-cloth ; his long body had 
 a perpetual stoop, as though of deference, and his spectacled 
 look of mild attentiveness had nothing in common with that 
 medical self-assurance with which we are all nowadays so 
 familiar. Robert noticed presently that when he addressed 
 Mrs. Darcy he said ' Ma'am,' making no bones at all about it ; 
 and his manner generally was the manner of one to whom class 
 distinctions were the profoundest reality, and no burden at all 
 on a naturally humble temper. Dr. Baker, of Whindale, accus- 
 tomed to trouncing Mrs. Beaton, would have thought him a 
 poor creature. 
 
 When dinner was announced, Robert found himself assigned 
 to Mrs. Darcy ; the squire took Lady Charlotte. Catherine 
 fell to Mr. Bickerton, Rose to Mr. Wynnstay, and the rest found 
 their way in as best they could. Catherine seeing the distri- 
 bution was happy for a moment, till she found that if Rose was 
 covered on her right she was exposed to the full fire of the 
 enemy on her left, in other words that Langham was placed 
 between her and Dr. Meyrick. 
 
 ' Are your spirits damped at all by this magnificence ? ' Lang- 
 ham said to his neighbour as they sat down. The table was 
 entirely covered with Japanese lilies, save for the splendid 
 silver candelabra from which the light flashed, first on to the 
 faces of the guests, and then on to those of the family portraits, 
 hung thickly round the room. A roof embossed with gilded 
 Tudor roses on a ground of black oak hung above them ; a rose-
 
 I:HAP. xvn SURREY 227 
 
 water dish in which the Merry Monarch had once dipped his 
 hands, and which bore a record of the fact in the inscription on 
 its sides, stood before them ; and the servants were distributing 
 to each guest silver soup-plates which had been the gift of 
 Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, in some moment of generosity 
 or calculation, to the Wendover of her day. 
 
 ' Oh dear, no !' said Hose carelessly. ' 1 don't know how it is, 
 I think I must have been born for a palace.' 
 
 Langham looked at her, at the daring harmony of colour 
 made by the reddish gold of her hair, the warm whiteness of her 
 skin, and the brown -pink tints of her dress, at the crystals 
 playing the part of diamonds on her beautiful neck, and 
 remembered Robert's remarks to him. The same irony mingled 
 with the same bitterness returned to him, and the elder brother's 
 attitude became once more temporarily difficult. ' Who is your 
 neighbour ? ' he inquired of her presently. 
 
 'Lady Charlotte's husband,' she answered mischievously, 
 under her breath. ' One needn't know much more about him I 
 imagine ! ' 
 
 ' And that man opposite ? ' 
 
 ' Robert's pet aversion,' she said calmly, without a change of 
 countenance, so that Mr. LongstafFe opposite, who was studying 
 her as he always studied pretty young women, stared at her 
 through her remark in sublime ignorance of its bearing. 
 
 ' And your sister's neighbour r 
 
 ' I can't hit him off in a sentence, he's too good ! ' said Rose 
 laughing ; ' all I can say is that Mrs. Bickerton has too many 
 children, and the children have too many ailments for her ever 
 to dine out.' 
 
 'That will do; I see the existence,' said Langham with a 
 shrug. 'But he has the look of an apostle, though a rather 
 hunted one. Probably nobody here, except Robert, is fit to tie 
 his shoes.' 
 
 ' The squire could hardly be called empresse,' said Rose, after 
 a second, with a curl of her red lips. Mr. Wynnstay was still 
 safely engaged with Mrs. Darcy, and there was a buzz of talk 
 largely sustained by Lady Charlotte. 
 
 ' No,' Langham admitted ; ' the manners I thought were not 
 quite equal to the house.' 
 
 'What possible reason could he have for treating Robert 
 with those airs ? ' said Rose indignantly, ready enough in girl 
 fashion to defend her belongings against the outer world. 'He 
 ought to be only too glad to have the opportunity of knowing 
 him and making friends with him.' 
 
 'You are a sister worth having ;' and Langham smiled at her 
 as she leant back in her chair, her white arms and wrists lying 
 on her lap, and her slightly flushed face turned towards him. 
 They had been on these pleasant terms of camaraderie all day, 
 and the intimacy between them had been still making strides. 
 
 ' Do you imagine I don't appreciate Robert because I make
 
 228 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 bad jokes about the choir and the clothing club?' she asked 
 him, with a little quick repentance passing like a shadow 
 through her eyes. 'I always feel I play an odious part here. 
 I can t like it I can't their life. I should hate it ! And 
 yet ' _ 
 
 She sighed remorsefully, and Langham, who five minutes 
 before could have wished her to be always smiling, could now 
 have almost asked to fix her as she was : the eyes veiled, the 
 soft lips relaxed in this passing instant of gravity. 
 
 ' Ah ! I forgot ' and she looked up again with light be- 
 witching appeal 'there is still that question, my poor little 
 question of Sunday night, when I was in that fine moral frame 
 of mind and you were near giving me, I believe, the only good 
 advice you ever gave in your life, how shamefully you have 
 treated it ! ' 
 
 One brilliant look, which Catherine for her torment caught 
 from the other side of the table, and then in an instant the 
 quick face changed and stiffened. Mr. Wynnstay was speaking 
 to her, and Langham was left to the intermittent mercies of Dr. 
 Meyrick, who though glad to talk, was also quite content, ap- 
 parently, to judge from the radiant placidity of his look, to 
 examine his wine, study his menu, and enjoys his entrees in 
 silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of conversa- 
 tion. 
 
 Eobert, meanwhile, during the first few minutes, in which 
 Mr. Wynnstay had been engaged in some family talk with Mrs. 
 Darcy, had been allowing himself a little deliberate study of 
 Mr. Wendover across what seemed the safe distance of a long 
 table. The squire was talking shortly and abruptly, yet with 
 occasional flashes of shrill ungainly laughter, to Lady Char- 
 lotte, who seemed to have no sort of fear of him and to find him 
 good company, and every now and then Robert saw him turn 
 to Catherine on the other side of him, and with an obvious 
 change of manner address some formal and constrained remark 
 to her. 
 
 Mr. Wendover was a man of middle height and loose bony 
 frame, of which, as Robert had noticed in the drawing-room, 
 all the lower half had a thin and shrunken look. But the 
 shoulders, which had the scholar's stoop, and the head were 
 massive and squarely outlined. The head was specially remark- 
 able for its great breadth and comparative flatness above the 
 eyes, and for the way in which the head itself dwarfed the face, 
 which, as contrasted with the large angularity of the skull, had 
 a pinched and drawn look. The hair was reddish-gray, the eyes 
 small, but deep -set under fine brows, and the thin -lipped 
 wrinkled mouth and long chin had a look of hard sarcastic 
 strength. 
 
 Generally the countenance was that of an old man, the 
 furrows were deep, the skin brown and shrivelled. But the 
 alertness and force of the man's whole expression showed that,
 
 CHAP, xvii SURREY 229 
 
 if the body was beginning to fail, the mind was as fresh and 
 masterful as ever. His hair, worn rather longer than usual, 
 his loosely-fitting dress and slouching carriage gave him an un- 
 English look. In general he impressed Robert as a sort of 
 curious combination of the foreign savant with the English 
 grandee, for while his manner showed a considerable conscious- 
 ness of birth and social importance, the gulf between him and 
 the ordinary English country gentleman could hardly have been 
 greater, whether in points 01 appearance or, as Robert very well 
 knew, in points of social conduct. And as Robert watchea him, 
 his thoughts flew back again to the library, to this man's past,to 
 all that those eyes had seen and those hands had touched. He 
 felt already a mysterious, almost a yearning, sense of acquaint- 
 ance with the being who had just received him with such chill- 
 ing, such unexpected, indifference. 
 
 The squire's manners, no doubt, were notorious, but even so, 
 his reception of the new rector of the parish, the son of a man 
 intimately connected for years with the place, and with his 
 father, and to whom he had himself shown what was for him 
 considerable civility by letter and message, was sufficiently 
 startling. 
 
 Robert, however, had no time to speculate on the causes of 
 it, for Mrs. Darcy, released from Mr. Wynnstay, threw herself 
 with glee on to her longed-for prey, the young and interesting- 
 looking rector. First of all she cross-examined him as to his 
 literary employments, and when by dint of much questioning 
 she had forced particulars from him, Robert's mouth twitched 
 as he watched her scuttling away from the subject, seized 
 evidently with internal terrors lest she should have precipi- 
 tated herself beyond hope of rescue into the jaws of the sixth 
 century. Then with a view to regaining the lead and opening 
 another and more promising vein, she asked him his opinion of 
 Lady Selden's last novel, Love in a Marsh ; and when he con- 
 fessed ignorance she paused a moment, fork in hand, her small 
 wrinkled face looking almost as bewildered as when, three 
 minutes before, her rashness had well-nigh brought her face 
 to face with Gregory of Tours as a topic of conversation. 
 
 But she was not daunted long. With little airs and bridlings 
 infinitely diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most be- 
 guiling confidence. She could appreciate ' clever men,' she said, 
 for she she too^-was literary. Did Mr. Elsmere know this 
 in a hurried whisper, with sidelong glances to see that Mr. 
 Wynnstay was safely occupied with Rose, and the squire with 
 Lady Charlotte that she had once written a novel ? 
 
 Robert, who had been posted up in many things concerning 
 the neighbourhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most 
 truly that he had. Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over. 
 
 ' Ah ! but you haven't read it,' she said regretfully. ' It was 
 when I was Maid of Honour, you know. No Maid of Honour 
 had ever written a novel before. It was quite an event. Dear
 
 230 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 Prince Albert borrowed a copy of me one night to read in bed 
 I have it still, with the page turned down where he left off.' 
 She hesitated. ' It was only in the second chapter,' she said at 
 last with a fine truthfulness, ' but you know he was so busy, 
 all the Queen's work to do, of course, besides his own poor 
 man ! ' 
 
 Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, 
 with blushes which made her more weird than ever, con- 
 sented. 
 
 Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between 
 Lady Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as 
 grateful for his attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white 
 nobody at a country dinner-party ought to be, and was glad of 
 the diversion afforded him by some aggressive remark of his 
 wife. He and she differed on three main points politics the 
 decoration of their London house, Mr. Wynnstay being a lover 
 of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris ; and 
 the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte, in the 
 pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the 
 domestic hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a 
 name for any sort of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay 
 loathed such promiscuity ; and the company in which his wife 
 compelled him to drink his wine had seriously soured a small 
 irritable Conservative with more family pride than either nerves 
 or digestion. 
 
 During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched Els- 
 mere, cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burning 
 within her, and as soon as there was once more a general burst 
 of talk, she pounced upon him afresh. Would he like to know 
 that after thirty years sne had just finished her second novel, 
 unbeknown to her brother as she mentioned him the little face 
 darkened, took a strange bitterness and it was just about to 
 be entrusted to the post and a publisher 1 
 
 Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. 
 Mrs. Darcy expanded still more could, in fact, have hugged 
 him. But, just as she was launching into the plot a thought, 
 apparently a scruple of conscience, struck her. 
 
 ' Do you remember,' she began, looking at him a little darkly, 
 askance, ' what I said about my hobbies the other day ? Now, 
 Mr. Elsmere, will you tell me don't mind me don't be polite 
 have you ever heard people tell stories of me 1 Have you 
 ever, for instance, heard them call me a a tuft-hunter ? ' 
 
 ' Never ! ' said Robert heartily. 
 
 ' They might,' she said, sighing. ' I am a tuft-hunter. I can't 
 help it. And yet we are a good family, you know. I suppose 
 it was that year at Court, and that horrid Warham afterwards. 
 Twenty years in a cathedral town and a very little cathedral 
 town, after Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, and dear Lord 
 Melbourne ! Every year I came up to town to stay with my 
 father for a month in the season, and if it hadn't been for that
 
 CHAP, xvn SUKREY 231 
 
 I should have died my husband knew I should. It was the 
 world, the flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn't be 
 helped. But now,' and she looked plaintively at her companion, 
 as though challenging him to a candid reply : ' You would be 
 more interesting, wouldn't you, to tell the truth, if you had a 
 handle to your name ? ' 
 
 'Immeasurably,' cried Kobert, stifling his laughter with 
 immense difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh. 
 
 ' Well, yes, you know. But it isn't right ; ' and again she 
 sighed. 'And so I have been writing this novel just for that. 
 It is called what do you think ? " Mr. Jones." Mr. Jones is 
 my hero it's so good for me, you know, to think about a Mr. 
 Jones.' 
 
 She looked beamingly at him. ' It must be indeed ! Have 
 you endowed him with every virtue ? ' 
 
 ' Oh yes, and in the end, you know ' and she bent forward 
 eagerly 'it all comes right. His father didn't die in Brazil 
 without children after all, and the title ' 
 
 ' What ! ' cried Robert, ' so he wasn't Mr. Jones ? ' 
 
 Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious. 
 
 'Well, no,' she said guiltily, 'not just at the end. But it 
 really doesn't matter not to the story.' 
 
 Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory 
 as he could make it, which evoked in her an answering expres- 
 sion of anxiety. But just at that moment a loud wave of con- 
 versation and of laughter seemed to sweep down upon them 
 from the other end of the table, and their little private eddy 
 was effaced. The squire had been telling an anecdote, and his 
 clerical neighbours had been laughing at it. 
 
 ' Ah ! ' cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his 
 chair with a chuckle, ' that was an Archbishop worth having ! ' 
 
 ' A curious story,' said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point 
 of it, however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to 
 him. It seemed to Robert that the squire s keen eye. as he sat 
 looking down the table, with his large nervous hands clasped 
 before him, was specially fixed upon himself. 
 
 ' May we hear the story ? ' he said, bending forward. Catherine, 
 faintly smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a 
 little flushed and moved out of her ordinary quiet. 
 
 'It is a story of Archbishop Manners Button,' said Mr. 
 Wendover, in. his dry nasal voice. 'You probably know it, Mr. 
 Elsmere. After Bishop Heber's consecration to the See of 
 Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop to make a valedictory speech, 
 in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth which followed the 
 ceremony. "I have very little advice to give you as to your 
 future career," he said to the young bishop, " but all that ex- 
 perience lias given me I hand on to you. Place before your 
 eyes two precepts, and two only. One is, Preach the Gospel ; 
 and the other is Put doivn enthusiasm I " ' 
 
 There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the squire's
 
 232 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 look as he told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Kobert. 
 Robert divined in a moment that the story had been re-told for 
 his special benefit, and that in some unexplained way the rela- 
 tions between him and the squire were already biassed. He 
 smiled a little with faint politeness, and falling back into his 
 place made no comment on the squire's anecdote. Lady 
 Charlotte's eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the 
 distant figure of the rector, with regard to whom she had been 
 asking Dr. Meyrick for particulars, quite unmindful of Cath- 
 erine's neighbourhood, turned back again towards the squire. 
 
 'An unblushing old worldling, I should call your Archbishop,' 
 she said briskly. ' And a very good thing for him that he lived 
 when he did. Our modern good people would have dusted his 
 apron for him.' 
 
 Lady Charlotte prided herself on these vigorous forms of 
 speech, and the squire's neighbourhood generally called put an 
 unusual crop of them. The squire was still sitting with his 
 hands on the table, his great brows bent, surveying his guests. 
 
 ' Oh, of course all the sensible men are dead ! ' he said indif- 
 ferently. 'But that is a pet saying of mine the Church of 
 England in a nutshell.' 
 
 Kobert flushed, and after a moment's hesitation bent forward. 
 
 ' What do you suppose,' he asked quietly, ' your Archbishop 
 meant, Mr. Wendover, by enthusiasm ? Nonconformity, I 
 imagine.' 
 
 ' Oh, very possibly ! ' and again Robert found the hawk -like 
 glance concentrated on himself. ' But I like to give his remark 
 a much wider extension. One may make it a maxim of general 
 experience, and take it as fitting all the fools with a mission 
 who have teased pur generation all your Kingsleys, and 
 Maurices, and Ruskins every one bent upon making any sort 
 of aimless commotion, which may serve him both as an invest- 
 ment for the next world, and an advertisement for this.' 
 
 ' Upon my word, squire,' said Lady Charlotte, ' I hope you 
 don't expect Mr. Elsmere to agree with you ? ' 
 
 Mr. Wendover made her a little bow. 
 
 ' I have very little sanguineness of any sort in my composition,' 
 he said drily. 
 
 ' I should like to know,' said Robert, taking no notice of this 
 by -play ; ' I should like to know, Mr. Wendover, leaving the 
 Archbishop out of count, what you understand .by this word 
 enthusiasm in this maxim of yours ? ' 
 
 ' An excellent manner,' thought Lady Charlotte, who, for all 
 her noisiness, was an extremely shrewd woman, ' an excellent 
 manner and an unprovoked attack.' 
 
 Catherine's trained eye, however, had detected signs in 
 Robert's look and bearing which were lost on Lady Charlotte, 
 and which made her look nervously on. As to the rest of the 
 table, they had all fallen to watching the ' break ' between the 
 new rector and their host with a good deal of curiosity.
 
 CHAP, xvn SURREY 233 
 
 The squire paused a moment before replying, 
 
 ' It is not easy to put it tersely,' he said at last ; c but I may 
 define it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of your 
 right-hand neighbour with straw torn off the roof of your left- 
 hand neighbour ; the custom, in short, of robbing Peter to 
 propitiate Paul.' 
 
 'Precisely,' said Mr. Wynnstay warmly; 'all the ridiculous 
 Radical nostrums of the last fifty years you have hit them off 
 exactly. Sometimes you rob more and propitiate less ; some- 
 times you rob less and propitiate more. But the principle is 
 always the same.' And mindful of all those intolerable even- 
 ings, when these same Radical nostrums had been forced down 
 his throat at his own table, he threw a pugnacious look at his 
 wife, who smiled back serenely in reply. There is small redress 
 indeed for these things, when out of the common household 
 stock the wife possesses most of the money, and a vast propor- 
 tion of the brains. 
 
 ' And the cynic takes pleasure in observing,' interrupted the 
 squire, ' that the man who effects the change of balance does it 
 in the loftiest manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. Other 
 trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.' 
 
 He spoke with a harsh contemptuous insistence which was 
 gradually setting every nerve in Robert's body tingling. He 
 bent forward again, his long thin frame and boyish bright- 
 complexioned face making an effective contrast to the squire's 
 bronzed and wrinkled squareness. 
 
 'Oh, if you and Mr. Wynnstay are prepared to draw an 
 indictment against your generation and all its works, I have no 
 more to say,' he said, smiling still, though his voice had risen a 
 little in spite of himself. 'I should be content to withdraw 
 with my Burke into the majority. I imagined your attack on 
 enthusiasm had a narrower scope, but if it is to be made 
 synonymous with social progress I give up. The subject is too 
 big. Only ' 
 
 He hesitated. Mr. Wynnstay was studying him with some- 
 what insolent coolness ; Lady Charlotte's eyeglass never 
 wavered from his face, and he felt through every fibre the 
 tender timid admonitions of his wife's eyes. 
 
 ' However,' he went on after an instant, ' I imagine that we 
 should find it difficult anyhow to discover common ground. I 
 regard your Archbishop's maxim, Mr. Wendover,' and his tone 
 quickened and grew louder, ' as first of all a contradiction in 
 terms ; and in the next place, to me, almost all enthusiasms are 
 respectable ! ' 
 
 ' You are one of those people, I see,' returned Mr. Wendover, 
 after a pause, with the same nasal emphasis and the same 
 hauteur, ' who imagine we owe civilisation to the heart ' } that 
 mankind \\Asfelt its way literally. The school of the majority, 
 of course I admit it amply. I, on the other hand, am with the 
 benighted minority who believe that the world, so far as it has
 
 234 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 lived to any purpose, has lived by the head,' and he flung the 
 noun at Robert scornfully. ' But I am quite aware that in a 
 world of claptrap the philosopher gets all the kicks, and the 
 philanthropists, to give them their own label, all the halfpence.' 
 
 The impassive tone had gradually warmed to a heat which 
 was unmistakable. Lady Charlotte looked on with increasing 
 relish. To her all society was a comedy played for her enter- 
 tainment, and she detected something more dramatic than usual 
 in the juxtaposition of these two men. That young rector 
 might be worth looking after. The dinners in Martin Street 
 were alarmingly in want of fresh blood. As for poor Mr. 
 Bickerton, he had begun to talk hastily to Catherine, with a 
 sense of something tumbling about his ears ; while Mr. Long- 
 staffe, eyeglass in hand, surveyed the table with a distinct sense 
 of pleasurable entertainment. He had not seen much of Elsmere 
 yet, but it was as clear as daylight that the man was a firebrand, 
 and should be kept in order. 
 
 Meanwhile there was a pause between the two main disput- 
 ants ; the storm-clouds were deepening outside, and rain had 
 begun to patter on the windows. Mrs. Darcy was just calling 
 attention to the weather when the squire unexpectedly returned 
 to the charge. 
 
 'The one necessary thing in life,' he said, turning to Lady 
 Charlotte, a slight irritating smile playing round his strong 
 mouth, ' is not to be duped. Put too much faith in these fine 
 things the altruists talk of, and you arrive one day at the con- 
 dition of Louis XIV. after the battle of Ramillies : " Dieu a 
 done oubli tout ce que j'ai fait pour lui ?" Read your Renan ; 
 remind yourself at every turn that it is quite possible after all 
 the egotist may turn out to be in the right of it, and you will 
 find at any rate that the world gets on excellently well without 
 your blundering efforts to set it straight. And so we get back 
 to the Archbishop's maxim adapted, no doubt, to English 
 requirements,' and he shrugged his great shoulders expressively : 
 Pace Mr. Elsmere, of course, and the rest of our clerical 
 friends ! ' 
 
 Again he looked down the table, and the strident voice 
 sounded harsher than ever as it rose above the sudden noise 
 of the storm outside. Robert's bright eyes were fixed on the 
 squire, and before Mr. Wendover stopped Catherine could see 
 the words of reply trembling on his lips. 
 
 ' I am well content,' he said, with a curious dry intensity of 
 tone. ' I give you your Renan. Only leave us poor dupes our 
 illusions. We will not quarrel with the division. With you all 
 the cynics of history ; with us all the " scorners of the ground " 
 from the world's beginning until now ! ' 
 
 The squire make a quick impatient movement. Mr. Wynn- 
 stay looked significantly at his wife, who dropped her eye- 
 glass with a little irrepressible smile. 
 
 As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it
 
 CHAP, xvin SURREY 235 
 
 seemed to him that his eyes and the squire's crossed like swords. 
 In Robert's mind there had arisen a sudden passion of an- 
 tagonism. Before his eyes there was a vision of a child in a 
 stifling room, struggling with mortal disease, imposed upon her, 
 as he hotly reminded himself, by this man's culpable neglect. 
 The dinner-party, the splendour of the room, the conversation, 
 excited a kind of disgust in him. If it were not for Catherine's 
 pale face opposite, he could hardly have maintained his self- 
 control. 
 
 Mrs. Darcy, a little bewildered, and feeling that things were 
 not going particularly well ; thought it best to interfere. 
 
 'Roger, she said plaintively, 'you must not be so philoso- 
 phical. It's too hot ! He used to talk like that,' she went on, 
 bending over to Mr. Wynnstay, 'to the French priests who 
 came to see us last winter in Paris. They never minded a bit 
 they used to laugh. " Monsieur votre frere, madame, c'est un 
 homme qui a trop lu," they would say to me when I gave them 
 their coffee. Oh, they were such dears, those old priests ! Roger 
 said they had great hopes of me.' 
 
 The chatter was welcome, the conversation broke up. The 
 squire turned to Lady Charlotte, and Rose to Langham. 
 
 ' Why didn't you support Robert ? ' she said to him, impul- 
 sively, with a dissatisfied face. 'He was alone, against the 
 table ! ' 
 
 ' What good should I have done him ? ' he asked, with a shrug. 
 ' And pray, my lady confessor, what enthusiasms do you suspect 
 meof?' 
 
 He looked at her intently. It seemed to her they were by the 
 gate again the touch of his lips on her hand. She turned from 
 him hastily to stoop for her fan which had slipped away. It 
 was only Catherine who, for her annoyance, saw the scarlet flush 
 leap into the fair face. An instant later Mrs. Darcy had given 
 the signal. 
 
 CHAPTER XVIH 
 
 AFTER dinner Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Catherine, 
 whose quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal of the 
 dinner had impressed her, but a few minutes' talk produced in 
 her the conviction that without a good deal of pains and why 
 should a Londoner, accustomed to the cream of things, take 
 pains with a country clergyman's wife ? she was not likely to 
 get much out of her. Her appearance promised more, Lady 
 Charlotte thought, than her conversation justified, and she 
 looked about for easier game. 
 
 ' Are you Mr. Elsmere's sister 1 ' said a loud voice over Rose's 
 head ; and Rose, who had been turning over an illustrated book, 
 with a mind wholly detached from it, looked up to see Lady 
 Charlotte's massive form standing over her.
 
 236 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 ' No, his sister-in-law,' said Rose, flushing in spite of herself, 
 for Lady Charlotte was distinctly formidable. 
 
 ' Hum,' said her questioner, depositing herself beside her. ' I 
 never saw two sisters more unlike. You have got a very argu- 
 mentative brother-in-law.' 
 
 Rose said nothing, partly from awkwardness, partly from 
 rising antagonism. 
 
 ' Did you agree with him 1 ' asked Lady Charlotte, putting up 
 her glass and remorselessly studying every detail of the pink 
 dress, its ornaments, and the slippered feet peeping out beneath 
 it. 
 
 ' Entirely,' said Rose fearlessly, looking her full in the face. 
 
 ' And what can you know about it, I wonder ? However, you 
 are on the right side. It is the fashion nowadays to have en- 
 thusiasms. I suppose you muddle about among the poor like 
 other people ? ' 
 
 ' I know nothing about the poor,' said Rose. 
 
 'Oh, then, I suppose you feel yourself effective enough in 
 some other line?' said the other coolly. 'What is it lawn 
 tennis, or private theatricals, or hem prettiness t And again 
 the eyeglass went up. 
 
 ' Whichever you like,' said Rose calmly, the scarlet on her 
 cheek deepening, while she resolutely reopened her book. The 
 manner of the other had quite effaced in her all that sense of 
 obligation, as from the young to the old, which she had been 
 very carefully brought up in. Never had she beheld such an 
 extraordinary woman. 
 
 'Don't read,' said Lady Charlotte complacently. 'Look at 
 me. It's your duty to talk to me, you know ; and I won't make 
 myself any more disagreeable than I can help. I generally 
 make myself disagreeable, and yet, after all, there are a great 
 many people who like me.' 
 
 Rose turned a countenance rippling with suppressed laughter 
 on her companion. Lady Charlotte had a large fair face, with 
 a great deal of nose and chin, and an erection of lace and 
 feathers on her head that seemed in excellent keeping with the 
 masterful emphasis of those features. Her eyes stared frankly 
 and unblushingly at the world, only softened at intervals by the 
 glasses which were so used as to make them a most effective 
 adjunct of her conversation. Sociallv, she was absolutely devoid 
 of weakness or of shame. She found society extremely interest- 
 ing, and she always struck straight for the desirable things in 
 it, making short work of all those delicate tentative processes 
 of acquaintanceship by which men and women ordinarily sort 
 themselves. Rose's brilliant vivacious beauty had caught her 
 eye at dinner ; she adored beauty as she adored anything effec- 
 tive, and she always took a queer pleasure in bullying her way 
 into a girl's liking. It is a great thing to be persuaded that at 
 bottom you have a good heart. Lady Charlotte was so per- 
 suaded, and allowed herself many things in consequence.
 
 CHAP, xvin SURREY 237 
 
 ' What shall we talk about ? ' said Rose demurely. ' What a 
 magnificent old house this is ! ' 
 
 ' Stuff and nonsense ! I don't want to talk about the house. 
 I am sick to death of it. And if your people live in the parish, 
 you are too. I return to my question. Come, tell me, what is 
 your particular line in life ? I am sure you have one, by your 
 face. You had better tell me ; it will do you no harm. 
 
 Lady Charlotte settled herself comfortably on the sofa, and 
 Rose, seeing that there was no chance of escaping her tormentor, 
 felt her spirits rise to an encounter. 
 
 ' Really Lady Charlotte ' and she looked down, and then 
 up, with a feigned bashfulness ' I I play a little.' 
 
 ' Humph ! ' said her questioner again, rather disconcerted by 
 the obvious missishness of the answer. ' You do, do you ? 
 More's the pity. No woman who respects herself ought to play 
 the piano nowadays. A professional told me the other day that 
 until nineteen-twentieths of the profession were strung up, 
 there would be no chance for the rest ; and as for amateurs, 
 there is simply no room for them whatever. I can't conceive 
 anything more passe than amateur pianoforte playing ! ' 
 
 ' I don't play the piano,' said Rose meekly. 
 
 'What the fashionable instrument, the banjo?' laughed 
 Lady Charlotte. ' That would be really striking.' 
 
 Rose was silent again, the corners of her mouth twitch- 
 ing. 
 
 'Mrs. Darcy,' said her neighbour, raising her voice, 'this 
 young lady tells me she plays something ; what is it ? ' 
 
 Mrs. Darcy looked in a rather helpless way at Catherine. 
 She was dreadfully afraid of Lady Charlotte. 
 
 Catherine, with a curious reluctance, gave the required infor- 
 mation ; and then Lady Charlotte insisted that the violin should 
 be sent for, as it had not been brought. 
 
 ' Who accompanies you ? ' she inquired of Rose. 
 
 ' Mr. Langham plays very well,' said Rose indifferently. 
 
 Lady Charlotte raised her eyebrows. 'That dark, Byronic- 
 looking creature who came with you ? I should not have im- 
 agined him capable of anything sociable. Letitia, shall I send 
 my maid to the rectory, or can you spare a man ? ' 
 
 Mrs. Darcy hurriedly gave orders, and Rose, inwardly furious, 
 was obliged to submit. Then Lady Charlotte, having gained 
 her point, and secured a certain amount of diversion for the 
 evening, lay back on the sofa, used her fan, and yawned till the 
 gentlemen appeared. 
 
 When they came in, the precious violin which Rose never 
 trusted to any other hands but her own without trepidation had 
 just arrived, and its owner, more erect than usual, because more 
 nervous, was trying to prop up a dilapidated music-stand which 
 Mrs. Darcy had unearthed for her. As Langham came in, she 
 looked up and beckoned to him. 
 
 'Do you see?' she said to him impatiently, 'they have made
 
 238 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 me play. Will you accompany me ? I am very sorry, but there 
 is no one else.' 
 
 If there was one thing Langham loathed on his own account, 
 it was any sort of performance in public. But the half -plaintive 
 look which accompanied her last words showed that she knew 
 it, and he did his best to be amiable. 
 
 ' I am altogether at your service,' he said, sitting down with 
 resignation. 
 
 ' It is all that tiresome woman, Lady Charlotte Wynnstay,' 
 she whispered to him behind the music-stand. 'I never saw 
 such a person in my life.' 
 
 'Macaulay's Lady Holland without the brains,' suggested 
 Langham with languid vindictiveness as he gave her the note. 
 
 Meanwhile Mr. Wynnstay and the squire sauntered in to- 
 gether. 
 
 ' A village Norman-Ne'ruda ? ' whispered the guest to the host. 
 The squire shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' Hush ! ' said Lady Charlotte, looking severely at her husband. 
 Mr. Wynnstay's smile instantly disappeared ; he leant against 
 the doorway and stared sulkily at the ceiling. Then the musi- 
 cians began, on some Hungarian melodies put together by a 
 younger rival of Brahms. They had not played twenty bars 
 before the attention of every one in the room was more or less 
 seized unless we except Mr. Bickerton, whose children, good 
 soul, were all down with some infantile ailment or other, and 
 who was employed in furtively watching the clock all the time 
 to see when it would be decent to order round the pony-carriage 
 which would take him back to his pale overweighted spouse. 
 
 First came wild snatches of march music, primitive, savage, 
 non-European ; then a waltz of the lightest, maddest rhythm, 
 broken here and there by strange barbaric clashes ; then a song, 
 plaintive and clinging, rich in the subtlest shades and melan- 
 cholies of modern feeling. 
 
 ' Ah, but excellent ! ' said Lady Charlotte once, under her 
 breath, at a pause ; ' and what entrain what beauty ! ' 
 
 For Rose's figure was standing thrown out against the dusky 
 blue of the tapestried walls, and from that delicate relief every 
 curve, every grace, each tint hair and cheek and gleaming arm 
 gained an enchanting picture-like distinctness. There was jessa- 
 mine at her waist and among the gold of her hair the crystals 
 on her neck, and on the little shoe thrown forward beyond her 
 dress, caught the lamplight. 
 
 ' How can that man play with her and not fall in love with 
 her 1 ' thought Lady Charlotte to herself, with a sigh, perhaps, 
 for her own youth. ' He looks cool enough, however ; the typical 
 don with his nose in the air ! ' 
 
 Then the slow passionate sweetness of the music swept her 
 away with it, she being in her way a connoisseur, and she ceased 
 to speculate. When the sounds ceased there was silence for a 
 moment. Mrs. Darcy, who had a piano in her sitting-room
 
 CHAF. xvni SURREY 239 
 
 whereon she strummed every morning with her tiny rheumatic 
 fingers, and who had, as we know, strange little veins of senti- 
 ment running all about her, stared at Rose with open mouth. 
 So did Catherine. Perhaps it was then for the first time that, 
 touched by this publicity, this contagion of other people's feel- 
 ing, Catherine realised fully against what a depth of stream she 
 had been building her useless barriers. 
 
 ' More ! more ! ' cried Lady Charlotte. 
 
 The whole room seconded the demand save the squire and 
 Mr. Bickerton. They withdrew together into a distant oriel. 
 Robert, who was delighted with his little sister-in-law's success, 
 went smiling to talk of it to Mrs. Darcy, while Catherine with 
 a gentle coldness answered Mr. Longstafie's questions on the 
 same theme. 
 
 ' Shall we 1 ' said Rose, panting a little, but radiant, looking 
 down on her companion. 
 
 ' Command me ! ' he said, his grave lips slightly smiling, his 
 eyes taking in'.the same vision that had charmed Lady Charlotte's. 
 What a ' child of grace and genius ! ' 
 
 ' But do you like it ? ' she persisted. 
 
 ' Like it like accompanying your playing ? ' 
 
 ' Oh no ! ' impatiently ; ' snowing off, I mean. I am quite 
 ready to stop.' 
 
 ' Uo on ; go on ! ' he said, laying his finger on the A. ' You 
 have driven all my mauvaise honte away. I have not heard you 
 play so splendidly yet.' 
 
 She flushed all over. ' Then we will go on,' she said briefly. 
 
 So they plunged again into an Andante and Scherzo of Beeth- 
 oven. How the girl threw herself into it, bringing out the 
 wailing love-song of the Andante, the dainty tripping mirth of 
 the Scherzo, in a way which set every nerve in Langham vibrat- 
 ing ! Yet the art or it was wholly unconscious. The music was 
 the mere natural voice of her inmost self. A comparison full of 
 excitement was going on in that self between her first impres- 
 sions of the man beside her, and her consciousness of him, as he 
 seemed to-night, human, sympathetic, kind. A blissful sense of 
 a mission filled the young silly soul. Like David, she was 
 pitting herself and her gilt against those dark powers which 
 may invade and paralyse a life. 
 
 After the shouts of applause at the end had yielded to a burst 
 of talk, in the midst of which Lady Charlotte, with exquisite 
 infelicity, might have been heard laying down the law to Cath- 
 erine as to how her sister's remarkable musical powers might be 
 best perfected, Langham turned to his companion, 
 
 ' Do you know that for years I have enjoyed nothing so much 
 as the music of the last two days ? ' 
 
 His black eyes shone upon her, transfused with something 
 infinitely soft and friendly. She smiled. ' How little I ima- 
 gined that first evening that you cared for music ! ' 
 
 4 Or about anything else worth caring for ? ' he asked her,
 
 240 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 laughing, but with always that little melancholy note in the 
 laugh. 
 
 ' Oh, if you like,' she said, with a shrug of her white shoulders. 
 ' I believe you talked to Catherine the whole of the first evening, 
 when you weren't reading Hamlet in the corner, about the 
 arrangements for women's education at Oxford.' 
 
 ' Could I have found a more respectable subject ? ' he inquired 
 of her. 
 
 'The adjective is excellent,' she said with a little face, as she 
 put her violin into its case. ' If I remember right, Catherine 
 and I felt it personal. None of us were ever educated, except 
 in arithmetic, sewing, English history, the Catechism, and 
 Paradise Lost. I taught myself French at seventeen, because 
 one Moliere wrote plays in it, and German because of Wagner. 
 But they are my French and my German. I wouldn't advise 
 anybody else to steal them ! ' 
 
 Langham was silent, watching the movements of the girl's 
 agile fingers. 
 
 ' I wonder,' he said at last, slowly, ' when I shall play that 
 Beethoven again ? ' 
 
 ' To-morrow morning if you have a conscience,' she said drily ; 
 ' WB murdered one or two passages in fine style.' 
 
 He looked at her, startled. 'But I go by the morning train ! ' 
 There was an instant's silence. Then the violin case shut with 
 a snap. 
 
 ' I thought it was to be Saturday,' she said abruptly. 
 
 ' No,' he answered with a sigh, ' it was always Friday. There 
 is a meeting in London I must get to to-morrow afternoon.' 
 
 ' Then we shan't finish these Hungarian duets,' she said slowly, 
 turning away from him to collect some music on the piano. 
 
 Suddenly a sense of the difference between the week behind 
 him, with all its ups and downs, its quarrels, its ennuis, its 
 moments of delightful intimity, of artistic freedom and pleasure, 
 and those threadbare monotonous weeks into which he was to 
 slip back on the morrow, awoke in him a mad inconsequent 
 sting of disgust, of self-pity. 
 
 ' No, we shall finish nothing,' he said in a voice which only she 
 could hear, his hands lying on the keys ; ' there are some whose 
 destiny it is never to finish never to have enough to leave the 
 feast on the table, and all the edges of life ragged ! ' 
 
 Her lips trembled. They were far away, in the vast room, 
 from the group Lady Charlotte was lecturing. Her nerves were 
 all unsteady with music and feeling, and the face looking down 
 on him had grown pale. 
 
 'We make our own destiny,' she said impatiently. { We 
 choose. It is all our own doing. Perhaps destiny begins things 
 friendship, for instance ; but afterwards it is absurd to talk 
 of anything but ourselves. We keep our friends, our chances, 
 our our joys,' she went on hurriedly, trying desperately to 
 generalise, ' or we throw them away wilfully, because we choose.'
 
 CHAP, xvin SURREY 241 
 
 Their eyes were riveted on each other. 
 
 ' Not wilfully,' he said under his breath. ' But no matter. 
 May I take you at your word, Miss Leyburn? Wretched 
 shirker that I am, whom even Robert's charity despairs of : 
 have I made a friend ? Can I keep her ? ' 
 
 Extraordinary spell of the dark effeminate face of its rare 
 smile ! The girl forgot all pride, all discretion. ' Try,' she 
 whispered, and as his hand, stretching along the keyboard, in- 
 stinctively felt for hers, for one instant and another, and 
 another she gave it to him. 
 
 'Albert, come here ! ' exclaimed Lady Charlotte, beckoning to 
 her husband ; and Albert, though with a bad grace, obeyed. 
 ' Just go and ask that girl to come and talk to me, will you 1 
 Why on earth didn't you make friends with her at dinner ? 
 
 The husband made some irritable answer, and the wife 
 laughed. 
 
 ' Just like you ! ' she said, with a good humour which seemed 
 to him solely caused by the fact of his non-success with the 
 beauty at table. ' You always expect to kill at the first stroke. 
 I mean to take her in tow. Go and bring her here.' 
 
 Mr. Wynnstay sauntered off with as much dignity as his 
 stature was capable of. He found Rose tying up her music at 
 one end of the piano, while Langham was preparing to shut up 
 the keyboard. 
 
 There was something appeasing in the girl's handsomeness. 
 Mr. Wynnstay laid down his airs, paid her various compliments, 
 and led her off to Lady Charlotte. 
 
 Langham stood by the piano, lost in a kind of miserable 
 dream. Mrs. Darcy fluttered up to him. 
 
 'Oh, Mr. Langham, you play so beautifully/ Do play a 
 solo ! ' 
 
 He subsided on to the music -bench obediently. On any 
 ordinary occasion tortures could not have induced him to per- 
 form in a room full of strangers. He had far too lively and 
 fastidious a sense of the futility of the amateur. 
 
 But he played what, he knew not. Nobody listened but 
 Mrs. Darcy, who sat lost in an armchair a little way off, her tiny 
 foot beating time. Rose stopped talking, started, tried to listen. 
 But Lady Charlotte had had enough music, and so had Mr. 
 Longstaffe, who was endeavouring to joke himself into the good 
 graces of the Duke of Sedbergh's sister. The din of conversa- 
 tion rose at the challenge of the piano, and Langham was soon 
 overcrowded. 
 
 Musically, it was perhaps as well, for the player's inward 
 tumult was so great, that what his hands did he hardly knew or 
 cared. He felt himself the greatest criminal unhung. Sud- 
 denly, through all that wilful mist of epicurean feeling which 
 had been enwrapping him, there had pierced a sharp illumining 
 beam from a girl s eyes aglow with joy, with hope, with tender- 
 
 R
 
 242 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 ness. In the name of Heaven, what had this growing degeneracy 
 of every moral muscle led him to now ? What ! smile and talk, 
 and smile and be a villain all the time ? What ! encroach on 
 a young life, like some creeping parasitic growth, taking all, 
 able to give nothing in return not even one genuine spark of 
 genuine passion ? Go philandering on till a child of nineteen shows 
 you her warm impulsive heart, play on her imagination, on her 
 pity, safe all the while in the reflection that by the next day you 
 will be far away, and her task and yours will be alike to forget ! 
 He shrinks from himself as one shrinks from a man capable of 
 injuring anything weak and helpless. To despise the world's 
 social code, and then to fall conspicuously below its simplest 
 articles ; to aim at being pure intelligence, pure open-eyed 
 rationality, and not even to succeed in being a gentleman, as 
 the poor commonplace world understands it ! Oh, to fall at her 
 feet, and ask her pardon before parting for ever ! But no no 
 more posing ; no more dramatising. How can he get away most 
 quietly make least sign ? The thought of that walk home in 
 the darkness fills him with a passion of irritable impatience. 
 
 ' Look at that Romney, Mr. Elsmere ; just look at it ! ' cried Dr. 
 Meyrick excitedly ; ' did you ever see anything finer ? There 
 was one of those London dealer fellows down here last summer 
 offered the squire four thousand pounds down on the nail 
 for it.' 
 
 In this way Meyrick had been taking Robert round the draw- 
 ing-roorrij doing the honours of every stick and stone in it, his 
 eyeglass in his eye, his thin old face shining with pride over the 
 Wendover possessions. And so the two gradually neared the 
 oriel where the squire and Mr. Bickerton were standing. 
 
 Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation 
 with the squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve in 
 him was still tingling with anger, he had done his best to keep up 
 indifferent talk on local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly 
 he was asking himself whether he should ever sit at the squire's 
 table and eat his bread again. It seemed to him that they had 
 had a brush which would be difficult to forget. And as he sat 
 there before the squire's wine, hot with righteous heat, all his 
 grievances against the man and the landlord crowded upon him. 
 A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his 
 inferiors and bully his equals ! 
 
 But as the minutes passed on, the rector had cooled down. 
 The sweet, placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. 
 'What, play your cards so badly, give up the game so rashly, 
 the very first round ? Nonsense ! Patience and try again. 
 There must be some cause in the background. No need to be 
 white-livered, but every need, in the case of such a man as the 
 squire, to take no hasty needless offence.' 
 
 So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick and 
 he close to the squire and his companion. The two men, as
 
 CHAP, xvni SURREY 243 
 
 the rector approached, were discussing some cases of common 
 enclosure that had just taken place in the neighbourhood. 
 Robert listened a moment, then struck in. Presently, when 
 the chat dropped, he began to express to the squire his pleasure 
 in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, courtesy 
 itself, but without any trace of effusion. 
 
 ' I believe,' he said at last, smiling, ' my father used to be 
 allowed the same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the 
 way in which he clung to Murewell.' 
 
 'I had never the honour of Mr. Edward Elsmere's acquaint- 
 ance,' said the squire frigidly. ' During the time of his occupa- 
 tion of the rectory I was not in England.' 
 
 ' I know. Do you still go much to Germany ? Do you keep 
 up your relations with Berlin 1 ' 
 
 'I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,' said the squire 
 briefly, his eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on the 
 man who ventured to question him about himself, uninvited. 
 There was an awkward pause. Then the squire turned again 
 to Mr. Bickerton. 
 
 ' Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm of 
 last February has brought down at the north-east corner of the 
 park?' 
 
 Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, lay the 
 words themselves. The squire had not yet addressed a single 
 remark of any kind about Murewell to him. There was a de- 
 liberate intention to exclude implied in this appeal to the man 
 who was not the man of the place, on such a local point, which 
 struck Robert very forcibly. 
 
 He walked away to where his wife was sitting. 
 
 ' What time is it ? ' whispered Catherine, looking up at him. 
 
 'Time to go,' he returned, smiling, but she caught the dis- 
 composure in his tone and look at once, and her wifely heart 
 rose against the squire. She got up, drawing herself together 
 with a gesture that became her. 
 
 ' Then let us go at once,' she said. ' Where is Rose ? ' 
 
 A minute later there was a general leave-taking. Oddly 
 enough it found the squire in the midst of a conversation with 
 Langham. As though to show more clearly that it was the 
 rector personally who was in his black books, Mr. Wendover 
 had already devoted some cold attention to Catherine both at 
 and after dinner, and he had no sooner routed Robert than he 
 moved in his slouching away across from Mr. Bickerton to 
 Langham. And now, another man altogether, he was talking 
 and laughing describing apparently a reception at the French 
 Academy the epigrams flying, the harsh face all lit up, the 
 thin bony fingers gesticulating freely. 
 
 The husband and wife exchanged glances as they stood wait- 
 ing, while Lady Charlotte, in her loudest voice, was command- 
 ing Rose to come and see her in London any Thursday after the 
 first of November. Robert was very sore. Catherine passion-
 
 244 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 ately felt it, and forgetting everything but him, longed to be 
 out with him in the park comforting him. 
 
 ' What an absurd fuss you have been making about that girl,' 
 Wynnstay exclaimed to his wife as the Elsmere party left the 
 room, the squire conducting Catherine with a chill politeness. 
 'And now, I suppose, you will be having her up in town, and 
 making some young fellow who ought to know better fall in 
 love with her. I am told the father was a grammar-school 
 headmaster. Why can't you leave people where they belong 1 ' 
 
 ' I have already pointed out to you,' Lady Charlotte observed 
 calmly, ' that the world has moved on since you were launched 
 into it. I can't keep up class-distinctions to please you ; other- 
 wise, no doubt, being the devoted wife I am, I might try. How- 
 ever, my dear, we both have our fancies. You collect Sevres 
 china with or without a pedigree,' and she coughed drily ; ' I 
 collect promising young women. On the whole, I think my 
 hobby is more beneficial to you than yours is profitable to me.' 
 
 Mr. Wynnstay was furious. Only a week before he had been 
 childishly, shamefully taken in by a Jew curiosity-dealer from 
 Vienna, to his wife's huge amusement. If looks could have 
 crushed her, Lady Charlotte would have been crushed. But 
 she was far too substantial as she lay back in her chair, one 
 large foot crossed over the other, and, as her husband very well 
 knew, the better man of the two. He walked away, murmur- 
 ing under his moustache words that would hardly have borne 
 publicity, while Lady Charlotte, through her glasses, made a 
 minute study of a little French portrait hanging some two 
 yards from her. 
 
 Meanwhile the Elsmere party were stepping out into the 
 warm damp of the night. The storm had died away, but a soft 
 Scotch mist of rain filled the air. Everything was dark, save 
 for a few ghostly glimmerings through the trees of the avenue ; 
 and there was a strong sweet smell of wet earth and grass. 
 Rose had drawn the hood of her waterproof over her head, and 
 her face gleamed an indistinct whiteness from its shelter. Oh 
 this leaping pulse this bright glow of expectation ! How had 
 she made this stupid blunder about his going? Oh, it was 
 Catherine's mistake, of course, at the beginning. But what 
 matter ? Here they were in the dark, side by side, friends now, 
 friends always. Catherine should not spoil their last walk 
 together. She felt a passionate trust that he would not allow it. 
 
 ' Wifie ! ' exclaimed Robert, drawing her a little apart, ' do 
 you know it has just occurred to me that, as I was going through 
 the park this afternoon by the lower footpath, I crossed Hens- 
 lowe coming away from the house. Of course this is what has 
 happened ! He has told his story first. No doubt just before 
 I met him he had been giving the squire a full and particular 
 account a la Henslowe of my proceedings since I came. 
 Henslowe lays it on thick paints with a will. The squire
 
 CHAP, xvin SURREY 245 
 
 receives me afterwards as the meddlesome pragmatical priest 
 he understands me to be ; puts his foot down to begin with ; 
 and, hinc illce lacrymce. It's as clear as daylight ! I thought 
 that man had an odd twist of the lip as he passed me.' 
 
 'Then a disagreeable evening will be the worst of it,' said 
 Catherine proudly. ' I imagine, Robert, you can defend yourself 
 against that bad man ? ' 
 
 ' He has got the start ; he has no scruples ; and it remains to 
 be seen whether the squire has a heart to appeal to,' replied the 
 young rector with sore reflectiveness. ' Oh, Catherine, have 
 you ever thought, wifie, what a business it will be for us if I 
 can't make friends with that man ? Here we are at his gates 
 all our people in his power ; the comfort, at any rate, of our 
 social life depending on him. And what a strange, unmanage- 
 able, inexplicable being ! ' 
 
 Elsmere sighed aloud. Like all quick imaginative natures 
 he was easily depressed, and the squire's sombre figure had for 
 the moment darkened his whole horizon. Catherine laid her 
 cheek against his arm in the darkness, consoling, remonstrat- 
 ing, every other thought lost in her sympathy with Robert's 
 worries. Langham and Rose slipped out of her head ; Elsmere's 
 step had quickened, as it always did when he was excited, and 
 she kept up without thinking. 
 
 When Langham found the others had shot ahead in the dark- 
 ness, and he and his neighbour were tete-a-tete, despair seized 
 him. But for once he showed a sort of dreary presence of mind. 
 Suddenly, while the girl beside him was floating in a golden 
 dream of feeling, he plunged with a stiff deliberation born of his 
 inner conflict into a discussion of the German system of musical 
 training. Rose, startled, made some vague and flippant reply. 
 Langham pursued the matter. He had some information about 
 it, it appeared, garnered up in his mind, which might perhaps 
 some day prove useful to her. A St. Anselm's undergraduate, 
 one Dashwood, an old pupil of his, had been lately at Berlin 
 for six months, studying at the Conservatorium. Not long ago, 
 being anxious to become a schoolmaster, he had written to 
 Langham for a testimonial. His letter had contained a 
 full account of his musical life. Langham proceeded to 
 recapitulate it. 
 
 His careful and precise report of hours, fees, masters, and 
 methods lasted till they reached the park gate. He had the 
 smallest powers of social acting, and^ his r6le was dismally 
 overdone. The girl beside him could not know that he was 
 really defending her from himself. His cold altered manner 
 merely seemed to her a sudden and marked withdrawal of his 
 petition for her friendship. No doubt she had received that 
 petition too effusively and lie wished there should be no 
 mistake. 
 
 What a young smarting soul went through in that half-mile 
 of listening is better guessed than analysed. There are certain
 
 246 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK n 
 
 moments of shame, which only women know, and which seem 
 to sting and burn out of youth all its natural sweet self-love. 
 A woman may outlive them, but never forget them. If she pass 
 through one at nineteen her cheek will grow hot over it at 
 seventy. Her companion's measured tone, the flow of deliberate 
 speech which came from him, the nervous aloofness of his 
 attitude every detail in that walk seemed to Rose's excited 
 sense an insult. 
 
 As the park gate swung behind them she felt a sick longing 
 for Catherine's shelter. Then all the pride in her rushed to the 
 rescue and held that swooning dismay at the heart of her in 
 check. And forthwith she capped Langham's minute account 
 of the scale-method of a famous Berlin pianist by some witty 
 stories of the latest London prodigy, a child- violinist, incredibly 
 gifted, dirty, and greedy, whom she had made friends with in 
 town. The girl's voice rang out sharp and hard under the trees. 
 Where, in fortune's name, were the lights of the rectory? 
 Would this nightmare never come to an end ? 
 
 At the rectory gate was Catherine waiting for them, her 
 whole soul one repentant alarm. 
 
 ' Mr. Langham, Robert has gone to the study ; will you go and 
 smoke with him ? ' 
 
 ' By all means. Good-night, then, Mrs. Elsmere.' 
 
 Catherine gave him her hand. Rose was trying hard to fit 
 the lock of the gate into the hasp, and had no hand free. 
 Besides, he did not approach her. 
 
 ' Good-night ! ' she said to him over her shoulder. 
 
 ' Oh, and Mr. Langham ! ' Catherine called after him as he 
 strode away, ' will you settle with Robert about the carriage 1 ' 
 
 He turned, made a sound of assent, and went on. 
 
 'When ? ' asked Rose lightly. 
 
 ' For the nine o'clock train. 
 
 ' There should be a law against interfering with people's 
 breakfast hour,' said Rose ; ' though, to be sure, a guest may as 
 well get himself gone early and be done with it. How you and 
 Robert raced, Cathie ! We did our best to catch you up, but 
 the pace was too good.' 
 
 Was there a wild taunt, a spice of malice in the girl's reckless 
 voice ? Catherine could not see her in the darkness, but the 
 sister felt a sudden trouble invade her. 
 
 ' Rose, darling, you are not tired ? ' 
 
 'Oh dear, no! Good -night, sleep well. What a goose Mrs. 
 Darcy is ! ' 
 
 And, barely submitting to be kissed, Rose ran up the steps 
 and upstairs. 
 
 Langham and Robert smoked till midnight. Langham for 
 the first time gave Elsmere an outline of his plans for the 
 future, and Robert, filled with dismay at this final breach with 
 Oxford and human society, and the only form of practical life 
 possible to such a man, threw himself into protests more and
 
 CHAP, xvin SURREY 247 
 
 more vigorous and affectionate. Langham listened to them at 
 first with sombre silence, then with an impatience which 
 gradually reduced Robert to a sore puffing at his pipe. There 
 was a long space during which they sat together, the ashes of 
 the little fire Robert had made dropping on the hearth, and not 
 a word on either side. 
 
 At last Elsmere could not bear it, and when midnight struck 
 he sprang up with an impatient shake of his long body, and 
 Langham took the hint, gave him a cold good-night, and went. 
 
 As the door shut upon him Robert dropped back into his 
 chair, and sat on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the 
 fire. It seemed to him the world was going crookedly. A day 
 on which a man of singularly open and responsive temper 
 makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than ever before to 
 losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the calendar, 
 and, by way of aggravation, Robert Elsmere says to himself at 
 once that somehow or other there must be fault of his own in 
 the matter. 
 
 Rose ! pshaw ! Catherine little knows what stuff that cold 
 intangible soul is made of. 
 
 Meanwhile, Langham was standing heavily, looking out into 
 the night. The different elements in the mountain of discomfort 
 that weighed upon him were so many that the weary mind 
 made no attempt to analyse them. He had a sense of disgrace, 
 of having stabbed something gentle that had leant upon him, 
 mingled with a strong intermittent feeling of unutterable relief. 
 Perhaps his keenest regret was that, after all, it had not been 
 love ! He had offered himself up to a girl's just contempt, but 
 he had no recompense in the shape of a great addition to 
 knowledge, to experience. Save for a few doubtful moments 
 at the beginning, when he had all but surprised himself in 
 something more poignant, what he had been conscious of had 
 been nothing more than a suave and delicate charm of sentiment, 
 a subtle surrender to one exquisite aesthetic impression after 
 another. And these things in other relations the world had 
 yielded him before. 
 
 ' Am I sane ? ' he muttered to himself. ' Have I ever been 
 sane ? Probably not. The disproportion between my motives 
 and other men's is too great to be normal. Well, at least I am 
 sane enough to shut myself up. Long after that beautiful child 
 has forgotten she ever saw me I shall still be doing penance in 
 the desert.' 
 
 He threw himself down beside the open window with a groan. 
 An hour later he lifted a face blanched and lined, and stretched 
 out his hand with avidity towards a book on the table. It was 
 an obscure and difficult Greek text, and he spent the greater 
 part of the night over it, rekindling in himself with feverish 
 haste the embers of his one lasting passion. 
 
 Meanwhile, in a room overhead, another last scene in this 
 most futile of dramas was passing. Rose, when she came in,
 
 248 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK 11 
 
 had locked the door, torn off her dress and her ornaments, and 
 flung herself on the edge of the bed, her hands on her knees, 
 her shoulders drooping, a fierce red spot on either cheek. There 
 for an indefinite time she went through a torture of self -scorn. 
 The incidents of the week passed before her one by one her 
 sallies, her defiances, her impulsive friendliness, the Man, the 
 happiness of the last two days, the self-abandonment of this 
 evening. Oh, intolerable intolerable ! 
 
 And all to end with the intimation that she had been 
 behaving like a forward child had gone too far and must be 
 admonished made to feel accordingly ! The poisoned arrow 
 pierced deeper and deeper into the girl's shrinking pride. The 
 very foundations of self-respect seemed overthrown. 
 
 Suddenly her eye caught a dim and ghostly reflection of her 
 own figure, as she sat with locked hands on the edge of the bed, 
 in a long glass near, the only one of the kind which the rectory 
 household possessed. Rose sprang up, snatched at the candle, 
 which was flickering in the air of the open window, and stood 
 erect before the glass, holding the candle above her head. 
 
 What the light showed her was a slim form in a white 
 dressing-gown, that fell loosely about it ; a rounded arm up- 
 stretched ; a head, still crowned with its jessamine wreath, from 
 which the bright hair fell heavily over shoulders and bosom ; 
 eyes, under frowning brows, flashing a proud challenge at 
 what they saw ; two lips, 'indifferent red,' just open to let the 
 quick breath come through all thrown into the wildest chiaro- 
 scuro by the wavering candle flame. 
 
 Her challenge was answered. The fault was not there. Her 
 arm dropped. She put down the light. 
 
 'I am handsome, she said to herself, her mouth quivering 
 childishly. ' I am. I may say it to myself.' 
 
 Then, standing by the window, she stared into the night. 
 Her room, on the opposite side of the house from Langham's, 
 looked over the cornfields and the distance. The stubbles 
 gleamed faintly ; the dark woods, the clouds teased by the 
 rising wind, sent a moaning voice to greet her. 
 
 ' I hate him ! I hate him ! ' she cried to the darkness, clench- 
 ing her cold little hand. 
 
 Then presently she slipped on to her knees, and buried her 
 head in the bed-clothes. She was crying angry stifled tears 
 which had the hot impatience of youth in them. It all seemed 
 to her so untoward. This was not the man she had dreamed 
 of the unknown of her inmost heart. He had been young, 
 ardent, impetuous like herself. Hand in hand, eye flashing 
 into eye, pulse answering to pulse, they would have flung aside 
 the veil hanging over lire and plundered the golden mysteries 
 behind it. 
 
 She rebels ; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has 
 laid this paralysing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself 
 back to peace to indifference. The poor child flies from her
 
 CHAP, xvni SURREY 249 
 
 own half -understood trouble ; will none of it ; murmurs again 
 wildly 
 
 'I hate him ! I hate him ! Cold-blooded ungrateful 
 unkind ! ' 
 
 In vain. A pair of melancholy eyes haunt, enthral her in- 
 most soul. The charm of the denied, the inaccessible is on her, 
 womanlike. 
 
 That old sense of capture, of helplessness, as of some lassoed 
 struggling creature, descended upon her. She lay sobbing 
 there, trying to recall what she had been a week before ; the 
 whirl of her London visit, the ambitions with which it had 
 filled her ; the bewildering many-coloured lights it had thrown 
 upon life, the intoxicating sense of artistic power. In vain. 
 
 ' The stream will not flow, and the hills will not rise ; 
 And the colours have all passed away from her eyes.' 
 
 She felt herself bereft, despoiled. And yet through it all, as 
 she lay weeping, there came flooding a strange contradictory 
 sense of growth, of enrichment. In such moments of pain does 
 a woman first begin to live ? Ah ! why should it hurt so this 
 long-awaited birth of the soul ?
 
 BOOK III 
 
 THE SQUIEE
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 THE evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a 
 date of some importance in the lives of two or three persons. 
 Rose was not likely to forget it ; Langham carried about with 
 him the picture of the great drawing-room, its stately light and 
 shade, and its scattered figures, through many a dismal subse- 
 quent hour ; and to Robert it was the beginning of a period of 
 practical difficulties such as his fortunate youth had never yet 
 encountered. 
 
 His conjecture had hit the mark. The squire's sentiments 
 towards him, which had been on the whole friendly enough, 
 with the exception of a slight nuance of contempt provoked in 
 Mr. Wendover's mind by all forms of the clerical calling, had 
 been completely transformed in the course of the afternoon 
 before the dinner-party, and transformed by the report of his 
 agent. Henslowe, who knew certain sides of the squire's char- 
 acter by heart, had taken Time by the forelock. For fourteen 
 Ssars before Robert entered the parish he had been king of it. 
 r. Preston, Robert's predecessor, had never given him a 
 moment's trouble. The agent had developed a habit of drink- 
 ing, had favoured his friends and spited his enemies, and had 
 allowed certain distant portions of the estate to go finely to 
 ruin, quite undisturbed by any sentimental meddling of the 
 priestly sort. Then the old rector had been gathered to the 
 majority, and this long-legged busybody had taken his place, a 
 man, according to the agent, as full of communistical notions 
 as an egg is full of meat, and always ready to poke his nose 
 into other people's business. And as all men like mastery, but 
 especially Scotchmen, and as during even the first few months 
 of the new rector's tenure of office it became tolerably evident 
 to Henslowe that young Elsmere would soon become the ruling 
 force of the neighbourhood unless measures were taken to pre- 
 vent it, the agent, over his nocturnal drams, had taken sharp 
 and cunning counsel with himself concerning the young man. 
 
 The state of Mile End had been originally the result of in- 
 dolence and caprice on his part rather than of any set purpose 
 of neglect. As soon, however, as it was brought to his notice 
 by Elsmere, who did it, to begin with, in the friendliest way, it
 
 254 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 became a point of honour with the agent to let the place go to 
 the devil, nay, to hurry it there. For some time notwithstand- 
 ing, he avoided an open breach with the rector. He met Els- 
 mere's remonstrances by a more or less civil show of argument, 
 belied every now and then by the sarcasm of his coarse blue 
 eye, and so far the two men had kept outwardly on terms. 
 Elsmere had reason to know that on one or two occasions of 
 difficulty in the parish Henslowe had tried to do him a mischief. 
 The attempts, however, had not greatly succeeded, and their 
 ill-success had probably excited in Elsmere a confidence of ulti- 
 mate victory which had tended to keep him cool in the presence 
 of Henslowe's hostility. But Henslowe had been all along merely 
 waiting for the squire. He had served the owner of the Mure- 
 well estate for fourteen years, and if he did not know that 
 owner's peculiarities by this time, might he obtain certain 
 warm corners in the next life to which he was fond of con- 
 signing other people ! It was not easy to cheat the squire out 
 of money, but it was quite easy to play upon his ignorance of 
 the details of English land management ignorance guaranteed 
 by the learned habits of a lifetime on his complete lack of 
 popular sympathy, and on the contempt felt by the disciple of 
 Bismarck and Mommsen for all forms of altruistic sentiment. 
 The squire despised priests. He hated philanthropic cants. 
 Above all things he respected his own leisure, and was ab- 
 normally, irritably sensitive as to any possible inroads upon it. 
 
 All these things Henslowe knew, and all these things he 
 utilised. He saw the squire within forty -eight hours of his 
 arrival at Murewell. His fancy picture of Robert and his doings 
 was introduced with adroitness, and coloured with great skill, 
 and he left the squire walking up and down his library, chafing 
 alternately at the monstrous fate which had planted this senti- 
 mental agitator at his gates, and at the memory of his own 
 misplaced civilities towards the intruder. In the evening those 
 civilities were abundantly avenged, as we have seen. 
 
 Robert was much perplexed as to his next step. His heart 
 was very sore. The condition of Mile End those gaunt-eyed 
 women and wasted children, all the sordid details of their un- 
 just avoidable suffering weighed upon his nerves perpetually. 
 But he was conscious that this state of feeling was one of ten- 
 sion, perhaps of exaggeration, and though it was impossible 
 he should let the matter alone, he was anxious to do nothing 
 rashly. 
 
 However, two days after the dinner-party he met Henslowe 
 on the hill leading up to the rectory. Robert would have passed 
 the man with a stiffening of his tall figure and the slightest 
 possible salutation. But the agent, just returned from a round 
 wherein the bars of various local inns had played a conspicuous 
 part, was in a truculent mood and stopped to speak. He took 
 up the line of insolent condolence with the rector on the impos- 
 sibility of carrying his wishes with regard to Mile End into
 
 CHAP, xix THE SQUIRE 255 
 
 effect. They had been laid before the squire, of course, but 
 the squire had his own ideas and wasn't just easy to manage. 
 
 'Seen him yet, sir ?' Henslowe wound up jauntily, every line 
 of his flushed countenance, the full lips under the fair beard, 
 and the light prominent eyes, expressing a triumph he hardly 
 cared to conceal. 
 
 ' I have seen him, but I have not talked to him on this par- 
 ticular matter,' said the rector quietly, though the red mounted 
 in his cheek. ' You may, however, be very sure, Mr. Henslowe, 
 that everything I know about Mile End the squire shall know 
 before long.' 
 
 ' Oh, lor' bless me, sir ! ' cried Henslowe with a guffaw, ' it's 
 all one to me. And if the squire ain't satisfied with the way 
 his work's done now, why he can take you on as a second string, 
 you know. You'd show us all, I'll be bound, how to make the 
 money fly.' 
 
 Then Eobert's temper gave way, and he turned upon the 
 half -drunk en brute before him with a few home-truths delivered 
 with a rapier-like force which for the moment staggered Hens- 
 lowe, who turned from red to purple. The rector, with some of 
 those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which we had glimpses 
 in his talk with Langham, burning at his heart, felt the man 
 no better than a murderer, and as good as told him so. Then, 
 without giving him time to reply, Kobert strode on, leaving 
 Henslowe planted in the pathway. But he was hardly up the 
 hill before the agent, having recovered himself by dint of 
 copious expletives, was looking after him with a grim chuckle. 
 He knew his master, and he knew himself, and he thought 
 between them they would about manage to keep that young 
 spark in order. 
 
 Robert meanwhile went straight home into his study, and 
 there fell upon ink and paper. What was the good of protract- 
 ing the matter any longer? Something must and should be 
 done for these people, if not one way, then another. 
 
 So he wrote to the squire, showing the letter to Catherine 
 when it was done, lest there should be anything over-fierce in 
 it. It was the simple record of twelve months' experience told 
 with dignity and strong feeling. Henslowe was barely men- 
 tioned in it, and the chief burden of the letter was to implore 
 the squire to come and inspect certain portions of his property 
 with his own eyes. The rector would be at his service any day 
 or hour. 
 
 Husband and wife went anxiously through the document, 
 softening here, improving there, and then it was sent to the 
 Hall. Robert waited nervously through the day for an answer. 
 In the evening, while he and Catherine were in the footpath 
 after dinner, watching a chilly autumnal moonrise over the 
 stubbles of the cornfield, the answer came. 
 
 ' H'm,' said Robert dubiously as he opened it, holding it up 
 to the moonlight ; ' can't be said to be lengthy.'
 
 256 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 He and Catherine hurried into the house. Robert read the 
 letter, and handed it to her without a word. 
 
 After some curt references to one or two miscellaneous points 
 raised in the latter part of the rector's letter, the squire wound 
 up as follows : 
 
 ' As for the bulk of your communication, I am at a loss to 
 understand the vehemence of your remarks on the subject of 
 my Mile End property. My agent informed me shortly after 
 my return home that you had been concerning yourself greatly, 
 and, as he conceived, unnecessarily about the matter. Allow 
 me to assure you that I have full confidence in Mr. Henslowe, 
 who has been in the district for as many years as you have 
 spent months in it, and whose authority on points connected 
 with the business management of my estate naturally carries 
 more weight with me, if you will permit me to say so, than 
 your own. I am, sir, your obedient servant, 
 
 ' ROGER WENDOVER.' 
 
 Catherine returned the letter to her husband with a look of 
 dismay. He was standing with his back to the chimney-piece, 
 his hands thrust far into his pockets, his upper lip quivering. 
 In his happy expansive life this was the sharpest personal re- 
 buff that had ever happened to him. He could not but smart 
 under it. 
 
 ' Not a word,' he said, tossing his hair back impetuously, as 
 Catherine stood opposite watching him ' not one single word 
 about the miserable people themselves ! What kind of stuff can 
 the man be made off?' 
 
 ' Does he believe you ? ' asked Catherine, bewildered. 
 
 ' If not, one must try and make him,' he said energetically, 
 after a moment's pause. ' To-morrow, Catherine, I go down to 
 the Hall and see him.' 
 
 She quietly acquiesced, and the following afternoon, first 
 thing after luncheon, she watched him go, her tender inspiring 
 look dwelling with him as he crossed the park, which was lying 
 delicately wrapped in one of the whitest of autumnal mists, the 
 sun just playing through it with pale invading shafts. 
 
 The butler looked at him with some doubtfulness. It was 
 never safe to admit visitors for the squire without orders. 
 But he and Robert had special relations. As the possessor of a 
 bass voice worthy of his girth, Vincent, under Robert's rule, 
 had become the pillar of the choir, and it was not easy for him 
 to refuse the rector. 
 
 So Robert was led in, through the hall, and down the long 
 passage to the curtained door, which he knew so well. 
 
 ' Mr. Elsmere, sir ! ' 
 
 There was a sudden hasty movement. Robert passed a mag- 
 nificent lacquered screen newly placed round the door, and 
 found himself in the squire's presence.
 
 OHAP. xix THE SQUIRE 257 
 
 The squire had half risen from his seat in a capacious chair, 
 with a litter of books round it, and confronted his visitor with 
 a look of surprised annoyance. The figure of the rector, tall, 
 thin, and youthful, stood out against the delicate browns and 
 whites of the book-lined walls. The great room, so impressively 
 bare when Robert and Langham had last seen it, was now full 
 of the signs of a busy man's constant habitation. An odour of 
 smoke pervaded it ; the table in the window was piled with 
 books just unpacked, and the half -emptied case from which 
 they had been taken lay on the ground beside the squire's 
 chair. 
 
 'I persuaded Vincent to admit me, Mr. Wendover,' said 
 Robert, advancing hat in hand, while the squire hastily put 
 down the German professor's pipe he had just been enjoying, 
 and coldly accepted his proffered greeting. ' I should have pre- 
 ferred not to disturb you without an appointment, but after 
 your letter it seemed to me some prompt personal explanation 
 was necessary.' 
 
 The squire stiffly motioned towards a chair, which Robert 
 took, and then slipped back into his own, his wrinkled eyes 
 fixed on the intruder. 
 
 Robert, conscious of almost intolerable embarrassment, but 
 maintaining in spite of it an excellent degree of self-control, 
 plunged at once into business. He took the letter he had just 
 received from the squire as a text, made a good-humoured 
 defence of his own proceedings, described his attempt to move 
 Henslowe, and the reluctance of his appeal from the man to 
 the master. The few things he allowed himself to say about 
 Henslowe were in perfect temper, though by no means without 
 an edge. 
 
 Then, having disposed of the more personal aspects of the 
 matter, he paused, and looked hesitatingly at the face opposite 
 him, more like a bronzed mask at this moment than a human 
 countenance. The squire, however, gave him no help. He had 
 received his remarks so far in perfect silence, and seeing that 
 there were more to come, he waited for them with the same 
 rigidity of look and attitude. 
 
 So, after a moment or two, Robert went, on to describe in 
 detail some of those individual cases of hardship and disease at 
 Mile End, during the preceding year, which could be most 
 clearly laid to the sanitary condition of the place. Filth, damp, 
 leaking roofs, foul floors, poisoned water he traced to each 
 some ghastly human ill, telling his stories with a nervous 
 brevity, a suppressed fire, which would have burnt them into 
 the sense of almost any other listener. Not one of these woes 
 but he and Catherine had tended with sickening pity and labour 
 of body and mind. That side of it he kept rigidly out of sight. 
 But all that he could hurl against the squire's feeling, as it 
 were, he gathered up, strangely conscious through it all of his 
 own young persistent yearning to right himself with this man, 
 
 3
 
 258 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK m 
 
 whose mental history, as it lay chronicled in these rooms, had 
 been to him, at a time of intellectual hunger, so stimulating, so 
 enriching. 
 
 But passion and reticence and hidden sympathy were alike 
 lost upon the squire. Before he paused Mr. Wendover had 
 already risen restlessly from his chair, and from the rug was 
 glowering down on his unwelcome visitor. 
 
 Good heavens ! had he come home to be lectui^ed in his own 
 library by this fanatical slip of a parson ? As for his stories, 
 the squire barely took the trouble to listen to them. 
 
 Every popularity-hunting fool, with a passion for putting 
 his hand into other people's pockets, can tell pathetic stories ; 
 but it was intolerable that his scholar s privacy should be at the 
 mercy of one of the tribe. 
 
 ' Mr. Elsmere,' he broke out at last with contemptuous em- 
 phasis, ' I imagine it would have been better infinitely better 
 to have spared both yourself and me the disagreeables of this 
 interview. However, I am not sorry we should understand 
 each other. I have lived a life which is at least double the 
 length of yours in very tolerable peace and comfort. The world 
 lias been good enough for me, and I for it, so far. I have been 
 master in my own estate, and intend to remain so. As for the 
 new-fangled ideas of a landowner's duty, with which your mind 
 seems to be full' the scornful irritation of the tone was unmis- 
 takable 'I have never dabbled in them, nor do I intend to 
 begin now. I am like the rest of my kind ; I have no money 
 to chuck away in building schemes, in order that the rector of 
 the parish may pose as the apostle of the agricultural labourer. 
 That, however, is neither here nor there. What is to the pur- 
 pose is, that my business affairs are in the hands of a business 
 man, deliberately chosen and approved by me, and that I have 
 nothing to do with them. Nothing at all ! ' he repeated with 
 emphasis. ' It may seem to you very shocking. You may re- 
 gard it as the object in life of the English landowner to inspect 
 the pigstyes and amend the habits of the English labourer. I 
 don't quarrel with the conception, I only ask you not to expect 
 me to live up to it. I am a student first and foremost, and 
 desire to be left to my books. Mr. Henslowe is there on pur- 
 pose to protect my literary freedom. What he thinks desirable 
 is good enough for me, as I have already informed you. I am 
 sorry for it if his methods do not commend themselves to you. 
 But I have yet to learn that the rector of the parish has an ex- 
 officio right to interfere between a landlord and his tenants.' 
 
 Robert kept his temper with some difficulty. After a pause 
 he said, feeling desperately, however, that the suggestion was 
 not likely to improve matters, 
 
 ' If I were to take all the trouble and all the expense off your 
 hands, Mr. Wendover, would it be impossible for you to authorise 
 me to make one or two alterations most urgently necessary for 
 the improvement of the Mile End cottages ?'
 
 CHAP, xix THE SQUIRE 259 
 
 The squire burst into an angry laugh. 
 
 ' I have never yet been in the habit, Mr. Elsmere, of doing 
 my repairs by public subscription. You ask a little too much 
 from an old man's powers of adaptation.' 
 
 Robert rose from his seat, his hand trembling as it rested on 
 his walking-stick. 
 
 'Mr. Wendover,' he said, speaking at last with a flash of 
 answering scorn in his young vibrating voice, 'what I think 
 you cannot understand is that at any moment a human creature 
 may sicken and die, poisoned by the state of your property, for 
 which you and nobody else are ultimately responsible.' 
 
 The squire shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' So you say, Mr. Elsmere. If true, every person in such a 
 condition has a remedy in his own hands. 1 force no one to 
 remain on my property.' 
 
 ' The people who live there,' exclaimed Robert, ' have neither 
 home nor subsistence if they are driven out. Murewell is full 
 times bad most of the people old.' 
 
 'And eviction "a sentence of death," I suppose,' interrupted 
 the squire, studying him with sarcastic eyes. ' Well, I have no 
 belief in a Gladstonian Ireland, still less in a Radical England. 
 Supply and demand, cause and effect, are enough for me. The 
 Mile End cottages are out of repair, Mr. Elsmere, so Mr. Hens- 
 lowe tells me, because the site is unsuitable, the type of cottage 
 out of date. People live in them at their peril ; I don't pull 
 them down, or rather' correcting himself with exasperating 
 consistency 'Mr. Henslowe doesn't pull them down, because, 
 like other men, I suppose, he dislikes an outcry. But if the 
 population stays, it stays at its own risk. Now have I made 
 myself plain ? ' 
 
 The two men eyed one another. 
 
 'Perfectly plain,' said Robert quietly. 'Allow me to remind 
 you, Mr. Wendover, that there are other matters than eviction 
 capable of provoking an outcry.' 
 
 'As you please,' said the other indifferently. 'I have no 
 doubt I shall find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, 
 I daresay I shall manage to put up with it. Society is made 
 up of fanatics and the creatures they hunt. If I am to be 
 hunted, I shall be in good company.' 
 
 Robert stood hat in hand, tormented with a dozen cross- 
 currents of feeling. He was forcibly struck with the blind and 
 comparatively motiveless pugnacity of the squire's conduct. 
 There was an extravagance in it which for the first time recalled 
 to him old Meyrick's lucubrations. 
 
 ' I have done no good, I see, Mr. Wendover,' he said at last, 
 slowly. ' I wish I could have induced you to do an act of justice 
 and mercy. I wish I could have made you think more kindly 
 of myself. I have failed in both. It is useless to keep you any 
 longer. Good-morning.' 
 
 He bowed. The squire also bent forward. At that moment
 
 260 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 Robert caught sight beside his shoulder of an antique, standing 
 on the mantelpiece, which was a new addition to the room. It 
 was a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it struck 
 on Elsmere's ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. It flashed 
 across him that here was an apt symbol of that absorbing and 
 overgrown life of the intellect which blights the heart and chills 
 the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man before him 
 was not the first victim he had known. 
 
 Possessed with the fancy the young man made his way into 
 the hall. Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of passion- 
 ate regret : ' Shall I ever see this again 1 ' he asked himself. 
 During the past twelve months his pleasure in the great house 
 had been much more than sensuous. Within those walls his 
 mind had grown, had reached to a fuller stature than before, 
 and a man loves, or should love, all that is associated with the 
 maturing of his best self. 
 
 He closed the ponderous doors behind him sadly. The mag- 
 nificent pile, grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist 
 which enwrapped it, seemed to look after him as he walked 
 away, mutely wondering that he should have allowed anything 
 so trivial as a peasant's grievance to come between him and its 
 perfections. 
 
 In the wooded lane outside the rectory gate he overtook 
 Catherine. He gave her his report, and they walked on together 
 arm-in-arm, a very depressed pair. 
 
 ' What shall you do next ? ' she asked him. 
 
 ' Make out the law of the matter,' he said briefly. 
 
 ' If you get over the inspector,' said Catherine anxiously, ' I 
 am tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people.' 
 
 He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law 
 existed for such cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the 
 inspector's attention. 
 
 Catherine did not see what good could be done thereby, and 
 feared harm. But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get 
 through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She 
 saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, 
 and would not for the world have harassed him by over advice. 
 
 So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter 
 from him with a sigh. 
 
 ' Let it be a while,' he said, with a shake of his long frame. ' I 
 shall get morbid over it if I don't mind. I am a selfish wretch 
 too. I know you have worries of your own, wifie.' 
 
 And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a 
 boyish tenderness. 
 
 'Yes,' said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. 'Robert,' 
 she burst out again, ' I am certain that man made love of a kind 
 to Rose. He will never think of it again, but since the night 
 before last she, to my mind, is simply a changed creature.' 
 
 ' / don't see it,' said Robert doubtfully.
 
 CHAP, xix THE SQUIRE 261 
 
 Catherine looked at him with a little angel scorn in her gray 
 eyes. That men should make their seeing in such matters the 
 measure of the visible ! 
 
 ' You have been studying the squire, sir I have been study- 
 ing Rose.' 
 
 Then she poured out her heart to him, describing the little 
 signs of change and suffering her anxious sense had noted, in 
 spite of Rose's proud effort to keep all the world, but especially 
 Catherine, at arm's length. And at the end her feeling swept 
 her into a denunciation of Langham, which was to Robert like 
 a breath from the past, from those stern hills wherein he met 
 her first. The happiness of their married life had so softened 
 or masked all her ruggedness of character, that there was a 
 certain joy in seeing those strong forces in her which had struck 
 him first reappear. 
 
 ' Of course I feel myself to blame,' he said when she stopped. 
 ' But how could one foresee, with such an inveterate hermit and 
 recluse ? And I owed him I owe him so much.' 
 
 'I know,' said Catherine, but frowning still. It probably 
 seemed to her that that old debt had been more than effaced. 
 
 ' You will have to send her to Berlin,' said Elsmere after a 
 pause. ' You must play off her music against this unlucky 
 feeling. If it exists it is your only chance.' 
 
 ' Yes, she must go to Berlin,' said Catherine slowly. 
 
 Then presently she looked up, a flash of exquisite feeling 
 breaking up the delicate resolution of the face. 
 
 ' I am not sad about that, Robert. Oh, how you have widened 
 my world for me ! ' 
 
 Suddenly that hour in Marrisdale came back to her. They 
 were in the woodpath. She crept inside her husband's arm and 
 put up her face to him, swept away by an overmastering impulse 
 of self-humiliating love. 
 
 The next day Robert walked over to the little market town 
 of Churton, saw the discreet and long-established solicitor of 
 the place, and got from him a complete account of the present 
 state of the rural sanitary law. The first step clearly was to 
 move the sanitary inspector ; if that failed for any reason, then 
 any bond fide inhabitant had an appeal to the local sanitary 
 authority, viz. the board of guardians. Robert walked home 
 pondering his information, and totally ignorant that Henslowe, 
 who was always at Churton on market-days, had been in the 
 market-place at the moment when the rector's tall figure had 
 disappeared within Mr. Dunstan's office-door. That door was 
 unpleasantly known to the agent in connection with some 
 energetic measures for raising money he had been lately under 
 the necessity of employing, and it had a way of attracting his 
 eyes by means of the fascination that often attaches to disagree- 
 able objects. 
 
 In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing- 
 room. Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap
 
 262 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 and her eyes were staring intently into a world whereof they 
 only had the key. Suddenly there was a ring at the bell. The 
 servant came, and there were several voices and a sound of 
 much shoe-scraping. Then the swing-door leading to the study 
 opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped 
 with an exclamation. 
 
 His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old 
 Milsom, more sallow and palsied than ever. As he stood bent 
 almost double, his old knotted hand resting for support on the 
 table beside him, everything in the little hall seemed to shake 
 with him. The other was Sharland, the handsome father of the 
 twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with every 
 imaginable delicacy since Robert's last visit to the hamlet. 
 Even his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature 
 decay. The rolling gipsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs 
 dragged a little. 
 
 They had come to implore the rector to let Mile End alone. 
 Henslowe had been over there in the afternoon, and had given 
 them all very plainly to understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled 
 any more they would be all turned out at a week's notice to shift 
 as they could. ' And if you don't find Thurston Common nice 
 lying this weather, with the winter coming on, you'll know who 
 to thank for it,' the agent had flung behind him as he rode off. 
 
 Robert turned white. Rose, watching the little scene with 
 listless eyes, saw him towering over the group like an embodi- 
 ment of wrath and pity. 
 
 ' If they turn us out, sir,' said old Milsom, wistfully looking 
 up at Elsmere with blear eyes, ' there'll be nothing left but the 
 House for us old 'uns. Why, lor' bless you, sir, it's not so bad 
 but we can make shift.' 
 
 'You, Milsom !' cried Robert; 'and you've just all but lost 
 your grandchild ! And you know your wife 11 never be the 
 same woman since that bout of fever in the spring. And 
 
 His quick eyes ran over the old man's broken frame with a 
 world of indignant meaning in them. 
 
 ' Ay, ay, sir,' said Milsom, unmoved. ' But if it isn't fevers, 
 it's summat else. I can make a shilling or two where I be, 
 speshally in the first part of the year, in the basket work, and 
 my wife she goes charring up at Mr. Carter's farm, and Mr. 
 Dodson, him at the farther farm, he do give us a bit sometimes. 
 Ef you git us turned away it will be a bad day's work for all on 
 us, sir, you may take my word on it.' 
 
 'And my wife so ill, Mr. Elsmere,' said Sharland, 'and all 
 those childer ! I can't walk three miles farther to my work, 
 Mr. Elsmere, I can't nohow. I haven't got the legs for it. Let 
 un be, sir. We'll rub along.' 
 
 Robert tried to argue the matter. 
 
 If they would but stand by him he would fight the matter 
 through, and they should not suffer, if he had to get up a public 
 subscription, or support them out of his own pocket all the
 
 ix THE SQUIRE 263 
 
 winter. A bold front, and Mr. Henslowe must give way. The 
 law was on their side, and every labourer in Surrey would be 
 the better off for their refusal to be housed like pigs and 
 poisoned like vermin. 
 
 In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious endur- 
 ance in the poor against which the keenest reformer constantly 
 throws himself in vain. Elsmere was beaten. The two men 
 got his word, and shuffled off back to their pestilential hovels, a 
 pathetic content beaming on each face. 
 
 Catherine and Robert went back into the study. Rose heard 
 her brother-in-law's passionate sigh as the door swung behind 
 them. 
 
 ' Defeated ! ' she said to herself with a curious accent. ' Well, 
 everybody must have his turn. Robert has been too successful 
 in his life, I tliink. You wretch ! ' she added, after a minute, 
 laying her bright head down on the book before her. 
 
 Next morning his wife found Elsmere after breakfast busily 
 packing a case of books in the study. They were books from 
 the Hall library, which so far had been for months the insepar- 
 able companions of his historical work. 
 
 Catherine stood and watched him sadly. 
 
 'Must you, Robert?' 
 
 'I won't be beholden to that man for anything an hour 
 longer than I can help,' he answered her. 
 
 When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where 
 she stood in the open window. 
 
 ' Things won't be as easy for us in the future, darling,' he said 
 to her. ' A rector with both squire and agent against him is 
 rather heavily handicapped. We must make up our minds to 
 that.' 
 
 ' I have no great fear,' she said, looking at him proudly. 
 
 'Oh, well nor I perhaps,' he admitted, after a moment. 
 ' We can hold pur own. But I wish oh, I wish ' and he laid 
 his hand on his wife's shoulder 'I could have made friends 
 with the squire.' 
 
 Catherine looked less responsive. 
 
 ' As squire, Robert, or as Mr. Wendover ? ' 
 
 ' As both, of course, but specially as Mr. Wendover.' 
 
 ' We can do without his friendship,' she said with energy. 
 
 Robert gave a great stretch, as though to work off his regrets. 
 
 'All, but,' he said, half to himself, as his arms dropped, 'if 
 you are just filled with the hunger to know, the people who 
 know as much as the squire become very interesting to you ! ' 
 
 Catherine did not answer. But probably her heart went out 
 once more in protest against a knowledge that was to her but a 
 form of revolt against the awful powers of man's destiny. 
 
 ' However, here go his books,' said Robert. 
 
 Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appear- 
 ance Mrs. Leyburn all in a flutter concerning the event over
 
 264 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 which, in her own opinion, she had come to preside. In her 
 gentle fluid mind all impressions were short -lived. She had 
 Forgotten how she had brought up her own babies, but Mrs. 
 Thornburgh, who had never had any, had filled her full of 
 nursery lore. She sat retailing a host of second-hand hints and 
 instructions to Catherine, who would every now and then lay 
 her hand smiling on her mother's knee, well pleased to see the 
 flush of pleasure on the pretty old face, and ready, in her patient 
 filial way, to let herself be experimented on to the utmost, if it 
 did but make the poor foolish thing happy. 
 
 Then came a night when every soul in the quiet rectory, even 
 hot, smarting Rose, was possessed by one thought through many 
 terrible hours, and one only the thought of Catherine's safety. 
 It was strange and unexpected, but Catherine, the most normal 
 and healthy of women, had a hard struggle for her own life and 
 her child'Sj and it was not till the gray autumn morning, after a 
 day and night which left a permanent mark on Robert, that he 
 was summoned at last, and with the sense of one emerging from 
 black gulfs of terror, received from his wife's languid hand the 
 tiny fingers of his firstborn. 
 
 The days that followed were full of emotion for these two 
 people, who were perhaps always over-serious, over-sensitive. 
 They had no idea of minimising the great common experiences 
 of life. Both of them were really simple, brought up in old- 
 fashioned simple ways, easily touched, responsive to all that 
 high spiritual education which flows from the familiar incidents 
 of the human story, approached poetically and passionately. 
 As the young husband sat in the quiet of his wife's room, the 
 occasional restless movements of the small brown head against 
 her breast causing the only sound perceptible in the country 
 silence, he felt all the deep familiar currents of human feeling 
 sweeping through him love, reverence, thanksgiving and all 
 the walls of the soul, as it were, expanding and enlarging as 
 they passed. 
 
 Responsive creature that he was, the experience of these 
 days was hardly happiness. It went too deep ; it brought him 
 too poignantly near to all that is most real and therefore most 
 tragic in life. 
 
 Catherine's recovery also was slower than might have been 
 expected, considering her constitutional soundness, and for the 
 first week, after that faint moment of joy when her child was 
 laid upon her arm, and she saw her husband's quivering face 
 above her, there was a kind of depression hovering over her. 
 Robert felt it, and felt too that all his devotion could not soothe 
 it away. At last she said to him one evening, in the encroach- 
 ing September twilight, speaking with a sudden hurrying 
 vehemence, wholly unlike herself, as though a barrier of reserve 
 had given way, 
 
 ' Robert, I cannot put it out of my head. I cannot forget it, 
 the pain of the world !'
 
 ix THE SQUIRE 265 
 
 He shut the book lie was reading, her hand in his, and bent 
 over her with questioning eyes. 
 
 ' It seems,' she went on, with that difficulty which a strong 
 nature always feels in self -revelation, ' to take the joy even out 
 of our love and the child. I feel ashamed almost that mere 
 physical pain should have laid such hold on me and yet I can't 
 get away from it. It's not for myself,' and she smiled faintly 
 at him. ' Comparatively I had so little to bear ! But I know 
 now for the first time what physical pain may mean and I 
 never knew before ! I lie thinking, Robert, about all creatures 
 in pain workmen crushed by machinery, or soldiers or poor 
 things in hospitals above all of women ! Oh, when I get well, 
 how I will take care of the women here ! What women must 
 sutler even here in out-of-the-way cottages no doctor, no kind 
 nursing, all blind agony and struggle ! And women in London 
 in dens like those Mr. Newcome got into, degraded, forsaken, 
 ill-treated, the thought of the child only an extra horror and 
 burden ! And the pain all the time so merciless, so cruel no 
 escape ! Oh, to give all one is, or ever can be, to comforting ! 
 And yet the great sea of it one can never touch ! It is a night- 
 mare I am weak still, I suppose ; I don't know myself ; but I 
 can see nothing but jarred, tortured creatures everywhere. All 
 my own joys and comforts seem to lift me selfishly above the 
 common lot.' 
 
 She stopped, her large gray-blue eyes dim with tears, trying 
 once more for that habitual self-restraint which physical weak- 
 ness had shaken. 
 
 ' You are weak,' he said, caressing her, ' and that destroys for 
 a time the normal balance of things. It is true, darling, but we 
 are not meant to see it always so clearly. God knows we could 
 not bear it if we did.' 
 
 ' And to think,' she said, shuddering a little, ' that there are 
 men and women who in the face of it can still refuse Christ and 
 the Cross, can still say this life is all ! How can they live how 
 dare they live ? ' 
 
 Then he saw that not only man's pain, but man's defiance, 
 had been haunting her, and he guessed what persons and 
 memories had been flitting through her mind. But he dared 
 not talk lest she should exhaust herself. Presently, seeing a 
 volume of Augustine's Confessions, her favourite book, lying 
 beside her, he took it up, turning over the pages, and weaving 
 passages together as they caught his eye. 
 
 ' Speak to me, for Thy compassion's sake, Lord my God, and 
 tell me what art Thou to me I Say unto my soul, " / am thy 
 salvation ! " Speak it that I may hear. Behold the ears of my 
 heart, Lord; open them and say unto my soul, "I am thy 
 salvation/" I will follow after this voice of Thine, I will lay hold 
 on Tfiee. The temple of my soul, wherein T/iou shouldest enter, is 
 narrow, do Thou enlarge it. It falleth into ruins do Tliou re- 
 build it I . . . Woe to that bold soul which hopetli, if it du bui
 
 266 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 let Thee go, to find _ something better t/tan Thee ! It turneth hither 
 and thither, on this side and on that, and all things are hard and 
 bitter unto it. For Thou only art rest / . . . Whithersoever the 
 soul of man turneth it findeth sorrow, except only in Thee. Fix 
 there, then, thy resting-place, my soul I Lay up in Him whatever 
 thou hast received from Him. Commend to the keeping of the 
 Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose 
 nothing. And thy dead things shall revive and thy weak things 
 shall be made whole ! ' 
 
 She listened, appropriating and clinging to every word, till 
 the nervous clasp of the long delicate fingers relaxed, her head 
 dropped a little, gently, against the head of the child, and tired 
 with much feeling she slept. 
 
 Robert slipped away and strolled out into the garden in the 
 fast -gathering darkness. His mind was full of that intense 
 spiritual life of Catherine's which in its wonderful self-con- 
 tainedness and strength was always a marvel, sometimes a 
 reproach, to him. Beside her, he seemed to himself a light 
 creature, drawn hither and thither by this interest and by that, 
 tangled in the fleeting shows of things the toy and plaything 
 of circumstance. He thought ruefully and humbly, as he 
 wandered on through the dusk, of his own lack of inward- 
 ness : ' Everything divides me from Thee ! ' he could have 
 cried in St. Augustine's manner. 'Books, and friends, and 
 work all seem to hide Thee from me. Why am I so passion- 
 ate for this and that, for all these sections and fragments of 
 Thee ? Oh, for the One, the All ! Fix there thy resting-place, 
 my soul ! ' 
 
 And presently, after this cry of self-reproach, he turned to 
 muse on that intuition of the world's pain which had been 
 troubling Catherine, shrinking from it even more than she had 
 shrunk from it, in proportion as his nature was more imagina- 
 tive than hers. And Christ the only clue, the only remedy no 
 other anywhere in this vast universe, where all men are under 
 sentence of death, where the whole creation groaneth and 
 travaileth in pain together until now ! 
 
 And yet what countless generations of men had borne their 
 pain, knowing nothing of the one Healer. He thought of 
 Buddhist patience and Buddhist charity ; of the long centuries 
 during which Chaldean or Persian or Egyptian lived, suffered, 
 and died, trusting the gods they knew. And how many other 
 generations, nominally children of the Great Hope, had used it 
 as the mere instrument of passion or of hate, cursing in the 
 name of love, destroying in the name of pity ! For how much 
 of the world's pain was not Christianity itself responsible ? His 
 thoughts recurred with a kind of anguished perplexity to some 
 of the problems stirred in him of late by his historical reading. 
 The strifes and feuds and violences of the early Church re- 
 turned to weigh upon him the hair-splitting superstition, the 
 selfish passion for power. He recalled Gibbon's lamentation
 
 CHAP, xix THE SQUIRE 267 
 
 over the age of the Antonines, and Mommsen's grave doubt 
 whether, taken as a whole, the area once covered by the Roman 
 Empire can be said to be substantially happier now than in the 
 days of Severus. 
 
 corruptio optimi / That men should have been so little 
 affected by that shining ideal of the New Jerusalem, ' descended 
 out of Heaven from God,' into their very midst that the print 
 of the 'blessed feet' along the world's highway should have 
 been so often buried in the sands of cruelty and fraud ! 
 
 The September wind blew about him as he strolled through 
 the darkening column, set thick with great bushes of sombre 
 juniper among the yellowing fern, which stretched away on the 
 left-hand side of the road leading to the Hall. He stood and 
 watched the masses of restless discordant cloud which the sun- 
 set had left behind it, thinking the while of Mr. Grey, of his 
 assertions and his denials. Certain phrases of his which Robert 
 had heard drop from him on one or two rare occasions during 
 the later stages of his Oxford life ran through his head. 
 
 ' The fairy-tale of Christianity' ' The origins q/ Christian 
 Mythology.' He could recall, as the words rose in his memory, 
 the simplicity of the rugged face, and the melancholy mingled 
 with fire which had always marked the great tutors sayings 
 about religion. 
 
 ' Fairy Tale / ' Could any reasonable man watch a life like 
 Catherine's and believe that nothing but a delusion lay at the 
 heart of it ? And as he asked the question, he seemed to hear 
 Mr. Grey's answer : 'All religions are true, and all are false. 
 In them all, more or less visibly, man grasps at the one thing 
 needful self forsaken, God laid hold of. The spirit in them all 
 is the same, answers eternally to reality ; it is but the letter, 
 the fashion, the imagery, that are relative and changing.' 
 
 He turned and walked homeward, struggling, with a host of 
 tempestuous ideas as swift and varying as the autumn clouds 
 hurrying overhead. And then, through a break in a line of 
 trees, he caught sight of the tower and chancel window of the 
 little church. In an instant he had a vision of early summer 
 mornings dewy, perfumed, silent, save for the birds, and all 
 the soft stir of rural birth and growth, of a chancel fragrant 
 with many flowers, of a distant church with scattered figures, 
 of the kneeling form of his wife close beside him, himself bend- 
 ing over her, the sacrament of the Lord's death in his hand. 
 The emotion, the intensity, the absolute self-surrender of in- 
 numerable such moments in the past moments of a common 
 faith, a common self-abasement came flooding back upon him. 
 With a movement of joy and penitence, he threw himself at the 
 feet of Catherine's Master and his own : ' Fix there thy resting- 
 place, my soul 1 '
 
 268 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 CATHERINE'S later convalescence dwelt in her mind in after 
 years as a time of peculiar softness and peace. Her baby -girl 
 throve ; Robert had driven the squire and Henslowe out of his 
 mind, and was all eagerness as to certain negotiations with a 
 famous naturalist for a lecture at the village club. At Mile End, 
 as though to put the rector in the wrong, serious illness had 
 for the time disappeared ; and Mrs. Leyburn's mild chatter, as 
 she gently poked about the house and garden, went out in 
 Catherines pony - carriage, inspected Catherine's stores, and 
 hovered over Catherine's babe, had a constantly cheering effect 
 on the still languid mother. Like all theorists, especially those 
 at second-hand, Mrs. Leyburn's maxims had been very much 
 routed by the event. The babe had ailments she did not under- 
 stand, or it developed likes and dislikes she had forgotten 
 existed in babies, and Mrs. Leyburn was nonplussed. She would 
 sit with it on her lap, anxiously studying its peculiarities. She 
 was sure it squinted, that its back was weaker than other babies, 
 that it cried more than hers had ever done. She loved to be 
 plaintive ; it would have seemed to her unladylike to be too 
 cheerful, even over a first grandchild. 
 
 Agnes meanwhile made herself practically useful, as was 
 her way, and she did almost more than anybody to beguile 
 Catherine's recovery by her hours of Long Whindale chat. She 
 had no passionate feeling about the place and the people as 
 Catherine had, but she was easily content, and she had a good 
 wholesome feminine curiosity as to the courtings and weddings 
 and buryings of the human beings about her. So she would 
 sit and chat, working the while with the quickest, neatest of 
 fingers, till Catherine knew as much about Jenny Tyson's 
 Whinborough lover, and Farmer Tredall's troubles with his son, 
 and the way in which that odious woman Molly Redgold bullied 
 her little consumptive husband, as Agnes knew, which was say- 
 ing a good deal. 
 
 About themselves Agnes was frankness itself. 
 
 ' Since you went,' she would say with a shrug, ' I keep the 
 coach steady, perhaps, but Rose drives, and we shall have to go 
 where she takes us. By the way, Cathie, what have you been 
 doing to her here ? She is not a bit like herself. I don't 
 generally mind being snubbed. It amuses her and doesn't hurt 
 me : and, of course, I know I am meant to be her foil. But, 
 really, sometimes she is too bad even for me.' 
 
 Catherine sighed, but held her peace. Like all strong per- 
 sons, she kept things very much to herself. It only made vexa- 
 tions more real to talk about them. But she and Agnes discussed 
 the winter and Berlin. 
 
 ' You had better let her go,' said Agnes significantly ; ' she 
 will go anyhow '
 
 CITAP. xx THE SQUIRE 269 
 
 A few days afterwards Catherine, opening the drawing-room 
 door unexpectedly, came upon Rose sitting idly at the piano, 
 her hands resting on the keys, and her great gray eyes straining 
 out of her white face with an expression which sent the sister's 
 heart into her shoes. 
 
 ' How you steal about, Catherine ! ' cried the player, getting 
 up and shutting the piano. ' I declare you are just like Millais's 
 Gray Lady in that ghostly gown.' 
 
 Catherine came swiftly across the floor. She had just left 
 her child, and the sweet dignity of motherhood was in her step, 
 her look. She came and threw her arms round the girl. 
 
 ' Rose, dear, I have settled it all with mamma. The money 
 can be managed, and you shall go to Berlin for the winter when 
 you like.' 
 
 She drew herself back a little, still with her arms round Rose's 
 waist, and looked at her smiling, to see how she took it. 
 
 Rose had a strange movement of irritation. She drew herself 
 out of Catherine's grasp. 
 
 ' I don't know that I had settled on Berlin,' she said coldly. 
 ' Very possibly Leipsic would be better.' 
 
 Catherine's face fell. 
 
 'Whichever you like, dear. I have been thinking about it 
 ever since that day you spoke of it -you remember and now 
 I have talked it over with mamma. If she can't manage all the 
 expense we will help. Oh. Rose,' and she came nearer again, 
 timidly, her eyes melting, ' I know we haven't understood each 
 other. I have been ignorant, I think, and narrow. But I meant 
 it for the best, dear I did ' 
 
 Her voice failed her, but in her look there seemed to be 
 written the history of all the prayers and yearnings of her 
 youth over the pretty wayward child who had been her joy and 
 torment. Rose could not but meet that look its nobleness, its 
 humble surrender. 
 
 Suddenly two large tears rolled down her cheeks. She dashed 
 them away impatiently. 
 
 ' I am not a bit well,' she said, as though in irritable excuse 
 both to herself and Catherine. ' I believe I have had a headache 
 for a fortnight.' 
 
 And then she put her arms down on a table near and hid her 
 face upon them. She was one bundle of jarring nerves sore, 
 poor passionate child, that she was betraying herself ; sorer still 
 that, as she told herself, Catherine was sending her to Berlin as 
 a consolation. When girls have love -troubles the first thing 
 their elders do is to look for a diversion. She felt sick and 
 humiliated. Catherine had been talking her over with the 
 family, she supposed. 
 
 Meanwhile Catherine stood by her tenderly, stroking her 
 hair and saying soothing things. 
 
 ' I am sure you will be happy at Berlin, Rose. And you 
 mustn't loave me out of your lite, dear, though I am so stupid
 
 270 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 and unmusical. You must write to me about all you do. We 
 must begin a new time. Oh, I feel so guilty sometimes/ she 
 went on, falling into a low intensity of voice that startled Rose, 
 and made her look hurriedly up. 'I fought against your music, 
 I suppose, because I thought it was devouring you leaving no 
 room for for religion for God. I was jealous of it for Christ's 
 sake. And all the time I was blundering ! Oh, Rose,' and she sank 
 on her knees beside the chair, resting her head against the girl's 
 shoulder, ' papa charged me to make you love God, and I tor- 
 ture myself with thinking that, instead, it has been my doing, 
 my foolish clumsy doing, that you have come to think religion 
 dull and hard. Oh, my darling, if I could make amends if I 
 could get you not to love your art less but to love it in God ! 
 Christ is the first reality ; all things else are real and lovely in 
 Him. Oh, I have been frightening you away from Him ! I 
 ought to have drawn you near. I have been so so silent, so 
 shut up, I have never tried to make you feel what it was kept 
 me at His feet ! Oh, Rose, darling, you think the world real, 
 and pleasure and enjoyment real. But if I could have made 
 you see and know the things I have seen up in the mountains 
 among the poor, the dying you would h&vefelt Him saving, 
 redeeming, interceding, as I did. Oh, then you must, you would 
 have known that Christ only is real, that our joys can only truly 
 exist in Him. I should have been more open more faithful 
 more humble.' 
 
 She paused with a long quivering sigh. Rose suddenly lifted 
 herself, and they fell into each other's arms. 
 
 Rose, shaken and excited, thought, of course, of that night at 
 Burwood, when she had won leave to go to Manchester. This 
 scene was the sequel to that the next stage in one and the 
 same process. Her feeling was much the same as that of the 
 naturalist who comes close to any of the hidden operations of 
 life. She had come near to Catherine's spirit in the growing. 
 Beside that sweet expansion, how poor and feverish and earth- 
 stained the poor child felt herself ! 
 
 But there were many currents in Rose many things striving 
 for the mastery. She kissed Catherine once or twice, then she 
 drew herself back suddenly, looking into the other's face. A 
 great wave of feeling rushed up and broke. 
 
 ' Catherine, could you ever have married a man that did not 
 believe in Christ ? ' 
 
 She flung the question out a kind of morbid curiosity, a 
 wild wish to find an outlet of some sort for things pent up in 
 her, driving her on. 
 
 Catherine started. But she met Rose's half-frowning eyes 
 steadily. 
 
 ' Never, Rose ! To me it would not be marriage.' 
 
 The child's face lost its softness. She drew one hand away. 
 
 ' What have we to do with it 1 ' she cried. ' Each one for 
 himself.'
 
 CHAP, xx THE SQUIRE 271 
 
 ' But marriage makes two one,' said Catherine, pale, but with 
 a firm clearness. ' And if husband and wife are only one in 
 body and estate, not one in soul, why, who that believes in the 
 soul would accept such a bond, endure such a miserable second 
 best?' 
 
 She rose. But though her voice had recovered all its energy, 
 her attitude, her look was still tenderness, still yearning itself. 
 
 ' Religion does not fill up the soul,' said Rose slowly. Then 
 she added carelessly, a passionate red flying into her cheek 
 against her will, ' However, I cannot imagine any question that 
 interests me personally less. I was curious what you would 
 say.' 
 
 And she too got up, drawing her hand lightly along the 
 keyboard of the piano. Her pose had a kind of defiance in it ; 
 her knit brows forbade Catherine to ask questions. Catherine 
 stood irresolute. Should she throw herself on her sister, im- 
 ploring her to speak, opening her own heart on the subject of 
 this wild unhappy fancy for a man who would never think 
 again of the child he had played with ? 
 
 But the North-country dread of words, of speech that only 
 defines and magnifies, prevailed. Let there be no words, but 
 let her love and watch. 
 
 So, after a moment's pause, she began in a different tone 
 upon the inquiries she had been making, the arrangements that 
 would be wanted for this musical winter. Rose was almost 
 listless at first. A stranger would have thought she was being 
 persuaded into something against her will. But she could not 
 keep it up. The natural instinct reasserted itself, and she was 
 soon planning and deciding as sharply, and with as much young 
 omniscience, as usual. 
 
 By the evening it was settled. Mrs. Leyburn, much be- 
 wildered, asked Catherine doubtfully, the last thing at night, 
 whether she wanted Rose to be a professional. Catherine 
 exclaimed. 
 
 'But, my dear,' said the widow, ^ staring pensively into her 
 bedroom fire, ' what's she to do with all this music ? ' Then 
 after a second she added half severely : ' I don't believe her 
 father would have liked it ; I don't, indeed, Catherine ! ' 
 
 Poor Catherine smiled and sighed in the background, but 
 made no reply. 
 
 ' However, she never looks so pretty as when she's playing 
 the violin never ! ' said Mrs. Leyburn presently in the distance, 
 with a long breath of satisfaction. She's got such a lovely 
 hand and arm, Catherine ! They're prettier than mine, and 
 even your father used to notice mine.' 
 
 ' Even.' The word had a little sound of bitterness. In spite 
 of all his love, had the gentle puzzle-headed woman found her 
 unearthly husband often very hard to live with ? 
 
 Rose meanwhile was sitting up in bed, with her hands round 
 her knees, dreaming. So she had got her heart's desire ! There
 
 272 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 did not seem to be much joy in the getting, but that was the 
 way of things, one was told. She knew she should hate the 
 Germans great, bouncing, over-fed, sentimental creatures ! 
 
 Then her thoughts ran into the future. After six months 
 yes, by April she would be home, and Agnes and her mother 
 could meet her in London. 
 
 London. Ah, it was London she was thinking of all the 
 time, not Berlin ! She could not stay in the present ; or rather 
 the Rose of the present went straining to the Rose of the future, 
 asking to be righted, to be avenged. 
 
 ' I will learn I will learn fast many things besides music ! ' 
 she said to herself feverishly. ' By April I shall be much cleverer. 
 Oh, then I won't be a fool so easily. We shall be sure to meet, 
 of course. But he shall find out that it was only a child, only a 
 silly soft-hearted baby he played with down here. I shan't care 
 for him in the least, of course not. not after six months. I don't 
 mean to. And I will make him know it oh, I will, though he 
 is so wise, and so much older, and mounts on such stilts when 
 he pleases ! ' 
 
 So once more Rose flung her defiance at fate. But when 
 Catherine came along the passage an hour later she heard low 
 sounds from Rose's room, which ceased abruptly as her step 
 drew near. The elder sister paused ; her eyes filled with tears ; 
 her hand closed indignantly. Then she came closer, all but 
 went in, thought better of it, and moved away. If there is any 
 truth in brain- waves, Langham should have slept restlessly that 
 night. 
 
 Ten days later an escort had been found, all preparations had 
 been made, and Rose was gone. 
 
 Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes lingered a while, and then they too 
 departed under an engagement to come back after Christmas 
 for a long stay, that Mrs. Leyburn might cheat the northern 
 spring a little. 
 
 So husband and wife were alone again. How they relished 
 their solitude ! Catherine took up many threads of work which 
 her months of comparative weakness had forced her to let drop. 
 She taught vigorously in the school ; in the afternoons, so far as 
 her child would let her, she carried her tender presence and her 
 practical knowledge of nursing to the sick and feeble ; and on 
 two evenings in the week she and Robert threw open a little 
 room there was on the ground-floor between the study and the 
 dining-room to the women and girls of the village, as a sort of 
 drawing-room. Hard- worked mothers would come, who had put 
 their fretful babes to sleep, and given their lords to eat, and had 
 just energy left, while the eldest daughter watched, and the men 
 were at the club or the ' Blue Boar,' to put on a clean apron and 
 climb the short hill to the rectory. Once there, there was 
 nothing to think of for an hour but the bright room, Catherine's 
 kind face, the rector's jokes, and the illustrated papers or the
 
 <n\p. xx THE SQUIRE 273 
 
 photographs that were spread out for them to look at if they 
 would. The girls learned to come, because Catherine could 
 teach them a simple dressmaking, and was clever in catching 
 stray persons to set them singing ; and because Mr. Elsmere 
 read exciting stories, and because nothing any one of them ever 
 told Mrs. Elsmere was forgotten by her, or failed to interest her. 
 Any of her social equals of the neighbourhood would have hardly 
 recognised the reserved and stately Catherine on these occasions. 
 Here she felt herself at home, at ease. She would never, indeed, 
 have Robert's pliancy, his quick divination, and for some time 
 after her transplanting the North-country woman had found it 
 very difficult to suit herself to a new shade of local character. 
 But she was learning from Robert every day ; she watched him 
 among the poor, recognising all his gifts with a humble intensity 
 of admiring love, which said little but treasured everything, 
 and for herself her inward happiness and peace shone through 
 her quiet ways, making her the mother and the friend of all 
 about her. 
 
 As for Robert, he, of course, was living at high pressure all 
 round. Outside his sermons and his school, his Natural History 
 Club had perhaps most of his heart, and the passion for science, 
 little continuous work as he was able to give it, grew on him 
 more and more. He kept up as best he could, working with one 
 hand, so to speak, when he could not spare two, and in his long 
 rambles over moor and hill, gathering in with his quick eye a har- 
 vest of local fact wherewith to feed their knowledge and his own. 
 
 The mornings he always spent at work among his books, the 
 afternoons in endless tramps over the parish, sometimes alone, 
 sometimes with Catherine and in the evenings, if Catherine 
 was ' at home,' twice a week to womankind, he had his nights 
 when his study became the haunt and prey of half the boys in 
 the place, who were free of everything, as soon as he had taught 
 them to respect his books, and not to taste his medicines ; other 
 nights when he was lecturing or story-telling in the club or in 
 some outlying hamlet ; or others again, when with Catherine 
 l>eside him he would sit trying to think some of that religious 
 passion which burned in both their hearts, into clear words or 
 striking illustrations for his sermons. 
 
 Then his choir was much upon his mind. He knew nothing 
 about music, nor did Catherine ; their efforts made Rose laugh 
 irreverently when she got their letters at Berlin. But Robert 
 believed in a choir chiefly as an excellent social and centralising 
 instrument. There had been none in Mr. Preston's day. He 
 was determined to have one, and a good one, and by sheer energy 
 he succeeded, delighting in his boyish way over the opposition 
 some of his novelties excited among the older and more stifi- 
 backed inhabitants. 
 
 ' Let them talk,' he would say brightly to Catherine. ' They 
 will come round ; and talk is good. Anytliing to make them 
 think, to stir the pool ! '
 
 274 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK HI 
 
 Of course that old problem of the agricultural labourer 
 weighed upon him his grievances, his wants. He went about 
 pondering the English land system, more than half inclined one 
 day to sink part of his capital in a peasant-proprietor experi- 
 ment, and ingulfed the next in all the moral and economical 
 objection, to the French system. Land for allotments, at any 
 rate, he had set his heart on. But in this direction, as in many 
 others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish was the 
 squire's, and not one inch of the squire's land would Henslowe 
 let young Elsmere have anything to do with if he knew it. He 
 would neither repair nor enlarge the Workmen's Institute ; and 
 he had a way of forgetting the squire's customary subscriptions 
 to parochial objects, always paid through him, which gave him 
 much food for chuckling whenever he passed Elsmere in the 
 country lanes. The man's coarse insolence and mean hatred 
 made themselves felt at every turn, besmirching and embittering. 
 
 Still it was very true that neither Henslowe nor the squire 
 could do Robert much harm. His hold on the parish was visibly 
 strengthening ; his sermons were not only filling the church 
 with his own parishioners, but attracting hearers from the dis- 
 tricts round Murewell, so that even on these winter Sundays 
 there was almost always a sprinkling of strange faces among 
 the congregation ; and his position in the county and diocese 
 was becoming every month more honourable and important. 
 The gentry about showed them much kindness, and would have 
 shown them much hospitality if they had been allowed. But 
 though Robert had nothing of the ascetic about him, and liked 
 the society of his equals as much as most good- tempered and 
 vivacious people do, he and Catherine decided that for the 
 present they had no time to spare for visits and county society. 
 Still, of course, there were many occasions on which the routine 
 of their life brought them across their neighbours, and it began 
 to be pretty widely recognised that Elsmere was a young fellow 
 of unusual promise and intelligence, that his wife too was re- 
 markable, and that between them they were likely to raise the 
 standard of clerical effort considerably in their part of Surrey. 
 
 All the factors of this life his work, his influence, his re- 
 covered health, the lavish beauty of the country, Elsmere en- 
 joyed with all his heart. But at the root of all there lay what 
 gave value and savour to everything else that exquisite home- 
 life of theirs, that tender, triple bond of husband, wife, and 
 child. 
 
 Catherine, coming home tired from teaching or visiting, 
 would find her step quickening as she reached the gate of the 
 rectory, and the sense of delicious possession waking up in her, 
 which is one of the first fruits of motherhood. There, at the 
 window, between the lamplight behind and the winter dusk 
 outside, would be the child in its nurse's arms, little wondering, 
 motiveless smiles passing over the tiny puckered face that was 
 so oddly like Robert already. And afterwards, in the fire-lit
 
 CHAP, xx THE SQUIRE 275 
 
 nursery, with the bath in front of the high fender, and all the 
 necessaries of baby life beside it, she would go through those 
 functions which mothers love and linger over, let the kicking 
 dimpled creature principally concerned protest as it may against 
 the over-refinements of civilisation. Then, when the little rest- 
 less voice was stilled, and the cradle left silent in the darkened 
 room, there would come the short watching for Robert, his 
 voice, his kiss, their simple meal together, a moment of rest, 
 of laughter and chat, before some fresh effort claimed them. 
 Every now and then white-letter days there would drop on 
 them a long evening together. Then out would come one of the 
 few books Dante or Virgil or Milton which had entered into 
 the fibre of Catherine's strong nature. The two heads would 
 draw close over them, or Robert would take some thought of 
 hers as a text, and spout away from the hearthrug, watching all 
 the while for her smile, her look of assent. Sometimes, late at 
 night, when there was a sermon on his mind, he would dive into 
 his pocket for his Greek Testament and make her read, partly 
 for the sake of teaching her for she knew some Greek and 
 longed to know more but mostly that he might get from her 
 some of that garnered wealth of spiritual experience which he 
 adored in her. They would go from verse to verse, from thought 
 to thought, till suddenly perhaps the tide of feeling would rise, 
 and while the wind swept round the house, and the owls hooted 
 in the elms, they would sit hand in hand, lost in love and faith, 
 Christ near them Eternity, warm with God, enwrapping 
 them. 
 
 So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthro- 
 
 Slst. In reality, great as was the moral energy of this period of 
 Ismere's life, the dominant distinguishing note of it was not 
 moral but intellectual. 
 
 In matters of conduct he was but developing habits and 
 tendencies already strongly present in him ; in matters of think- 
 ing, with every month of this winter he was becoming conscious 
 of fresh forces, fresh hunger, fresh horizons. 
 
 ' One half of your day be the king of your world,' Mr. Grey had 
 said to him ; ' the other half be the slave of something which will 
 take you out of your world, into the general life, the life of 
 thought, of man as a whole, of the universe.' 
 
 The counsel, as we have seen, had struck root and flowered 
 into action. So many men of Elsmere's type give themselves 
 up once and for all as they become mature to the life of doing 
 and feeling, practically excluding the life of thought. It was 
 Henry Greys influence in all probability, perhaps, too, the train- 
 ing of an earlier Langham, that saved for Elsmere the life of 
 thought. 
 
 The form taken by this training of his own mind lie had been 
 thus encouraged not to abandon, was, as we know, the study of 
 history. He had well mapped out before him that book on the
 
 276 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 origins of France which he had described to Langham. It wa$ 
 to take him years, of course, and meanwhile, in his first enthu- 
 siasm, he was like a child, revelling in the treasure of work that 
 lay before him. As he had told Langham, he had just got below 
 the surface of a great subject and was beginning to dig into the 
 roots of it. Hitherto he had been under the guidance of men of 
 his own day, of the nineteenth century historian, who refashions 
 the past on the lines of his own mind, who gives it rationality, 
 coherence, and, as it were, modernness, so that the main im- 
 pression he produces on us, so long as we look at that past 
 through him only, is on the whole an impression of continuity, 
 of resemblance. 
 
 Whereas, on the contrary, the first impression left on a man 
 by the attempt to plunge into the materials of history for him- 
 self is almost always an extraordinarily sharp impression of 
 difference, of contrast. Ultimately, of course, he sees that these 
 men and women whose letters and biographies, whose creeds and 
 general conceptions he is investigating, are in truth his ancestors, 
 bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh. But at first the student who 
 goes back, say, in the history of Europe, behind the Renaissance 
 or behind the Crusades into the actual deposits of the past, is 
 often struck with a kind of vertige. The men and women whom 
 he has dragged forth into the light of his own mind are to him 
 like some strange puppet-show. They are called by names he 
 knows kings, bishops, judges, poets, priests, men of letters 
 but what a gulf between him and them ! What motives, what 
 beliefs, what embryonic processes of thought and mprals, what 
 bizarre combinations of ignorance and knowledge, of the highest 
 sanctity with the lowest credulity or falsehood ; what extraor- 
 dinary prepossessions, born with a man and tainting his whole 
 ways of seeing and thinking from childhood to the grave ! 
 Amid all the intellectual dislocation of the spectacle, indeed, 
 he perceives certain Greeks and certain Latins who repre- 
 sent a forward strain, who belong as it seems to a world of 
 their own, a world ahead of them. To them he stretches out 
 his hand : ' You,' he says to them, ' though your priests spoke to 
 you not of Christ, but of Zeus and Artemis, you are really my 
 kindred ! ' But intellectually they stand alone. Around them, 
 after them, for long ages the world ' spake as a child, felt as a 
 child, understood as a child.' 
 
 Then he sees what it is makes the difference, digs the gulf. 
 ' Science,' the mind cries, 'ordered knowledge.' And so for the 
 first time the modern recognises what the accumulations of his 
 forefathers have done for him. He takes the torch which man 
 has been so long and patiently fashioning to his hand, and turns 
 it on the past, and at every step the sight grows stranger, and 
 yet more moving, more pathetic. The darkness into which he 
 penetrates does but make him grasp his own guiding light the 
 more closely. And yet, bit by bit, it has been prepared for him 
 by these groping half conscious generations, and the scrutiny
 
 CHAP, xx THE SQUIRE 277 
 
 which began in repulsion and laughter ends in a marvelling 
 gratitude. 
 
 But the repulsion and the laughter come first, and during 
 this winter of work Elsmere felt them both very strongly. He 
 would sit in the morning buried among the records of decaying 
 Home and emerging France, surrounded by Chronicles, by 
 Church Councils, by lives of the Saints, by primitive systems of 
 law, pushing his imaginative impetuous way through them. 
 Sometimes Catherine would be there, and he would pour out on 
 her something of what was in his own mind. 
 
 One day he was deep in the life of a certain saint. The saint 
 had been bishop of a diocese in Southern France. His bio- 
 grapher was his successor in the see, a man of high political 
 importance in the Burgundian state, renowned besides for 
 sanctity and learning. Only some twenty years separated the 
 biography, at the latest, from the death of its subject. It con- 
 tained some curious material for social history, and Robert was 
 reading it with avidity. But it was, of course, a tissue of 
 marvels. The young bishop had practised every virtue known 
 to the time, and wrought every conceivable miracle, and the 
 miracles were better told than usual, with more ingenuity, more 
 imagination. Perhaps on that account they struck the reader's 
 sense more sharply. 
 
 ' And the saint said to the sorcerers and to the practisers of 
 unholy arts, that they should do those evil things no more, for 
 he had bound the spirits of whom they were wont to inquire, 
 and they would get no further answers to their incantations. 
 Then those stiff-necked sons of the devil fell upon the man of 
 God, scourged him sore, and threatened him with death, if he 
 would not instantly loose those spirits he had bound. And 
 seeing he could prevail nothing, and being, moreover, admon- 
 ished by God so to do, he permitted them to work their own 
 damnation. For he called for a parchment and wrote upon it, 
 " Ambrose unto Satan Enter I " Then was the spell loosed, the 
 spirits returned, the sorcerers inquired as they were accustomed, 
 and received answers. But in a short space of time every one 
 of them perished miserably and was delivered unto his natural 
 lord Satanas, whereunto he belonged.' 
 
 Robert made a hasty exclamation, and turning to Catherine, 
 who was working beside him, read the passage to her, with a 
 few words as to the book and its author. 
 
 Catherine's work dropped a moment on to her knee. 
 
 ' What extraordinary superstition ! ' she said, startled. ' A 
 bishop, Robert, and an educated man ? ' 
 
 Robert nodded. 
 
 ' But it is the whole habit of mind,' he said half to himself, 
 staring into the fire, ' that is so astounding. No one escapes it. 
 The whole age really is non-sane.' 
 
 ; I suppose the devout Catholic would believe that ? ' 
 
 ' I am not sure,' said Robert dreamily, and remained sunk in
 
 278 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 thought for long after, while Catherine worked, and pondered 
 a Christmas entertainment for her girls. 
 
 Perhaps it was his scientific work, fragmentary as it was, that 
 was really quickening and sharpening these historical im- 
 pressions of his. Evolution once a mere germ in the mind 
 was beginning to press, to encroach, to intermeddle with the 
 mind's other furniture. 
 
 And the comparative instinct that tool, par excellence, of 
 modern science was at last fully awake, was growing fast, 
 taking hold, now here, now there. 
 
 ' It is tolerably clear to me,' he said to himself suddenly one 
 winter afternoon, as he was trudging home alone from Mile 
 End, 'that some day or other I must set to work to bring a 
 little order into one's notions of the Old Testament. At present 
 they are just a chaos ! ' 
 
 He walked on a while, struggling with the rainstorm which 
 had overtaken him, till again the mind's quick life took voice. 
 
 ' But what matter ? God in the beginning God in the pro- 
 phets in Israel's best life God in Christ ! How are any 
 theories about the Pentateuch to touch that ? ' 
 
 And into the clear eyes, the young face aglow with wind and 
 rain, there leapt a light, a softness indescribable. 
 
 But the vivider and the keener grew this new mental life of 
 Elsmere's, the more constant became his sense of soreness as to 
 that foolish and motiveless quarrel which divided him from the 
 squire. Naturally he was for ever being harassed and pulled 
 up in his work by the mere loss of the Murewell library. To 
 have such a collection so close, and to be cut off from it, was a 
 state of things no student could help feeling severely. But it 
 was much more than that : it was the man he hankered after ; 
 the man who was a master where he was a beginner ; the man 
 who had given his life to learning, and was carrying all his vast 
 accumulations sombrely to the grave, unused, untransmitted. 
 
 'He might have given me his knowledge,' thought Elsmere 
 sadly, ' and I I would have been a son to him. Why is life so 
 perverse ? ' 
 
 Meanwhile he was as much cut off from the great house and 
 its master as though both had been surrounded by the thorn 
 hedge of fairy tale. The Hall had its visitors during these 
 winter months, but the Elsmeres saw nothing of them. Robert 
 gulped down a natural sigh when one Saturday evening, as he 
 passed the Hall gates, he saw driving through them the chief of 
 English science side by side with the most accomplished of 
 English critics. 
 
 ' " There are good times in the world and I ain't in 'em ! " ' he 
 said to himself with a laugh and a shrug as he turned up the 
 lane to the rectory, and then, boy-like, was ashamed of himself, 
 and greeted Catherine with all the tenderer greeting. 
 
 Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure
 
 CHAP, xx THE SQUIRE 279 
 
 of having seen the squire. Both were in the twilight, when, as 
 the neighbourhood declared, Mr. Wendover always walked, and 
 both made a sharp impression on the rector's nerves. In the heart 
 of one of the loneliest commons of the parish Robert, swinging 
 along one November evening through the scattered furze bushes, 
 growing ghostly in the darkness, was suddenly conscious of a 
 cloaked figure with slouching shoulders and head bent forward 
 coming towards him. It passed without recognition of any kind, 
 and for an instant Eobert caught the long sharpened features 
 and haughty eyes of the squire. 
 
 At another time Robert was walking, far from home, along a 
 bit of level road. The pools in the ruts were just filmed with 
 frost, and gleamed under the sunset ; the winter dusk was clear 
 and chill. A horseman turned into the road from a side lane. 
 It was the squire again, alone. The sharp sound of the 
 approaching hoofs stirred Robert's pulse, and as they passed 
 each other the rector raised his hat. He thought his greeting 
 was acknowledged, but could not be quite sure. From the 
 shelter of a group of trees he stood a moment and looked after 
 the retreating figure. It and the horse showed dark against a 
 wide sky barred by stormy reds and purples. The wind whistled 
 through the withered oaks ; the long road with its lines of 
 glimmering pools seemed to stretch endlessly into the sunset ; 
 and with every minute the night strode on. Age and loneliness 
 could have found no fitter setting. A shiver ran through 
 Elsmere as he stepped forward. 
 
 Undoubtedly the quarrel, helped by his work, and the 
 perpetual presence of that beautiful house commanding the 
 whole country round it from its plateau above the river, kept 
 Elsmere specially in mind of the squire. As before their first 
 meeting, and in spite of it, he became more and more imagin- 
 atively preoccupied with him. One of the signs of it was 
 a strong desire to read the squire's two famous books : one, 
 The Idols of the Market -place, an attack on English beliefs ; 
 the other, Essays on English Culture, an attack on English 
 ideals of education. He had never come across them as it 
 happened, and perhaps Newcome's denunciation had some 
 effect in inducing him for a time to refrain from reading them. 
 But in December he ordered them and waited their coming with 
 impatience. He said nothing of the order to Catherine ; some- 
 how there were by now two or three portions of his work, two 
 or three branches of his thought, which had fallen out of their 
 common discussion. After all she was no^ literary, and with 
 all their oneness of soul there could not be an identity of interests 
 or pursuits. 
 
 The books arrived in the morning. (Oh, how dismally well, 
 with what a tightening of the heart, did Robert always 
 remember that day in after years ! ) He was much too busy to 
 look at them, and went off to a meeting. In the evening, 
 coming home late from his night-school, he found Catherine
 
 280 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 tired, sent her to bed, and went himself into his study to put 
 together some notes for a cottage lecture he was to give the 
 following day. The packet of books, unopened, lay on his 
 writing-table. He took off the wrapper, and in his eager way 
 fell to reading the first he touched. 
 
 It was the first volume of The, Idols of the Market-place. 
 
 Ten or twelve years before, Mr. Wendover had launched this 
 book into a startled and protesting England. It had been the 
 fruit of his first renewal of contact with English life and 
 English ideas after his return from Berlin. Fresh from the 
 speculative ferment of Germany and the far profaner scepticism 
 of France ; he had returned to a society where the first chapter 
 of Genesis and the theory of verbal inspiration were still 
 regarded as valid and important counters on the board of 
 thought. The result had been this book. In it each stronghold 
 of English popular religion had been assailed in turn, at a time 
 when English orthodoxy was a far more formidable thing than 
 it is now. 
 
 The Pentateuch, the Prophets, the Gospels, St. Paul, 
 Tradition, the Fathers, Protestantism and Justification by Faith, 
 the Eighteenth Century, the Broad Church Movement, 
 Anglican Theology the squire had his say about them all. 
 And while the coolness ana frankness of the method sent a 
 shock of indignation and horror through the religious public, 
 the subtle and caustic style, and the epigrams with which the 
 book was strewn, forced both the religious and irreligious public 
 to read, whether they would or no. A storm of controversy 
 rose round the volumes, and some of the keenest observers of 
 English life had said at the time, and maintained since, that 
 the publication of the book had made or marked an epoch. 
 
 Robert had lit on those pages in the Essay on the Gospels where 
 the squire fell to analysing the evidence for the Resurrection, 
 following up his analysis by an attempt at reconstructing the 
 conditions out of which the belief in ' the legend ' arose. Robert 
 began to read vaguely at first, then to hurry on through page 
 after page, still standing, seized at once by the bizarre power of 
 the style, the audacity and range of the treatment. 
 
 Not a sound in the house. Outside, the tossing moaning 
 December night ; inside, the faintly crackling fire, the standing 
 figure. Suddenly it was to Robert as though a cruel torturing 
 hand were laid upon his inmost being. His breath failed him ; 
 the book slipped out of his grasp ; he sank down upon his chair, 
 his head in his hands. Oh, what a desolate intolerable 
 moment ! Over the young idealist soul there swept a dry 
 destroying whirlwind of thought. Elements gathered from all 
 sources from his own historical work, from the squire's book, 
 from the secret half -conscious recesses of the mind entered 
 into it, and as it passed it seemed to scorch the heart. 
 
 He stayed bowed there a while, then he roused himself with 
 a half -groan, and hastily extinguishing his lamp he groped his
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 281 
 
 way upstairs to his wife's room. Catherine lay asleep. The 
 child, lost among its white coverings, slept too : there was a dim 
 light over the bed, the books, the pictures. Beside his wife's 
 pillow was a table on which there lay open her little Testament 
 and the Imitation her father had given her. Elsmere sank 
 down beside her, appalled by the contrast between this soft 
 religious peace and that black agony of doubt which still over- 
 shadowed him. He knelt there, restraining his breath lest it 
 should wake her, wrestling piteously with himself, crying for 
 pardon, for faith, feeling himself utterly unworthy to touch 
 even the dear hand that lay so near him. But gradually the 
 traditional forces of his life reasserted themselves. The horror 
 lifted. Prayer brought comfort and a passionate healing 
 self-abasement. 'Master, forgive defend purify,' cried 
 the aching heart. ' There is none other that fighteth for us, but 
 only Thou, God!' 
 
 He did not open the book again. Next morning he put it 
 back into his shelves. If there were any Christian who could 
 affront such an antagonist with a light heart, he felt with a 
 shudder of memory it was not he. 
 
 ' I have neither learning nor experience enough yet,' he said 
 to himself slowly as he moved away, ' of course it can be met, 
 but / must grow, must think first.' 
 
 And of that night's wrestle he said not a word to any living 
 soul. He did penance for it in the tenderest, most secret ways, 
 but he shrank in misery from the thought of revealing it even 
 to Catherine. 
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 MEANWHILE the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and 
 apparently throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. 
 Robert, as soon as he found that radical measures were for the 
 time hopeless, had applied himself with redoubled energy to 
 making the people use such palliatives as were within their 
 reach, and had preached boiled water and the removal of filth 
 till, as he declared to Catherine, his dreams were one long 
 sanitary nightmare. But he was not confiding enough to believe 
 that the people paid much heed, and he hoped more from a dry 
 hard winter than from any exertion either of his or theirs. 
 
 But, alas ! with the end of November a season of furious rain 
 set in. 
 
 Then Robert began to watch Mile End with anxiety, for so 
 far every outbreak of illness there had followed upon unusual 
 damp. But the rains passed, leaving behind them no worse 
 results than the usual winter crop of lung ailments and 
 rheumatism, and he breathed again. 
 
 Christmas came and went, and with the end of December the
 
 282 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK m 
 
 wet weather returned. Day after day rolling masses of south- 
 west cloud came up from the Atlantic and wrapped the whole 
 country in rain, which reminded Catherine of her Westmoreland 
 rain more than any she had yet seen in the South. Robert 
 accused her of liking it for that reason, but she shook her head 
 with a sigh, declaring that it was ' nothing without the becks.' 
 
 One afternoon she was shutting the door of the school behind 
 her, and stepping out on the road skirting the green the 
 bedabbled wintry green when she saw Robert emerging from 
 the Mile End lane. She crossed over to him, wondering as she 
 neared Mm that he seemed to take no notice of her. He was 
 striding along, his wideawake over his eyes, and so absorbed that 
 she had almost touched him before he saw her. 
 
 ' Darling, is that you ? Don't stop me, I am going to take 
 the pony-carriage in for Meyrick. I have just come back from 
 that accursed place ; three cases of diphtheria in one house, 
 Sharland's wife and two others down with fever.' 
 
 She made a horrified exclamation. 
 
 ' It will spread,' he said gloomily, ' I know it will. I never 
 saw the children look such a ghastly crew before. Well, I must 
 
 to for Meyrick and a nurse, and we must isolate and make a 
 ght for it.' 
 
 In a few days the diphtheria epidemic in the hamlet had 
 reached terrible proportions. There had been one death, others 
 were expected, and soon Robert in his brief hours at home 
 could find no relief in anything, so heavy was the oppression of 
 the day's memories. At first Catherine for the child s sake kept 
 away; but the little Mary was weaned, had a good Scotch 
 nurse, was in every way thriving, and after a day or two 
 Catherine's craving to help, to be with Robert in his trouble, 
 was too strong to be withstood. But she dared not go back- 
 wards and forwards between her baby and the diphtheritic 
 children. So she bethought herself of Mrs. Elsmere's servant, 
 old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs. Elsmere's cottage till 
 a tenant could be found for it, and doing good service mean- 
 while as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse 
 went over to the cottage. Catherine carried the child there, 
 wrapped close in maternal arms, and leaving her on old 
 Martha's lap, went back to Robert. 
 
 Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight 
 with the epidemic. At the climax of it there were about twenty 
 children down with it in different stages, and seven cases of 
 fever. They had two hospital nurses ; one of the better cot- 
 tages, turned into a sanatorium, accommodated the worst cases 
 under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine, directed by them 
 and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest, he helping 
 to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases Shar- 
 land's wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it 
 seemed almost impossible she could weather through. But day 
 after day passed, and by dint of incessant nursing she still
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 283 
 
 lived. A youth of twenty, the main support of a mother and 
 five or six younger children, was also desperately ill. Robert 
 hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and the boy's dog-like 
 affection for the rector, struggling with his deathly weakness, 
 was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and Ormuzd 
 the power of life struggling with the power of death. 
 
 It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband 
 and wife as though the few daily hours spent at the rectory 
 were mere halts between successive acts of battle with the 
 plague-fiend a more real and grim Grendel of the Marshes 
 for the lives of children. Catherine could always sleep in these 
 intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very soon could 
 only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick's. 
 On all occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been 
 signs in him of a certain lack of constitutional hardness which 
 his mother knew very well, but which his wife was only just 
 beginning to recognise. However, he laughed to scorn any 
 attempt to restrain his constant goings and comings, or those 
 hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital nurses were 
 the first to admit, no one was so successful as the rector. And 
 when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, 
 the worn and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge 
 warm at each heart of those before him of how the rector not 
 only talked but lived, carried every word home. 
 
 This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, 
 strangely enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke 
 through a tension of brain which of late had become an oppres- 
 sion. And for both him and Catherine these dark times had 
 moments of intensest joy, points of white light illuminating 
 heaven and earth. There were cloudy nights wet, stormy 
 January nights when sometimes it happened to them to come 
 back both together from the hamlet, Robert carrying a lantern, 
 Catherine clothed in waterproof from head to foot, walking 
 beside him, the rays flashing now on her face, now on the 
 wooded sides of the lane, while the wind howled through the 
 dark vault of branches overhead. A^d then, as they talked or 
 were silent, suddenly a sense of the intense blessedness of this 
 comradeship of theirs would rise like a flood in the man's heart, 
 and he would fling his free arm round her, forcing her to stand 
 a moment in the January night and storm while he said to her 
 words of passionate gratitude, of faith in an immortal union 
 reaching beyond change or death, lost in a kiss which was a 
 sacrament. Then there were the moments when they saw their 
 child, held high in Martha's arms at the window, and leaping 
 towards her mother ; the moments when one pallia sickly being 
 after another was pronounced out of danger ; and by the help 
 of them the weeks passed away. 
 
 Nor were they left without help from outside. Lady Helen 
 Varley no sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Robert, 
 on his way one morning from one cottage to another, saw her
 
 284 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK HI 
 
 pony-carriage in the lane. He hastened up to her before she 
 could dismount. 
 
 'No, Lady Helen, you mustn't come here,' he said to her 
 peremptorily, as she held out her hand. 
 
 'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his 
 grandmother. Let me just go through, at any rate, and see 
 what I can send you.' 
 
 Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs 
 and hers had once described this little lady to Elsmere by a 
 French sentence which originally applied to the Duchesse de 
 Choiseul. 'Une charmante petite fe"e sortie d'un ceuf enchante !' 
 so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked down upon her now, 
 fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels behind him, he 
 was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of 
 life. Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the 
 production of which even Worth had felt some pride ; a little 
 green velvet bonnet perched on her fair hair ; one tiny hand, 
 ungloved, seemed ablaze with diamonds ; there were opals and 
 diamonds somewhere at her throat, gleaming among her sables. 
 But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she wore her high birth, 
 her quaint irregular prettiness, or the one or two brilliant 
 gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. She 
 loved her opals as she loved all bright things ; if it pleased her 
 to wear them in the morning, she wore them ; and in five 
 minutes she was capable of making the sourest puritan forget 
 to frown on her and them. To Robert she always seemed the 
 quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their best. All her 
 freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful. At her 
 freest and gayest there were things in her restraints, reti- 
 cences, perceptions which implied behind her generations of 
 rich, happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate 
 all the more delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. 
 Robert was often struck by the curious differences between her 
 and Rose. Rose was far the handsomer ; she was at least as 
 clever ; and she had a strong imperious will where Lady Helen 
 had only impulses and sympathies and engouements. But Rose 
 belonged to the class which struggles, where each individual 
 depends on himself and knows it. Lady Helen had never 
 struggled for anything all the best things of the world were 
 hers so easily that she hardly gave them a thought ; or rather, 
 what she had gathered without pain she held so lightly, she 
 dispensed so lavishly, that men's eyes followed her, fluttering 
 through life, with much the same feeling as was struck from 
 Clough's radical hero by the peerless Lady Maria 
 
 ' Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness, 
 Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you ; 
 Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous ; only be lovely ! ' 
 
 'Uncaring,' however, little Lady Helen never was. If she
 
 CHAP. XXT THE SQUIRE 285 
 
 was a fairy, she was a fairy 4M. heart, all frank foolish smiles 
 and tears. 
 
 ' No, Lady Helen no ; ' Robert said again. ' This is no place 
 for you, and we are getting on capitally. 
 
 She pouted a little. 
 
 'I believe you and Mrs. Elsmere are just killing yourselves 
 all in a corner, with no one to see,' she said indignantly. ' If 
 you won't let me see, I shall send Sir Harry. But who ' and 
 her brown fawn's eyes ran startled over the cottages before her 
 ' who, Mr. Elsmere, does this dreadful place belong to ? ' 
 
 ' Mr. Wendover,' said Robert shortly. 
 
 ' Impossible ! ' she cried incredulously. ' Why, I wouldn't 
 ask one of my dogs to sleep there,' and she pointed to the 
 nearest hovel, whereof the walls were tottering outwards, the 
 thatch was falling to pieces, and the windows were mended 
 with anything that came handy rags, paper, or the crown of 
 an old hat. 
 
 ' No, you would be ill advised,' said Robert, looking with a 
 bitter little smile at the sleek dachshund that sat blinking 
 beside its mistress. 
 
 ' But what is the agent about t' 
 
 Then Robert told her the story, not mincing his words. 
 Since the epidemic had begun, all that sense of imaginative 
 attraction which had been reviving in him towards the squire 
 had been simply blotted out by a fierce heat of indignation. 
 When he thought of Mr. Wendover now, he thought of him as 
 the man to whom in strict truth it was owing that helpless 
 children died in choking torture. All that agony of wrath and 
 pity he had gone through in the last ten days sprang to his lips 
 now as he talked to Lady Helen, and poured itself into his 
 words. 
 
 ' Old Meyrick and I have taken things into our own hands 
 now,' he said at last briefly. ' We have already made two cot- 
 tages fairly habitable. To-morrow the inspector comes. I told 
 the people yesterday I wouldn't be bound by my promise a day 
 longer. He must put the screw on Henslowe, and* if Henslowe 
 dawdles, why we shall just drain and repair and sink for a well 
 ourselves. I can find the money somehow. At present we get 
 all our water from one of the farms on the brow.' 
 
 ' Money ! ' said Lady Helen impulsively, her looks warm with 
 sympathy for the pale harassed young rector. ' Sir Harry shall 
 send you as much as you want. And anything else blankets 
 coals?' 
 
 Out came her note-book, and Robert was drawn into a list. 
 Then, full of joy fulness at being allowed to help, she gathered 
 up her reins, she nodded her pretty little head at him, and was 
 rust starting off her ponies at full speed, equally eager ' to tell 
 Harry ' and to ransack Churton for the stores required, when it 
 occurred to her to pull up again. 
 
 'Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, does nothing
 
 286 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 but talk about your sister-in-law. Why did you keep her all to 
 yourself ? Is it kind, is it neighbourly, to have such a wonder 
 to stay with you and let nobody share ? ' 
 
 ' A wonder ? ' said Robert, amused. ' Rose plays the violin 
 very well, but ' 
 
 ' As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective ! ' exclaimed 
 Lady Helen. 'My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in 
 town next season if you will all let her. I think she would find 
 it fun. Aunt Charlotte knows all the world and his wife. And 
 if I'm there, and Miss Leyburn will let me make friends with 
 her, why, you know, / can just protect her a little from Aunt 
 Charlotte ! ' 
 
 The little laughing face bent forward again ; Robert, smiling, 
 raised his hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else 
 Elsmere would have thought all this effusion insincere or patron- 
 ising. But Lady Helen was the most spontaneous of mortals, 
 and the only high-born woman he had ever met who was really, 
 and not only apparently, free from the 'nonsense of rank.' 
 Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte's social tolerance to 
 be a mere varnish. But this little person, and her favourite 
 brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts of him, must always 
 have found life too romantic, too wildly and delightfully inter- 
 esting from top to bottom, to be measured by any but romantic 
 standards. 
 
 Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who 
 adored his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and 
 thanked God every morning that he was an Englishman, rode 
 over to Mile End. Robert, who had just been round the place 
 with the inspector and was dead tired, had only energy to show 
 him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry, leaving a cheque 
 behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong language, at 
 which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled. 
 
 A few days later Mr. Wendover's crimes as a landowner, his 
 agent's brutality, young Elsmere's devotion, and the horrors of 
 the Mile End outbreak, were in everybody's mouths. The 
 county was roused. The Radical newspaper came out on the 
 Saturday with a flaming article ; Robert, much to his annoy- 
 ance, found himself the local hero ; and money began to come 
 in to him freely. 
 
 On the Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene 
 with an army of workmen. A racy communication from the 
 inspector had reached him two days before, so had a copy of the 
 Churton Advertiser. He had spent Sunday in a drinking bout, 
 turning over all possible plans of vengeance and evasion. 
 Towards the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt clever Scotch- 
 woman, who saw ruin before them, and had on occasion an even 
 sharper tongue than her husband, managed to capture the 
 supplies of brandy in the house and effectually conceal them. 
 Then she waited for the moment of collapse which came on 
 towards morning, and with her hands on her hips she poured
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 287 
 
 into him a volley of home-truths which not even Sir Harry 
 Varley could have bettered. Henslowe's nerve gave way. He 
 went out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look for workmen. 
 
 Robert, standing on the step of a cottage, watched him give 
 his orders, and took vigilant note of their substance. They 
 embodied the inspector's directions, and the rector was satisfied. 
 Henslowe was obliged to pass him on his way to another group 
 of houses. At first he affected not to see the rector, then sud- 
 denly Elsmere was conscious that the man's bloodshot eyes were 
 on him. Such a look ! If hate could have killed, Elsmere 
 would have fallen where he stood. Yet the man's hand me- 
 chanically moved to his hat, as though the spell of his wife's 
 harangue were still potent over his shaking muscles. 
 
 Robert took no notice whatever of the salutation. He stood 
 calmly watching till Henslowe disappeared into the last house. 
 Then he called one of the agent's train, heard what was to be 
 done, gave a sharp nod of assent, and turned on his heel. So 
 far so good : the servant had been made to feel, but he wished 
 it had been the master. Oh, those three little emaciated 
 creatures whose eyes he had closed, whose clammy hands he had 
 held to the last! what reckoning should be asked for their 
 undeserved torments when the Great Account came to be 
 made up ? 
 
 Meanwhile not a sound apparently of all this reached the 
 squire in the sublime solitude of Murewell. A fortnight had 
 passed. Henslowe had been conquered, the county had rushed 
 to Elsmere's help, and neither he nor Mrs. Darcy had made a 
 sign. Their life was so abnormal that it was perfectly possible 
 they had heard nothing. Elsmere wondered when they would 
 hear. 
 
 The rector's chief help and support all through had been old 
 Meyrick. The parish doctor had been in bed with rheumatism 
 when the epidemic broke out, and Robert, feeling it a comfort 
 to be rid of him, had thrown the whole business into the hands 
 of Meyrick and his son. This son was nominally his father's 
 junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young and brilliant 
 M.D. fresh from a great hospital, and his father was just a poor 
 old general practitioner, with the barest qualification, and only 
 forty years' experience to recommend him, it will easily be 
 imagined that the subordination was purely nominal. Indeed 
 young Meyrick was fast ousting his father in all directions, and 
 the neighbourhood, which had so far found itself unable either 
 to enter or to quit this mortal scene without old Mey rick's 
 assistance, was beginning to send notes to the house in Churton 
 High Street, whereon the superscription ' Dr. Edivard Meyrick ' 
 was underlined with ungrateful emphasis. The father took 
 his deposition very quietly. Only on Murewell Hall would he 
 allow no trespassing, and so long as his son left him undisturbed 
 there, he took his effacement in other quarters with perfect 
 meekness.
 
 288 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK m 
 
 Young Elsmere's behaviour to him, however, at a time when 
 all the rest of the Churton world was beginning to hold him 
 cheap and let him see it, had touched the old man's heart, and 
 he was the rector's slave in this Mile End business. Edward 
 Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the hamlet once a 
 day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him. His 
 attainments, of course, were useful, but his cocksureness was 
 irritating, and his manner to his father abominable. The 
 father, on the other hand, came over in the shabby pony-cart 
 he had driven for the last forty years, and having himself no 
 press of business, would spend hours with the rector over the 
 cases, giving them an infinity of patient watching, and amusing 
 Robert by the cautious hostility he would allow himself every 
 now and then towards his son's new-fangled devices. 
 
 At first Meyrick showed himself fidgety as to the squire. 
 Had he been seen, been heard from ? He received Robert's 
 sharp negatives with long sighs, but Robert clearly saw that, 
 like the rest of the world, he was too much afraid of Mr. Wend- 
 over to go and beard him. Some months before, as it happened, 
 Elsmere had told him the story of his encounter with the squire, 
 and had been a good deal moved and surprised by the old man's 
 concern. 
 
 One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the out- 
 break, when the state of things in the hamlet was beginning 
 decidedly to mend, Meyrick arrived for his morning round, 
 much preoccupied. He hurried his work a little, and after it 
 was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him. 
 
 ' I have seen the squire, sir,' he said, turning on his companion 
 with a certain excitement. 
 
 Robert flushed. 
 
 ' Have you ? ' he replied with his hands behind him, and a 
 world of expression in his sarcastic voice. 
 
 'You misjudge him ! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere ! ' the 
 old man said tremulously. ' I told you he could know nothing 
 of this business and he didn't ! He has been in town part of 
 the time, and down here how is he to know anything? He 
 sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real bad 
 fellow.' 
 
 'Don't abuse the man,' said Robert, looking up. 'It's not 
 worth while, when you can say your mind of the master.' 
 
 Old Meyrick sighed. 
 
 'WelL' said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and 
 quivering, ' you told him the story, I suppose ? Seven deaths, 
 is it, by now 1 Well, what sort of impression did these unfor- 
 tunate accidents ' and he smiled ' produce ? ' 
 
 ' He talked of sending money,' said Meyrick doubtfully ' lie 
 said he would have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put 
 about and annoyed. Oh, Mr. Elsmere, you think too hardly of 
 the squire, that you do ! ' 
 
 They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 289 
 
 to discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be labouring 
 under some suppressed emotion, and presently he began upon 
 his own experiences as a doctor of the Wendover family. He 
 had already broached the subject more or less vaguely with 
 Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve, generally 
 his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted, on telling 
 his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable 
 and ghastly story of the old squire's suicide. He described the 
 heir's summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with 
 all its horrors, and that mysterious condition of the squire for 
 some months afterwards, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had 
 been admitted to the Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at inter- 
 vals by a great London doctor, had been the only spectator of 
 Roger Wendover's physical and mental breakdown, the only 
 witness of that dark consciousness of inherited fatality which 
 at that period of his life not even the squire's iron will had been 
 able wholly to conceal. 
 
 Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, 
 found himself with some curiosity realising the squire from 
 another man's totally different point of view. Evidently Mey- 
 rick had seen him at such moments as wring from the harshest 
 nature whatever grains of tenderness, of pity, or of natural 
 human weakness may be in it. And it was clear, too, that the 
 squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling a certain 
 soothing influence in the ndivett and simplicity of the old man's 
 sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding 
 that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick's pres- 
 ence, such as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in 
 him since his earliest youth. 
 
 And yet how childish the old man's whole mental image of 
 the squire was after all ! What small account it made of the 
 subtleties, the gnarled intricacies and contradictions of such a 
 character ! Horror at his father's end, and dread of a like fate 
 for himself ! Robert did not know very much of the squire, 
 but he knew enough to feel sure that this confiding indulgent 
 theory of Meyrick's was ludicrously far from the mark as an 
 adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover's later life. 
 
 Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resist- 
 ance which his companion's mind was opposing to his own. He 
 dropped the wandering narrative he was busy upon with a 
 sigh. 
 
 'Ah well, I daresay it's hard, it's hard,' he said with patient 
 acquiescence in his voice, ' to believe a man can't help himself. 
 I daresay we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But 
 if ever there was a man sick in mind for all his book-learning 
 they talk about and sick in soul, that man is the squire.' 
 
 Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was 
 a new dignity about the simple old man. The old-fashioned 
 deference, which had never let him forget in speaking to Robert 
 that he was speaking to a man of family, and which showed
 
 290 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions which were a torment 
 to his son, had given way to something still more deeply in- 
 grained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the spectacles 
 and the long straight hair like the figure of a superannuated 
 schoolmaster assumed, as he turned again to his younger com- 
 panion, something of authority, something almost of stateliness. 
 
 'Ah, Mr. Elsmere,' he said, laying his shrunk hand on the 
 younger man's sleeve and speaking with emotion, ' you're very 
 good to the poor. We're all proud of you you and your good 
 lady. But when you were coming, and I heard tell all about 
 you, I thought of my poor squire, and I said to myself, " That 
 young man '11 be good to him. The squire will make friends 
 with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good wife and there'll 
 be children born to him and the squire will take an interest 
 and and maybe " ' 
 
 The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently. 
 
 'And there was something in the way between you,' the 
 speaker went on, sighing. 'I daresay you were quite right 
 quite right. I can't judge. Only there are ways of doing a 
 thing. And it was a last chance ; and now it's missed it's 
 missed. Ah ! it's no good talking ; he has a heart he has ! 
 Many's the kind thing he's done in old days for me and mine 
 I'll never forget them ! But all these last few years oh, I 
 know, I know. You can't go and shut your heart up, and fly 
 in the face of all the duties the Lord laid on you, without losing 
 yourself and setting the Lord against you. But it is pitiful, 
 Mr. Elsmere. it's pitiful ! ' 
 
 It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine 
 breath passing through the wintry lane and through the shaking 
 voice or the old man. Beside the spirit looking out of those 
 wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth, its justest resentments, its 
 most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh, inexcusable. 
 
 ' Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and God bless you ! Don't 
 imagine I will forget a word you have said to me.' 
 
 The rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a 
 gentle smile passed over Meyrick's ageing face, and they parted. 
 
 That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with 
 John Allwood, the youth of twenty whose case had been a 
 severer tax on the powers of the little nursing staff than per- 
 haps any other. Mother and neighbours were worn out, and it 
 was difficult to spare a hospital nurse for long together from 
 the diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted during 
 the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the 
 nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept soundly 
 on a bed made up in the ground-floor room of the little sana- 
 torium. Then at twelve the nurse called him, and he went out, 
 his eyes still heavy with sleep, into a still frosty winter's night. 
 
 After so much rain, so much restlessness of wind and cloud, 
 the silence and the starry calm of it were infinitely welcome. 
 The sharp cold air cleared his brain and braced his nerves, and
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 291 
 
 by the time he reached the cottage whither he was bound, he 
 was broad awake. He opened the door softly, passed through 
 the lower room, crowded with sleeping children, climbed the 
 narrow stairs as noiselessly as possible, and found himself in a 
 garret, faintly lit, a bed in one comer and a woman sitting 
 beside it. The woman glided away, the rector looked carefully 
 at the table of instructions hanging over the bed, assured him- 
 self that wine and milk and beef essence and medicines were 
 ready to his hand, put out his watch on the wooden table near 
 the bed, and sat him down to his task. The boy was sleeping 
 the sleep of weakness. Food was to be given every half -hour, 
 and in this perpetual impulse to the system lay his only chance. 
 
 The rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could 
 just read it by the help of the dim light. But after a while, as 
 the still hours passed on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat 
 thinking endlessly thinking. The young labourer lay motion- 
 less beside him, the lines of the long emaciated frame showing 
 through the bed - clothes. The night - light flickered on the 
 broken discoloured ceiling ; every now and then a mouse 
 scratched in the plaster ; the mother's heavy breathing came 
 from the next room ; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried 
 outside. Otherwise deep silence, such silence as drives the soul 
 back upon itself. 
 
 Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. 
 The stern judgments, the passionate condemnations which his 
 nature housed so painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul 
 breathed an ' ampler aether, a diviner air.' Oh ! the mysteries 
 of life and character, the subtle inexhaustible claims of pity ! 
 The problems which hang upon our being here ; its mixture of 
 elements ; the pressure of its inexorable physical environment ; 
 the relations of mind to body, of man's poor will to this tangled 
 tyrannous life it was along these old, old lines his thought 
 went painfully groping ; and always at intervals it came back 
 to the squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new sober- 
 ness, a new humility and patience entering in. 
 
 And yet it was not Meyrick's facts exactly that had brought 
 this about. Kobert thought them imperfect, only half true. 
 Rather was it the spirit of love, of infinite forbearance in which 
 the simpler, duller nature had declared itself that had appealed 
 to him, nay, reproached him. 
 
 Then these thoughts led him on farther and farther from 
 man to God, from human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. 
 Never once during those hours did Elsmere's hand fail to per- 
 form its needed service to the faint sleeper beside him, and vet 
 that night was one long dream and strangeness to him, nothing 
 real anywhere but consciousness, and God its source ; the soul 
 attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt, of 
 bitter brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and 
 the eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling 
 awhile, and then prevailing. And each golden moment of cer-
 
 292 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK ill 
 
 tainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Kobert in some sort a gift 
 from Catherine's hand. It was she who led him through the 
 shades ; it was her voice murmuring in his ear. 
 
 When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible 
 waves into the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but years 
 of experience lay between him and the beginnings of his watch. 
 
 ' It is by these moments we should date our lives,' he mur- 
 mured to himself as he rose ; ' they are the only real landmarks.' 
 
 It was eight o'clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him 
 had come. The results of the night for his charge were good : 
 the strength had been maintained, the pulse was firmer, the 
 temperature lower. The boy, throwing off his drowsiness, lay 
 watching the rector's face as he talked in an undertone to the 
 nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb friendly wistfulness. 
 When Robert bent over him to say good-bye, this expression 
 brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, 
 feeling at last that there was a promise of life in his look and 
 touch. 
 
 In another moment he had stepped out into the January 
 morning. It was clear and still as the night had been. In the 
 east there was a pale promise of sun ; the reddish-brown trunks 
 of the fir woods had just caught it, and rose faintly glowing 
 in endless vistas and colonnades one behind the other. The 
 flooded river itself rushed through the bridge as full and turbid 
 as before, but all the other water surfaces had gleaming films 
 of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, almost a festal air 
 under the touch of the frost, while on the side of the hill leading 
 to Murewell, tree rose above tree, the delicate network of their 
 wintry twigs and branches set against stretches of frost- whitened 
 
 frass, till finally they climbed into the pale all-completing blue. 
 Q a copse close at hand there were woodcutters at work, and 
 piles of gleaming laths shining through the underwood. Robins 
 hopped along the frosty road, and as he walked on through the 
 houses towards the bridge, Robert's quick ear distinguished 
 that most wintry of all sounds the cry of a flock of fieldfares 
 passing overhead. 
 
 As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure 
 upon it, the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, 
 leaning against the stone parapet. With a start he recognised 
 the squire. 
 
 He went up to him without an instant's slackening of his 
 steady step. The squire heard the sound of some one coming, 
 turned, and saw the rector. 
 
 ' I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover,' said Robert, stop- 
 ping and holding out his hand. ' I meant to have come to talk 
 to you about this place this morning. I ought to have come 
 before.' 
 
 He spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had 
 parted the day before. The squire touched his hand for an 
 list ant.
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 293 
 
 'You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,' he said, 
 endeavouring to speak with all his old hauteur, while his heavy 
 lips twitched nervously, 'that, for one reason and another, I 
 knew nothing of the epidemic here till yesterday, when Meyrick 
 told me.' 
 
 ' I heard from Mr. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here 
 now, Mr. Wendover, and I am in no great hurry to get home, 
 may I take you through and show you the people ? ' 
 
 The squire at last looked at him straight at the face worn 
 and pale, yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which some- 
 thing of the solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed to 
 be still lingering. 
 
 'Are you just come?' he said abruptly, 'or are you going 
 back?' 
 
 ' I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of 
 the fever cases. It's hard work for the nurses, and the relations 
 sometimes, without help.' 
 
 The squire moved on mechanically towards the village, and 
 Robert moved beside him. 
 
 'And Mrs. Elsmere?' 
 
 ' Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to stay 
 the night when the diphtheria was at its worst ; but there are 
 only four anxious cases left the rest all convalescent.' 
 
 The squire said no more, and they turned into the lane, 
 where the ice lay thick in the deep ruts, and on either hand 
 curls of smoke rose into the clear cold sky. The squire 
 looked about him with eyes which no detail escaped. Robert, 
 without a word of comment, pointed out this feature and that, 
 showed where Henslowe had begun repairs, where the new well 
 was to be, what the water supply had been till now, drew the 
 squire's attention to the roofs, the pigstyes, the drainage, or 
 rather complete absence of drainage, and all in the dry voice of 
 some one going through a catalogue. Word had already fled like 
 wildfire through the hamlet that the squire was there. Children 
 and adults, a pale emaciated crew, poured out into the wintry 
 air to look. The squire knit his brows with annoyance as the 
 little crowd in the lane grew. Robert took no notice. 
 
 Presently he pushed open the door of the house where he 
 had spent the night. In the kitchen a girl of sixteen was clear- 
 ing away the various nondescript heaps on which the family 
 had slept, and was preparing breakfast. The squire looked at 
 the floor. 
 
 'I thought I understood from Henslowe,' he muttered, as 
 though to himself, ' that there were no mud floors left on the 
 estate ' 
 
 'There are only three houses in Mile End without them,' 
 said Robert, catching what he said. 
 
 They went upstairs, and the mother stood open-eyed whilo 
 the squire's restless look gathered in the details of the room, 
 the youth's face, as he lay back on his pillows, whiter than they,
 
 294 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 exhausted and yet refreshed by the sponging with vinegar and 
 water which the mother had just been administering to him ; 
 the bed, the gaps in the worm-eaten boards, the spots in the 
 roof where the plaster bulged inward, as though a snake would 
 bring it down ; the coarse china shepherdesses on the mantel- 
 shelf, and the flowers which Catherine had put there the day 
 before. He asked a few questions, said an abrupt word or two 
 to the mother, and they tramped downstairs again and into the 
 street. Then Robert took him across to the little improvised 
 hospital, saying to him on the threshold, with a moment's 
 hesitation, 
 
 ' As you know, for adults there is not much risk, but there is 
 always some risk 
 
 A peremptory movement of the squire's hand stopped him, 
 and they went in. In the downstairs room were half-a-dozen 
 convalescents, pale, shadowy creatures, four of them under ten, 
 sitting up in their little cots, each of them with a red flannel 
 jacket drawn from Lady Helen's stores, and enjoying the break- 
 fast which a nurse in white cap and apron had just brought 
 them. Upstairs, in a room from which a lath-and-plaster 
 partition had been removed, and which had been adapted, 
 warmed and ventilated by various contrivances to which Robert 
 and Meyrick had devoted their practical minds, were the ' four 
 anxious cases.' One of them, a little creature of six, one of 
 Sharland's black-eyed children, was sitting up, supported by the 
 nurse, and coughing its little life away. As soon as he saw it, 
 Robert's step quickened. He forgot the squire altogether. He 
 came and stood by the bedside, rigidly still, for he could do 
 nothing, but his whole soul absorbed in that horrible struggle 
 for air. How often he had seen it now, and never without the 
 same wild sense of revolt and protest ! At last the hideous 
 membrane was loosened, the child got relief, and lay back white 
 and corpse-like, but with a pitiful momentary relaxation of the 
 drawn lines on its little brow. Robert stooped and kissed the 
 damp tiny hand. The child's eyes remained shut, but the fingers 
 made a feeble effort to close on his. 
 
 'Mr. Elsmere,' said the nurse, a motherly body, looking at 
 him with friendly admonition, ' if you don't go home and rest 
 you'll be ill too, and I'd like to know who'll be the better for 
 that 1 ' 
 
 'How many deaths?' asked the squire abruptly, touching 
 Elsmere's arm, and so reminding Robert of his existence. 
 ' Meyrick spoke of deaths.' 
 
 He stood near the door, but his eyes were fixed on the little 
 bed, on the half -swooning child. 
 
 ' Seven,' said Robert, turning upon him. ' Five of diphtheria, 
 two of fever. That little one will go too.' 
 
 ' Horrible ! ' said the squire under his breath, and then 
 moved to the door. 
 
 The two men went downstairs in perfect silence. Below, in
 
 CHAP, xxi THE SQUIRE 295 
 
 the convalescent room, the children were capable of smiles, and 
 of quick coquettish beckonings to the rector to come and make 
 game with them as usual. But he could only kiss his hand to 
 them and escape, for there was more to do. 
 
 He took the squire through all the remaining fever cases, 
 and into several of the worst cottages Milsom's among them 
 and when it was all over they emerged into the lane again, near 
 the bridge. There was still a crowd of children and women 
 hanging about, watching eagerly for the squire, whom many of 
 them had never seen at all, and about whom various myths had 
 gradually formed themselves in the countryside. The squire 
 walked away from them hurriedly, followed by Robert, and 
 again they halted on the centre of the bridge. A horse led by 
 a groom was being walked up and down on a flat piece of road 
 just beyond. 
 
 It was an awkward moment. Robert never forgot the thrill 
 of it, or the association of wintry sunshine streaming down upon 
 a sparkling world of ice and delicate woodland and foam-flecked 
 river. 
 
 The squire turned towards him irresolutely ; his sharply-cut 
 wrinkled lips opening and closing again. Then he held out his 
 hand : ' Mr. Elsmere, I did you a wrong I did this place and 
 its people a wrong. In my view, regret for the past is useless. 
 Much of what has occurred here is plainly irreparable ; I will 
 think what can be done for the future. As for my relation to 
 you, it rests with you to say whether it can be amended. I 
 recognise that you have just cause of complaint.' 
 
 What invincible pride there was in the man's very surrender ! 
 But Elsmere was not repelled by it. He knew that in their 
 hour together the squire had felt. His soul had lost its bitter- 
 ness. The dead and their wrong were with God. 
 
 He took the squire's outstretched hand, grasping it cordially, 
 a pure unworldly dignity in his whole look and bearing. 
 
 ' Let us be friends, Mr. Wendover. It will be a great comfort 
 to us my wife and me. Will you remember us both very 
 kindly to Mrs. Darcy ? ' 
 
 Commonplace words, but words that made an epoch in the 
 life of both. In another minute the squire, on horseback, was 
 trotting along the side road leading to the Hall, and Robert was 
 speeding home to Catherine as fast as his long legs could carry 
 him. 
 
 She was waiting for him on the steps, shading her eyes 
 against the unwonted sun. He kissed her with the spirits or a 
 boy and told her all his news. 
 
 Catherine listened bewildered, not knowing what to say or 
 how all at once to forgive, to join Robert in forgetting. But 
 that strange spiritual glow about him was not to be withstood. 
 She threw her arms about him at last with a half sob, 
 
 ' Oh, Robert yes ! Dear Robert thank God ! ' 
 
 '.Never think any more,' he said at last, leading her in from
 
 296 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK HI 
 
 the little hall, ' of what has been, only of what shall be ! Oh, 
 Catherine, give me some tea ; and never did I see anything so 
 tempting as that armchair.' 
 
 He sank down into it, and when she put his breakfast beside 
 him she saw with a start that he was fast asleep. The wife 
 stood and watched him, the signs of fatigue round eyes and 
 mouth, the placid expression, and her face was soft with tender- 
 ness and joy. ' Of course of course, even that hard man must 
 love him. Who could help it 1 My Robert ! ' 
 
 And so now in this disguise, now in that, the supreme hour 
 of Catherine's life stole on and on towards her. 
 
 CHAPTER XXH 
 
 As may be imagined, the Churton Advertiser did not find its 
 way to Murewell. It was certainly no pressure of social dis- 
 approval that made the squire go down to Mile End in that 
 winter's dawn. The county might talk, or the local press 
 might harangue, till Doomsday, and Mr. Wendover would either 
 know nothing or care less. 
 
 Still his interview with Meyrick in the park after his return 
 from a week in town, whither he had gone to see some old 
 Berlin friends, had been a shock to him. A man may play the 
 intelligent recluse, may refuse to fit his life to his neighbours' 
 notions as much as you please, and still find death, especially 
 death for which he has some responsibility, as disturbing a fact 
 as the rest of us. 
 
 He went home in much irritable discomfort. It seemed to 
 him probably that fortune need not have been so eager to put 
 him in the wrong. To relieve his mind he sent for Henslowe, 
 and in an interview, the memory of which sent a shiver through 
 the agent to the end of his days, he let it be seen that though it 
 did not for the moment suit him to dismiss the man who had 
 brought this upon him, that man's reign in any true sense was 
 over. 
 
 But afterwards the squire was still restless. What was astir 
 in him was not so much pity or remorse as certain instincts of 
 race which still survived under the strange superstructure of 
 manners he had built upon them. It may be the part of a 
 gentleman and a scholar to let the agent whom you have inter- 
 posed between yourself and a boorish peasantry have a free 
 hand ; but, after all, the estate is yours, and to expose the rector 
 of the parish to all sorts of avoidable risks in the pursuit of his 
 official duty by reason of the gratuitous filth of your property, 
 is an act of doubtful breeding. The squire in his most rough- 
 and-tumble days at Berlin had always felt himself the grandee 
 as well as the student. He abhorred sentimentalised, but neither 
 did he choose to cut an unseemly figure in his own eyes.
 
 CHAP, xxn THE SQUIRE 297 
 
 After a night, therefore, less tranquil or less meditative than 
 usual, he rose early and sallied forth at one of those unusual 
 hours he generally chose for walking. The thing must be put 
 right somehow, and at once, with as little waste of time and 
 energy as possible, and Henslowe had shown himself not to be 
 trusted j so telling a servant to follow him, the squire had 
 made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen for 
 years. 
 
 Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition 
 of the rector. The squire did not want to be impressed by the 
 young man, did not want to make friends with him. No doubt 
 his devotion had served his own purposes. Still Mr. Wendover 
 was one of the subtlest living judges of character when he 
 pleased, and his enforced progress through these hovels with 
 Elsmere had not exactly softened him, but had filled him with 
 a curious contempt for his own hastiness of judgment. 
 
 4 History would be inexplicable after all without the honest 
 fanatic,' he said to himself on the way home. ' I suppose I had 
 forgotten it. There is nothing like a dread of being bored for 
 blunting your psychological instinct.' 
 
 In the course of the day he sent off a letter to the rector in- 
 timating in the very briefest, driest way that the cottages 
 should be rebuilt on a different site as soon as possible, and en- 
 closing a liberal contribution towards the expenses incurred in 
 fighting the epidemic. When the letter was gone he drew his 
 books towards him with a sound which was partly disgust, 
 partly relief. This annoying business had wretchedly inter- 
 rupted him, and his concessions left him mainly conscious of 
 a strong nervous distaste for the idea of any fresh interview 
 with young Elsmere. He had got his money and his apology ; 
 let him be content. 
 
 However, next morning after breakfast Mr. Wendover once 
 more saw his study door open to admit the tall figure of the 
 rector. The note and cheque had reached Robert late the night 
 before, and, true to his new-born determination to make the best 
 of the squire, he had caught up his wideawake at the first oppor- 
 tunity and walked off to the Hall to acknowledge the gift in per- 
 son. The interview opened as awkwardly as it was possible, and 
 with their former conversation on the same spot fresh in their 
 minds both men spent a sufficiently difficult ten minutes. The 
 squire was asking himself, indeea, impatiently, all the time, 
 whether lie could possibly be forced in the future to put up 
 with such an experience again, and Robert found his host, if 
 less sarcastic than before, certainly as impenetrable as ever. 
 
 At last, however, the Mile End matter was exhausted, and 
 then Robert, as good luck would have it, turned his longing 
 eyes on the squire s books, especially on the latest volumes of a 
 magnificent German Weltgeschichte lying near his elbow, which 
 he had coveted for months without being able to conquer hi3 
 conscience sufficiently to become the possessor of it. He took it
 
 298 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 up with an exclamation of delight, and a quiet critical remark 
 that exactly hit the value and scope of the book. The squire's 
 eyebrows went up, and the corners of his mouth slackened 
 visibly. Half an hour later the two men, to the amazement of 
 Mrs. Darcy, who was watching them from the drawing-room 
 window, walked back to the park gates together, and what 
 Robert's nobility and beauty of character would never have won 
 him, though he had worn himself to death in the service of the 
 poor and the tormented under the squire's eyes, a chance 
 coincidence of intellectual interest had won him almost in a 
 moment. 
 
 The squire walked back to the house under a threatening 
 sky, 'his mackintosh cloak wrapped about him, his arms folded, 
 his mind full of an unwonted excitement. 
 
 The sentiment of long-past days days in Berlin, in Paris, 
 where conversations such as that he had just passed through 
 were the daily relief and reward of labour, was stirring in him. 
 Occasionally he had endeavoured to import the materials for 
 them from the Continent, from London. But as a matter of fact 
 it was years since he had had any such talk as this with an 
 Englishman on English ground, and he suddenly realised that he 
 had been unwholesomely solitary, and that for the scholar there 
 is no nerve stimulus like that of an occasional interchange of 
 ideas with some one acquainted with his Fach. 
 
 1 Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and 
 aptitudes of such a kind in this long-legged optimist V The squire 
 shrugged his shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in 
 such a personality to combine both worlds, the world of action 
 and the world of thought. Absurd ! Of course, ultimately one 
 or other must go to the wall. 
 
 Meanwhile, what a ludicrous waste of time and opportunity 
 that he and this man should have been at cross-purposes like 
 this ! ' Why the deuce couldn't he have given some rational 
 account of himself to begin with ! ' thought the squire irritably, 
 forgetting, of course, who it was that had wholly denied him the 
 opportunity. ' And then the sending back of those books : 
 what a piece of idiocy ! ' 
 
 Granted an historical taste in this youngparson, it wasacurious 
 chance, Mr. Wendover reflected, that in his choice of a subject 
 he should just have fallen on the period of the later empire of 
 the passage from the old world to the new, where the squire 
 was a master. The squire fell to thinking of the kind of know- 
 ledge implied in his remarks, of the stage he seemed to have 
 reached, and then to cogitating as to the books he must be now 
 in want of. He went back to his library, ran over the shelves, 
 picking out volumes here and there with an unwonted glow and 
 interest all the while. He sent for a case, and made a youth 
 who sometimes acted as his secretary pack them. And still as 
 he went back to his own work new names would occur to him, 
 and full of the scholar's avaricious sense of the shortness of
 
 CHAP, xxi r THE SQUIRE 299 
 
 time, he would shake his head and frown over the three months 
 which young Elsniere had already passed, grappling with prob- 
 lems like Teutonic Arianism, the spread of Monasticism in Gaul, 
 and Heaven knows what besides, half a mile from the man and 
 the library which could have supplied him with the best help 
 to be got in England, unbenefited by either ! Mile End was 
 obliterated, and the annoyance of the morning forgotten. 
 
 The next day was Sunday, a wet January Sunday, raw and 
 sleety, the frost breaking up on all sides and flooding the roads 
 with mire. 
 
 Robert, rising in his place to begin morning service, and won- 
 dering to see the congregation so good on such a . day, was sud- 
 denly startled, as his eye travelled mechanically over to the 
 Hall pew, usually tenanted by Mrs. Darcy in solitary state, to 
 see the characteristic figure of the squire. His amazement was 
 so great that he almost stumbled in the exhortation, and his 
 feeling was evidently shared by the congregation, which through- 
 out the service showed a restlessness, an excited tendency to 
 peer round corners and pillars, that was not favourable to 
 devotion. 
 
 ' Has he come to spy out the land ? ' the rector thought to 
 liimself, and could not help a momentary tremor at the idea of 
 preaching before so formidable an auditor. Then he pulled 
 himself together by a great effort, and fixing his eyes on a shock- 
 headed urchin half way down the church, read the service to 
 him. Catherine meanwhile in her seat on the northern side of 
 the nave, her soul lulled in Sunday peace, knew nothing of Mr. 
 Wendover's appearance. 
 
 Robert preached on the first sermon of Jesus, on the first ap- 
 pearance of the young Master in the synagogue at Nazareth : 
 
 ' This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears I ' 
 
 The sermon dwelt on the Messianic aspect of Christ's mission, 
 on the mystery and poetry of that long national expectation, on 
 the pathos of Jewish disillusion, on the sureness and beauty of 
 Christian insight as faith gradually transferred trait after trait 
 of the Messiah of prophecy to the Christ of Nazareth. At first 
 there was a certain amount of hesitation, a slight wavering 
 hither and thither a difficult choice of words and then the 
 soul freed itself from man, and the preacher forgot all but his 
 Master and his people. 
 
 At the door as he came out stood Mr. Wendover, and Catherine, 
 slightly flushed and much puzzled for conversation, beside him. 
 The Hall carriage was drawn close up to the door, and Mrs. 
 Darcy, evidently much excited, had her small head out of the 
 window^ and was showering a number of flighty inquiries and 
 suggestions on her brother, to which he paid no more heed than 
 to the patter of the rain. 
 
 When Robert appeared the squire addressed him ceremoni- 
 ously 
 
 ' With your leave, Mr. Elsmere, I will walk with you to the
 
 300 EGBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 rectory.' Then, in another voice, ' Go home, Lsetitia, and don't 
 send anything or anybody.' 
 
 He made a signal to the coachman, and the carriage started, 
 Mrs. Darcy's protesting head remaining out of window as long 
 as anything could be seen of the group at the church door. The 
 odd little creature had paid one or two hurried and recent visits 
 to Catherine during the quarrel, visits so filled, however, with 
 vague railing against her brother and by a queer incoherent 
 melancholy, that Catherine felt them extremely uncomfortable, 
 and took care not to invite them. Clearly she was mortally 
 afraid of ' Roger,' and yet ashamed of being afraid. Catherine 
 could see that all the poor thing's foolish whims and affectations 
 were trampled on ; that she suffered, rebelled, found herself no 
 more able to affect Mr. Wendover than if she had been a fly 
 buzzing round him, and became all the more foolish and whimsical 
 in consequence. 
 
 The squire and the Elsmeres crossed the common to the 
 rectory, followed at a discreet interval by groups of villagers 
 curious to get a look at the squire. Robert was conscious of a 
 good deal of embarrassment, but did his best to hide it. Catherine 
 felt all through as if the skies had fallen. The squire alone was 
 at his ease, or as much at his ease as he ^ver was. He com- 
 mented on the congregation, even condescended to say some- 
 thing of the singing, and passed over the staring of the chor- 
 isters with a magnanimity of silence which did hirn credit. 
 
 They reached the rectory door, and it was evidently the 
 squire's purpose to come in, so Robert invited him in. Catherine 
 threw open her little drawing-room door, and then was seized 
 with shyness as the squire passed in, and she saw over his 
 shoulder her baby, lying kicking and crowing on the hearth- 
 rug, in anticipation of her arrival, the nurse watching it. The 
 squire in his great cloak stopped, and looked down at the 
 baby as if it had been some curious kind of reptile. The nurse 
 blushed, curtsied, and caught up the gurgling creature in a 
 twinkling. 
 
 Robert made a laughing remark on the tyranny and ubiquity 
 of babies. The squire smiled grimly. He supposed it was 
 necessary that the human race should be carried on. Catherine 
 meanwhile slipped out and ordered another place to be laid at 
 the dinner-table, devoutly hoping that it might not be used. 
 
 It was used. The squire stayed till it was necessary to invite 
 him, then accepted the invitation, and Catherine found herself 
 dispensing boiled mutton to him, while Robert supplied him 
 with some very modest claret, the sort of wine which a man 
 who drinks none thinks it necessary to have in the house, and 
 watched the nervousness of their little parlour -maid with a 
 fellow-feeling which made it difficult for him during the early 
 part of the meal to keep a perfectly straight countenance. 
 After a while, however, both he and Catherine were ready to 
 admit that the squire was making himself agreeable. He talked
 
 CHAP, xxii THE SQUIRE 301 
 
 of Paris, of a conversation he had had with M. Renan, whose 
 name luckily was quite unknown to Catherine, as to the state of 
 things in the French Chamber. 
 
 ' A se f . of chemists and quill-drivers,' he said contemptuously ; 
 ' but as llenan remarked to me, there is one thing to be said for 
 a government of that sort, " Us ne font pas la guerre." And so 
 long as they don't run France into adventures, and a man can 
 keep a roof over his head and a sou in his pocket, the men of 
 letters at any rate can rub along. The really interesting thing 
 in France just now is not French politics Heaven save the 
 mark ! but French scholarship. There never was so little 
 original genius going in Paris, and there never was so much 
 good work being done.' 
 
 Robert thought the point of view eminently characteristic. 
 
 ' Catholicism, I suppose,' he said. ' as a force to be reckoned 
 with, is dwindling more and more ? 
 
 'Absolutely dead,' said the squire emphatically, 'as an in- 
 tellectual force. They haven't got a writer, scarcely a preacher. 
 Not one decent book has been produced on that side for years.' 
 
 ' And the Protestants, too,' said Robert, ' have lost all their 
 best men of late,' and he mentioned one or two well-known 
 French Protestant names. 
 
 ' Oh, as to French Protestantism ' and the squire's shrug was 
 superb ' Teutonic Protestantism is in the order of things, so to 
 speak, but Latin Protestantism ! There is no more sterile 
 hybrid in the world ! ' 
 
 Then, becoming suddenly aware that he might have said 
 something inconsistent with his company, the squire stopped 
 abruptly. Robert, catching Catherine's quick compression of 
 the lips, was grateful to him, and the conversation moved on 
 in another direction. 
 
 Yes, certainly, all things considered, Mr. Wendover made 
 himself agreeable. He ate his boiled mutton and drank his 
 ordinaire like a man, and when the meal was over, and he and 
 Robert had withdrawn into the study, he gave an emphatic 
 word of praise to the coffee which Catherine s housewifely care 
 sent after them, and accepting a cigar, he sank into the arm- 
 chair by the fire and spread a bony hand to the blaze, as if he 
 had been at home in that particular corner for months. Robert, 
 sitting opposite to him, and watching his guest's eyes travel 
 round the room, with its medicine shelves, its rods and nets, 
 and preparations of uncanny beasts, its parish litter, and its 
 teeming bookcases, felt that the Mile End matter was turning 
 out oddly indeed. 
 
 ' I have packed you a case of books, Mr. Elsmere,' said the 
 squire, after a puff or two at his cigar. ' How have you got on 
 without that collection of Councils v 
 
 He smiled a little awkwardly. It was one of the books 
 Robert had sent back. Robert flushed. He did not want 
 the squire to regard him as wholly dependent on Murewell.
 
 302 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 ' I bought it,' he said, rather shortly. ' I have ruined myself 
 in books lately, and the London Library too supplies me really 
 wonderfully well.' 
 
 ' Are these your books ? ' The squire got up to look at them. 
 ' Hum, not at all bad for a beginning. I have sent you so and 
 so,' and he named one or two costly folios that Robert had long 
 pined for in vain. 
 
 The rector's eyes glistened. 
 
 ' That was very good of you,' he said simply. ' They will be 
 most welcome.' 
 
 ' And now, how much time, 1 said the other, settling himself 
 again to his cigar, his thin legs crossed over each other, and his 
 great head sunk into his shoulders, ' how much time do you give 
 to this work ? ' 
 
 ' Generally the mornings not always. A man with twelve 
 hundred souls to look after, you know, Mr. Wendover,' said 
 Elsmere, with a bright half -defiant accent, ' can't make grubbing 
 among the Franks his main business.' 
 
 The squire said nothing, and smoked on. Robert gathered 
 that his companion thought his chances of doing anything 
 worth mentioning very small. 
 
 ' Oh no,' he said, following out his own thought with a shake 
 of his curly hair ; ' of course I shall never do very much. But 
 if I don't, it won't be for want of knowing what the scholar's 
 ideal is.' And he lifted his hand with a smile towards the 
 squire's book on English Culture, which stood in the bookcase 
 just above him. The squire, following the gesture, smiled too. 
 It was a faint, slight illumining, but it changed the face agree- 
 ably. 
 
 Robert began to ask questions about the book, about the 
 pictures contained in it of foreign life and foreign universities. 
 The squire consented to be drawn out, and presently was talking 
 at his very best. 
 
 Racy stories of Mommsen or Von Ranke were followed by a 
 description of an evening of mad carouse with Heine a talk at 
 Nohant with George Sand scenes in the Duchesse de Broglie's 
 salon a contemptuous sketch of Guizot a caustic sketch of 
 Renan. Robert presently even laid aside his pipe, and stood in 
 his favourite attitude, lounging against the mantelpiece, looking 
 down, absorbed, on his visitor. All that intellectual passion 
 which his struggle at Mile End had for the moment checked in 
 him revived. Nay, after his weeks of exclusive contact with 
 the most hideous forms of bodily ill, this interruption, these 
 great names, this talk of great movements and great causes, 
 had a special savour and relish. All the horizons of the mind 
 expanded, the currents of the blood ran quicker. 
 
 Suddenly, however, he sprang up. 
 
 ' I beg your pardon, Mr. Wendover, it is too bad to interrupt 
 you I have enjoyed it immensely but the fact is I have only 
 two minutes to get to Sunday School in ! '
 
 CHAP, xxn THE SQUIRE 303 
 
 Mr. Wendover rose also, and resumed his ordinary manner. 
 
 'It is I who should apologise,' he said with stiff politeness, 
 'for having encroached in this way on your busy day, Mr. 
 Elsmere.' 
 
 Robert helped him on with his coat, and then suddenly the 
 squire turned to him. 
 
 'You were preaching this morning on one of the Isaiah 
 quotations in St. Matthew. It would interest you, I imagine, 
 to see a recent Jewish book on the subject of the prophecies 
 quoted in the Gospels which reached me yesterday. There is 
 nothing particularly new in it, but it looked to me well done.' 
 
 "Thank you,' said Robert, not, however, with any great 
 heartiness, and the squire moved away. They parted at the 
 gate, Robert running down the hill to the village as fast as his 
 long legs could carry him. 
 
 ' Sunday School pshaw ! ' cried the squire, as he tramped 
 homeward in the opposite direction. 
 
 Next morning a huge packing-case arrived from the Hall, 
 and Robert could not forbear a little gloating over the treasures 
 in it before he tore himself away to pay his morning visit to 
 Mile End. There everything was improving ; the poor Shar- 
 land child indeed had slipped away on the night after the 
 squire's visit, but the other bad cases in the diphtheria ward 
 were mending fast. John Allwood was gaining strength daily, 
 and poor Mary Sharland was feebly struggling back to a life 
 which seemed hardly worth so much effort to keep. Robert 
 felt, with a welcome sense of slackening strain, that the daily 
 and hourly superintendence which he and Catherine had been 
 giving to the place might lawfully be relaxed, that the nurses 
 on the spot were now more than equal to their task, and after 
 having made his round he raced home again in order to secure 
 an hour with his books before luncheon. 
 
 The following day a note arrived, while they were at luncheon, 
 in the squire's angular precise handwriting. It contained a 
 request that, unless otherwise engaged, the rector would walk 
 with Mr. Wendover that afternoon. 
 
 Robert flung it across to Catherine. 
 
 ' Let me see,' he said, deliberating, ' have I any engagement 
 I must keep 1 ' 
 
 There was a sort of jealousy for his work witliin him contend- 
 ing with this new fascination of the squire's company. But, 
 honestly, there was nothing in the way, and he went. 
 
 That walk was the first of many. The squire had no sooner 
 convinced himselPthat young Elsmere's society did in reality 
 provide him with a stimulus and recreation he had been too 
 long without, than in his imperious wilful way he began to 
 possess himself of it as much as possible. He never alluded to 
 the trivial matters which had first separated and then united 
 them. He worked the better, he thought the more clearly, for 
 these talks and walks with Elsmere, and therefore these talks
 
 304 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 and walks became an object with him. They supplied a long- 
 stifled want, the scholar's want of disciples, of some form of 
 investment for all that heaped-up capital of thought he had 
 been accumulating during a lifetime. 
 
 As for Robert, he soon felt himself so much under the spell 
 of the squire's strange and powerful personality that he was 
 forced to make a fight for it, lest this new claim should encroach 
 upon the old ones. He would walk when the squire liked, but 
 three times out of four these walks must be parish rounds, 
 interrupted by descents into cottages and chats in farmhouse 
 parlours. The squire submitted. The neighbourhood began to 
 wonder over the strange spectacle of Mr. Wendover waiting 
 grimly in the winter dusk outside one of his own farmhouses 
 while Elsmere was inside, or patrolling a bit of lane till Elsmere 
 should have inquired after an invalid or beaten up a recruit for 
 his confirmation class, dogged the while by stealthy children, 
 with fingers in their mouths, who ran away in terror directly he 
 turned. 
 
 Rumours of this new friendship spread. One day, on the bit 
 of road between the Hall and the rectory, Lady Helen behind 
 her ponies whirled past the two men, and her arch look at 
 Elsmere said as plain as words, ' Oh, you young wonder ! what 
 hook has served you with this leviathan ? ' 
 
 On another occasion, close to Churton, a man in a cassock 
 and cloak came towards them. The squire put up his eyeglass. 
 
 ' Humph ! ' he remarked ; ' do you know this merryandrew, 
 Elsmere 1 ' 
 
 It was Newcome. As they passed, Robert with slightly 
 heightened colour gave him an affectionate nod and smile. 
 Newcome's quick eye ran over the companions, he responded 
 stiffly, and his step grew more rapid. A week or two later 
 Robert noticed with a little prick of remorse that he had seen 
 nothing of Newcome for an age. If Newcome would not come 
 to him, he must go to Mottringham. He planned an expedition, 
 but something happened to prevent it. 
 
 And Catherine? Naturally this new and most unexpected 
 relation of Robert's to the man who had begun by insulting him 
 was of considerable importance to the wife. In the first place 
 it broke up to some extent the exquisite tete-a-tete of their home 
 life ; it encroached often upon time that had always been hers ; 
 it filled Robert's mind more and more with matters in which 
 she had no concern. All these things many wives might have 
 resented. Catherine Elsmere resented none of them. It is 
 probable, of course, that she had her natural moments of regret 
 and comparison, when love said to itself a little sorely and 
 hungrily, ' It is hard to be even a fraction less to him than I 
 once was ! ' But if so, these moments never betrayed themselves 
 in word or act. Her tender common sense, her sweet humility, 
 made her recognise at once Robert's need of intellectual comrade- 
 ship, isolated as he was in this remote rural district. She knew
 
 CHAP, xxn THE SQUIRE 305 
 
 perfectly that a clergyman's life of perpetual giving forth 
 becomes morbid and unhealthy if there is not some correspond- 
 ing taking in. 
 
 If only it had not been Mr. Wendover ! She marvelled over 
 the fascination Robert found in his dry cynical taHc. She 
 wondered that a Christian pastor could ever forget Mr. Wend- 
 over's antecedents ; that the man who had nursed those sick 
 children could -forgive Mile End. All in all as they were to 
 each other, she felt for the first time that she often understood 
 her husband imperfectly. His mobility, his eagerness, were 
 sometimes now a perplexity, even a pain to her. 
 
 It must not be imagined, however, that Robert let himself 
 drift into this intellectual intimacy with one of the most 
 distinguished of anti-Christian thinkers without reflecting on 
 its possible consequences. The memory of that night of misery 
 which The Idols of the Market-place had inflicted on him was 
 enough. He was no match in controversy for Mr. Wendover, 
 and he did not mean to attempt it. 
 
 One morning the squire unexpectedly plunged into an 
 account of a German monograph he had just received on the 
 subject of the Johannine authorship of the Fourth Gospel. It 
 was almost the first occasion on which he had touched what may 
 strictly be called the materiel of orthodoxy in their discussions 
 at any rate directly. But the book was a striking one, and 
 in the interest of it he had clearly forgotten his ground a little. 
 Suddenly the man who was walking beside him interrupted him. 
 
 'I think we ought to understand one another perhaps, Mr. 
 Wendover,' Robert said, speaking under a quick sense of 
 oppression, but with his usual dignity and bright courtesy. ' I 
 know your opinions, of course, from your books ; you know 
 what mine, as an honest man, must be, from the position I hold. 
 My conscience does not forbid me to discuss anything, only I 
 am no match for you on points of scholarship, and I should just 
 like to say once for all, that to me, whatever else is true, the 
 religion of Christ is true. I am a Christian and a Christian 
 minister. Therefore, whenever we come to discuss what may 
 be called Christian evidence, I do it with reserves, which you 
 would not have. I believe in an Incarnation, a Resurrection, a 
 Revelation. If there are literary difficulties, I must want to 
 smooth them away you may want to make much of them. We 
 come to the matter from different points of view. You will not 
 quarrel with me for wanting to make it clear. It isn't as if we 
 differed slightly. We differ fundamentally is it not so ? ' 
 
 The squire was walking beside him with bent shoulders, the 
 lower lip pushed forward, as was usual with him when he was 
 considering a matter with close attention, but did not mean to 
 communicate his thoughts. 
 
 After a pause he said, with a faint inscrutable smile, 
 
 'Your reminder is perfectly just. Naturally we all have our 
 reserves. Neither of us can be expected to stultify his own.' 
 
 x
 
 306 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 And the talk went forward again, Robert joining in more 
 buoyantly than ever, perhaps because he had achieved a 
 necessary but disagreeable thing and got done with it. 
 
 Tn reality he had but been doing as the child does when it 
 sets up its sand-barrier against the tide. 
 
 CHAPTER XXin 
 
 IT was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending 
 its golden empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of 
 the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel roots and 
 beginning to gleam along the edges of the river. On the grass 
 commons between Murewell and Mile End the birches rose like 
 green clouds against the browns and purples of the still leafless 
 oaks and beeches. The birds were twittering and building. 
 Every day Robert was on the look-out for the swallows, or 
 listening for the first notes of the nightingale amid the bare 
 spring coverts. 
 
 But the spring was less perfectly delightful to him than it 
 might have been, for Catherine was away. Mrs. Leyburn, who 
 was to have come south to them in February, was attacked by 
 bronchitis instead at Burwood and forbidden to move, even to a 
 warmer climate. In March, Catherine, feeling restless and 
 anxious about her mother, and thinking it hard that Agnes 
 should have all the nursing and responsibility, tore herself from 
 her man and her baby, and went north to Whinclale for a 
 fortnight, leaving Robert forlorn. 
 
 Now, however, she was in London, whither she had gone for 
 a few days on her way home, to meet Rose and to shop. 
 Robert's opinion was that all women, even St. Elizabeths, have 
 somewhere rooted in them an inordinate partiality for shopping ; 
 otherwise why should that operation take four or five mortal 
 days ? Surely with a little energy, one might buy up the whole 
 of London in twelve hours ! However, Catherine lingered, and 
 as her purchases were made, Robert crossly supposed it must be 
 all Rose's fault. He believed that Rose spent a great deal too 
 much on dress. 
 
 Catherine's letters, of course, were full of her sister. Rose, 
 she said, had come back from Berlin handsomer than ever, and 
 playing, she supposed, magnificently. At any rate, the letters 
 which followed her in shoals from Berlin flattered her to the 
 skies, and during the three months preceding her return Joachim 
 himself had taken her as a pupil and given her unusual atten- 
 tion. 
 
 'And now, of course,' wrote Catherine, 'she is desperately 
 disappointed that mamma and Agnes cannot join her in town, 
 as she had hoped. She does her best, I know, poor child, to 
 conceal it and to feel as she ought about mamma, but I can see
 
 CHAP, xxin THE SQUIRE 307 
 
 that the idea of an indefinite time at Burwood is intolerable to 
 her. As to Berlin, I think she has enjoyed it, but she talks very 
 scornfully of German Schwarmerei and German women, and she 
 tells the oddest stories of her professors. With one or two of 
 them she seems to have been in a state of war from the begin- 
 ning ; but some of them, my dear Robert, I am persuaded were 
 just simply in love with her ! 
 
 ' I don't-^no, I never shall believe, that independent exciting 
 student's life is good for a girl. But I never say so to Rose. 
 When she forgets to be irritable and to feel that the world is 
 
 going against her, she is often very sweet to me, and I can't 
 ear there should be any conflict.' 
 
 His next day's letter contained the following : 
 
 'Are you properly amused, sir, at your wife's performances 
 in town f Our three concerts you have heard all about. I still 
 can't get over them. I go about haunted by the seriousness, the 
 life-and-death interest people throw into music. It is astonish- 
 ing ! And outside, as we got into our hansom, such sights 
 and sounds ! such starved fierce -looking men, such ghastly 
 women ! 
 
 ' But since then Rose has been taking me into society. Yes- 
 terday 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 rib- 
 bons 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 
 rechercM which may be. She talked to Rose of nothing but 
 acting, especially of Madame Desfor6ts. 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 Char- 
 lotte 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,
 
 308 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 Lady Charlotte included. The gentlemen stared at her a great 
 deal, and Lady Charlotte paid her one or two compliments on 
 her looks, which / 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 hum- 
 drum 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 Char- 
 lotte 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 pro- 
 file. 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 i 
 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.
 
 CHAP, xxin THE SQUIRE 309 
 
 '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 widowetl 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 ungrate- 
 ful 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 every- 
 thing. 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 judg- 
 ment 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 Dash wood,' nam- 
 ing 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 prob- 
 lems 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 know- 
 ledge ! ' 
 
 He spoke in a glow of energy and enthusiasm. Catherine sat
 
 310 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 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 feefcas 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 manreuvres. 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 pre- 
 pared 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 
 ndivetd 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 intel- 
 lectual 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,
 
 CHAP, xxin THE SQUIRE 811 
 
 and HensloWs 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 impa- 
 tiently ; ' 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 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 any- 
 thing 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
 
 312 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK ill 
 
 make himself heard. In vain. Henslowe was physically in- 
 capable 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 church- 
 warden, 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 ivas he always at work on ?
 
 CHAP, xxiv THE SQUIRE 313 
 
 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, devas- 
 tating 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 
 peacef ulness 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.
 
 314 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 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 Lang- 
 ham'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 exam- 
 ination 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 ? ' 
 
 1 A giant's task ! ' cried Robert : 'hardly conceivable ! ' 
 
 The squire smiled slightly the smile of a man who looks
 
 CHAP, xxiv THE SQUIRE 315 
 
 back with indulgent half-melancholy satire on the rash ambi- 
 tions of liis 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 Judsea. 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 some- 
 thing cynical in the smile which accompanied the words, 
 
 ' But I have no wish to infringe our convention.' 
 
 ' A convention was it ? ' replied Elsmere, flushing. ' I think 
 I only wanted to make my own position clear and prevent mis- 
 understanding. But it is impossible that I should be indifferent 
 to the results of thirty years such work as you can give to so 
 great a subject.' 
 
 The squire drew himself up a little under his cloak and
 
 316 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 seemed to consider. His tired eyes, fixed on the spring lane 
 before them, saw in reality only the long retrospects of the past. 
 Then a light broke in them, transformed them a light of battle. 
 He turned to the man beside him, and his sharp look swept over 
 him from head to foot. Well, if he would have it, let him have 
 it. He had been contemptuously content so far to let the sub- 
 ject be. But Mr. Wendover, in spite of his philosophy, had 
 never been proof all his life against an anti-clerical instinct 
 worthy almost of a Paris municipal councillor. In spite of his 
 fatigue there woke in him a kind of cruel whimsical pleasure 
 at the notion of speaking, once for all, what he conceived to be 
 the whole bare truth to this clever attractive dreamer, to the 
 young fellow who thought he could condescend to science from 
 the standpoint of the Christian miracles ! 
 
 ' Results ? ' he said interrogatively. ' Well, as you will under- 
 stand, it is tolerably difficult to summarise such a mass at a 
 moment's notice. But I can give you the lines of my last 
 volumes, if it would interest you to hear them.' 
 
 That walk prolonged itself far beyond Mr. Wendover's 
 original intention. There was something in the situation, in 
 Elsmere's comments, or arguments, or silences, which after a 
 while banished the scholar's sense 01 exhaustion and made him 
 oblivious of the country distances. No man feels another's soul 
 quivering and struggling in his grasp without excitement, let 
 his nerve and his self-restraint be what they may. 
 
 As for Elsmere, that hour and a half, little as he realised it 
 at the time, represented the turning-point of life. He listened, 
 he suggested, he put in an acute remark here, an argument 
 there, such as the squire had often difficulty in meeting. Every 
 now and then the inner protest of an attacked faith would 
 break through in words so full of poignancy, in imagery so 
 dramatic, that the squire's closely-knit sentences would be for 
 the moment wholly disarranged. On the whole, he proved him- 
 self no mean guardian of all that was most sacred to himself 
 and to Catherine, and the squire's intellectual respect for him 
 rose considerably. 
 
 All the same, by the end of their conversation that first 
 period of happy unclouded youth we have been considering was 
 over for poor Elsmere. In obedience to certain inevitable laws 
 and instincts of the mind, he had been for months tempting his 
 fate, inviting catastrophe. None the less did the first sure 
 approaches of that catastrophe fill him with a restless resistance 
 which was in itself anguish. 
 
 As to the squire's talk, it was simply the outpouring of 
 one of the richest, most sceptical, and most highly-trained of 
 minds on the subject of Christian origins. At no previous 
 period of his life would it have greatly affected Elsmere. But 
 now at every step the ideas, impressions, arguments bred 
 in him by his months of historical work and ordinary converse 
 with the squire rushed in, as they had done once before, to
 
 CHAP, xxiv THE SQUIRE 317 
 
 cripple resistance, to check an emerging answer, to justify 
 Mr. Wendover. 
 
 We may quote a few fragmentary utterances taken almost at 
 random from the long wrestle of the two men, for the sake of 
 indicating the main lines of a bitter after-struggle. 
 
 'Testimony like every other human product has developed. 
 Man's power of apprehending and recording what he sees and 
 hears has grown from less to more, from weaker to stronger, 
 like any other of his faculties, just as the reasoning powers of 
 the cave-dweller have developed into the reasoning powers of a 
 Kant. What one wants is the ordered proof of this, and it can 
 be got from history and experience.' 
 
 'To plunge into the Christian period without haying first 
 cleared the mind as to what is meant in history and literature 
 by " the critical method," which in history may be defined as 
 the "science of what is credible," and in literature as "the 
 science of what is rational," is to invite fiasco. The theologian 
 in such a state sees no obstacle to accepting an arbitrary list of 
 documents with all the strange stuff they may contain, and 
 declaring them to be sound historical material, while he applies 
 to all the strange stuff of a similar kind surrounding them the 
 most rigorous principles of modern science. Or he has to make 
 believe that the reasoning processes exhibited in the speeches 
 of the Acts, in certain, passages of St. Paul's Epistles, or in the 
 Old Testament quotations in the Gospels, have a validity for the 
 mind of the nineteenth century, when in truth they are the 
 imperfect, half -childish products of the mind of the first 
 century, of quite insignificant or indirect value to the his- 
 torian of fact, of enormous value to the historian of testimony 
 and its varieties.' 
 
 'Suppose, for instance, before I begin to deal with the 
 Christian story, and the earliest Christian development, I try 
 to make out beforehand what are the moulds, the channels into 
 which the testimony of the time must run. I look for these 
 moulds, of course, in the dominant ideas, the intellectual pre- 
 conceptions and preoccupations existing when the period 
 begins. 
 
 ' In the first place, I shall find present in the age which saw 
 the birth of Christianity, as in so many other ages, a universal 
 preconception in favour of miracle that is to say, of deviations 
 from the common norm of experience, governing the work of 
 all men of all schools. Very well, allow for it then. Read the 
 testimony of the period in the light of it. Be prepared for the 
 inevitable differences between it and the testimony of your own 
 day. The witness of the time is not true, nor, in the strict 
 sense, false. It is merely incompetent, half -trained, pre- 
 scientific, but all through perfectly natural The wonder would
 
 318 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 have been to have had a life of Christ without miracles. The 
 air teems with them. The East is full of Messiahs. Even a 
 Tacitus is superstitious. Even a Vespasian works miracles. 
 Even a, Nero cannot die, but fifty years after his death is still 
 looked for as the inaugurator of a millennium of horror. The 
 Resurrection is partly invented, partly imagined, partly ideally 
 true in any case wholly intelligible and natural, as a product 
 of the age, when once you have the key of that age. 
 
 ' In the next place, look for the preconceptions that have a 
 definite historical origin j those, for instance, flowing from the 
 pre-Christian, apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking the 
 Maccabean legend of T)aniel as the centre of inquiry those 
 flowing from Alexandrian Judaism and the school of Philo 
 those flowing from the Palestinian schools of exegesis. Examine 
 your synoptic gospels, your Gospel of St. John, your Apocalypse, 
 in the light of these. You have no other chance of understand- 
 ing them. But so examined, they fall into place, become 
 explicable and rational ; such material as science can make full 
 use of. The doctrine of the Divinity of Christ, Christian 
 eschatology, and Christian views of prophecy will also have 
 found their place in a sound historical scheme ! ' 
 
 ' It is discreditable now for the man of intelligence to refuse 
 to read his Livy in the light of his Mommsen. My object has 
 been to help in making it discreditable to him to refuse to read 
 his Christian documents in the light of a trained scientific 
 criticism. We shall have made some positive advance in 
 rationality when the man who is perfectly capable of dealing 
 sanely with legend in one connection, and, in another, will 
 insist on confounding it with history proper, cannot do so any 
 longer without losing caste, without falling ipso facto out of 
 court with men of education. It is enough for a man of letters 
 if he has helped ever so little in the final staking out of the 
 boundaries between reason and unreason ! ' 
 
 And so on. These are mere ragged gleanings from an ample 
 store. The discussion in reality ranged over the whole field of 
 history, plunged into philosophy, and into the subtlest problems 
 of mind. At the end of it, after he had been conscious for many 
 bitter moments of that same constriction of heart which had 
 overtaken him once before at Mr. Wendoyer's hands, the 
 religious passion in Elsmere once more rose with sudden stub- 
 born energy against the iron negations pressed upon it. 
 
 ' I will not fight you any more, Mr. Wendover,' he said, with 
 his moved flashing look. 'I am perfectly conscious that my 
 own mental experience of the last two years has made it 
 necessary to re-examine some of these intellectual foundations 
 of faith. But as to the faith itself, that is its own witness. It 
 does not depend, after all, upon anything external, but upon the 
 living voice of the Eternal in the soul of man ! '
 
 CHAP, xxiv THE SQUIRE 319 
 
 Involuntarily his pace quickened. The whole man was 
 gathered into one great, useless, pitiful defiance, and the outer 
 world was forgotten. The squire kept up with difficulty a while, 
 a faint glimmer of sarcasm playing now and then round the 
 straight thin-lipped mouth. Then suddenly he stopped. 
 
 'No, let it be. Forget me and my book, Elsmere. Every- 
 thing can be got out of in this world. By the way, we seem to 
 have reached the ends of the earth. Those are the new Mile 
 End cottages, I believe. With your leave, I'll sit down in one 
 of them, and send to the Hall for the carriage.' 
 
 Elsmere's repentant attention was drawn at once to his 
 companion. 
 
 'I am a selfish idiot,' he said hotly, 'to have led you into 
 over-walking and over-talking like this.' 
 
 The squire made some short reply and instantly turned the 
 matter off. The momentary softness which had marked his 
 meeting with Elsmere had entirely vanished, leaving only the 
 Mr. Wendover of every day, who was merely made awkward 
 and unapproachable by the slightest touch of personal sym- 
 pathy. No living being, certainly not his foolish little sister, 
 had any right to take care of the squire. And as the signs of 
 age became more apparent, this one fact had often worked 
 powerfully on the sympathies of Elsmere's chivalrous youth, 
 though as yet he had been no more capable than any one else 
 of breaking through the squire's haughty reserve. 
 
 As they turned down the newly- worn track to the cottages, 
 whereof the weekly progress had been for some time the delight 
 of Elsmere's heart, they met old Meyrick in his pony-carriage. 
 He stopped his shambling steed at sight of the pair. The 
 bleared spectacled eyes lit up, the prim mouth broke into a 
 smile which matched the April sun. 
 
 ' Well, Squire ; well, Mr. Elsmere, are you going to have a 
 look at those places ? Never saw such palaces. I only hope I 
 may end my days in anything so good. Will you give me a 
 lease, Squire ? ' 
 
 Mr. Wendover's deep eyes took a momentary survey, half 
 indulgent, half contemptuous, of the naive, awkward -looking 
 old creature in the pony-carriage. Then, without troubling to 
 find an answer, he went his way. 
 
 Robert stayed chatting a moment or two, knowing perfectly 
 well what Meyrick's gay garrulity meant. A sharp and bitter 
 sense of the ironies of life swept across him. The squire 
 humanised, influenced by him he knew that was the image 
 in Meyrick's mind ; he remembered with a quiet scorn its pres- 
 ence in his own. And never, never had he felt his own weak- 
 ness and the strength of that grim personality so much as at 
 that instant. 
 
 That evening Catherine noticed an unusual silence and de- 
 pression in Robert. She did her best to cheer it away, to 
 get at the cause of it. In vain. At last, with her usual wise
 
 320 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 tenderness, she left him alone, conscious herself, as she closed the 
 study door behind her, of a momentary dreariness of soul, coming 
 she knew not whence, and only dispersed by the instinctive 
 upward leap of prayer. 
 
 Robert was no sooner alone than he put down his pipe and 
 sat brooding over the fire. All the long debate of the afternoon 
 began to fight itself out again in the shrinking mind. Sud- 
 denly, in his restless pain, a thought occurred to him. He had 
 been much struck in the squire's conversation by certain allu- 
 sions to arguments drawn from the Book of Daniel. It was 
 not a subject with which Robert had any great familiarity. He 
 remembered his Pusey dimly, certain Divinity lectures, an 
 article of Westcott's. 
 
 He raised his hand quickly and took down the monograph 
 on The Use of the Old Testament in the New, which the 
 squire had sent him in the earliest days of their acquaintance. 
 A secret dread and repugnance had held him from it till now. 
 Curiously enough it was not he but Catherine, as we shall see, 
 who had opened it first. Now, however, he got it down and 
 turned to the section on Daniel. 
 
 It was a change of conviction on the subject of the date and 
 authorship of this strange product of Jewish patriotism in the 
 second century before Christ that drove M. Renan out of the 
 Church of Rome. ' For the Catholic Church to confess,' he says 
 in his Souvenirs, ' that Daniel is an apocryphal book of the time 
 of the Maccabees, would be to confess that she had made a mis- 
 take ; if she had made this mistake, she may have made others ; 
 she is no longer divinely inspired.' 
 
 The Protestant, who is in truth more bound to the Book of 
 Daniel than M. Renan, has various ways of getting over the 
 difficulties raised against the supposed authorship of the book 
 by modern criticism. Robert found all these ways enumerated 
 in the brilliant and vigorous pages of the book before him. 
 
 In the first place, like the orthodox Saint-Sulpicien, the Pro- 
 testant meets the critic with a flat non possumus. ' Your argu- 
 ments are useless and irrelevant,' he says in effect. ' However 
 plausible may be your objections, the Book of Daniel is what it 
 professes to be, because our Lord quoted it in such a manner as 
 to distinctly recognise its authority. The All -True and All- 
 Knowing cannot have made a mistake, nor can He have ex- 
 pressly led His disciples to regard as genuine and Divine, 
 prophecies which were in truth the inventions of an ingenious 
 romancer.' 
 
 But the liberal Anglican the man, that is to say, whose 
 logical sense is inferior to his sense of literary probabilities 
 proceeds quite differently. 
 
 'Your arguments are perfectly just,' he says to the critic; 
 ' the book is a patriotic fraud, of no value except to the historian 
 of literature. But how do you know that our Lord quoted it as 
 true in the strict sense ? In fact He quoted it as literature, as
 
 CHAP, xxv THE SQUIRE 321 
 
 a Greek might have quoted Homer, as an Englishman might 
 quote Shakespeare.' 
 
 And many a harassed Churchman takes refuge forthwith in 
 the new explanation. It is very difficult, no doubt, to make the 
 passages in the Gospels agree with it, but at the bottom of his 
 mind there is a saving silent scorn for the old theories of inspir- 
 ation. He admits to himself that probably Christ was not cor- 
 rectly reported in the matter. 
 
 Then appears the critic, having no interests to serve, no parti 
 pris to defend, and states the matter calmly, dispassionately, as 
 it appears to him. ' No reasonable man,' says the ablest German 
 exponent of the Book of Daniel, 'can doubt' that this most 
 interesting piece of writing belongs to the year 169 or 170 B.C. 
 It was written to stir up the courage and patriotism of the 
 Jews, weighed down by the persecutions of Antiochus Epi- 
 phanes. It had enormous vogue. It inaugurated a new Apoca- 
 lyptic literature. And clearly the youth of Jesus of Nazareth 
 was vitally influenced by it. It entered into his thought, it 
 helped to shape his career. 
 
 But Elsmere did not trouble himself much with the critic, as 
 at any rate he was reported by the author of the book before 
 him. Long before the critical case was reached, he had flung 
 the book heavily from him. The mind accomplished its further 
 task without help from outside. In the stillness of the night 
 there rose up weirdly before him a whole new mental picture 
 effacing, pushing out, innumerable older images of thought. It 
 was the image of a purely human Christ a purely human, ex- 
 plicable, yet always wonderful Christianity. It broke his heart, 
 but the spell of it was like some dream-country wherein we see 
 all the familiar objects of life in new relations and perspectives. 
 He gazed upon it fascinated, the wailing underneath checked a 
 while by the strange beauty and order of the emerging spectacle. 
 Only a little while ! Then with a groan Elsmere looked up, his 
 eyes worn, his lips white and set. 
 
 ' I must face it I must face it through ! God help me ! ' 
 
 A slight sound overhead in Catherine's room sent a sudden 
 spasm of feeling through the young face. He threw himself 
 down, hiding from his own foresight of what was to be. 
 
 ' My darling, my darling ! But she shall know nothing of it 
 yet/ 
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 AND he did face it through. 
 
 The next three months were the bitterest months of Elsmere's 
 life. They were marked by anguished mental struggle, by a 
 consciousness of painful separation from the soul nearest to his 
 own, and by a constantly increasing sense of oppression, of 
 
 Y
 
 322 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 closing avenues and narrowing alternatives, which for weeks 
 together seemed to hold the mind in a grip whence there was 
 no escape. 
 
 That struggle was not hurried and embittered by the bodily 
 presence of the squire. Mr. Wendover went off to Italy a few 
 days after the conversation we have described. But though he 
 was not present in the flesh the great book of his life was in 
 Elsmere's hands, he had formally invited Elsmere's remarks 
 upon it ; and the air of Murewell seemed still echoing with his 
 sentences, still astir with his thoughts. That curious instinct 
 of pursuit, that avid imperious wish to crush an irritating re- 
 sistance, which his last walk with Elsmere had first awakened 
 in him with any strength, persisted. He wrote to Robert from 
 abroad, and .the proud fastidious scholar had never taken more 
 pains with anything than with those letters. 
 
 Robert might have stopped them, might have cast the whole 
 matter from him with one resolute effort. In other relations he 
 had will enough and to spare. 
 
 Was it an unexpected weakness of fibre that made it impos- 
 sible ? that had placed him in this way at the squire's disposal 1 
 Half the world would answer yes. Might not the other half 
 plead that in every generation there is a minority of these 
 mobile, impressionable, defenceless natures, who are ultimately 
 at the mercy of experience, at the mercy of thought, at the 
 mercy (shall we say ?) of truth ; and that, in fact, it is from this 
 minority that all human advance comes 1 
 
 During these three miserable months it cannot be said 
 poor Elsmere ! that he attempted any systematic study of 
 Christian evidence. His mind was too much torn, his heart 
 too sore. He pounced feverishly on one test point after another, 
 on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, the relation of the New Testa- 
 ment to the thoughts and beliefs of its time, the Gospel of St. 
 John, the evidence as to the Resurrection, the intellectual and 
 moral conditions surrounding the formation of the Canon. His 
 mind swayed hither and thither, driven from each resting-place 
 in turn by the pressure of some new difficulty. And let it be 
 said again all through, the only constant element in the whole 
 dismal process was his trained historical sense. If he had gone 
 through this conflict at Oxford, for instance, he would have 
 come out of it unscathed : for he would simply have remained 
 throughout it ignorant or the true problems at issue. As it 
 was, the keen instrument he had sharpened so laboriously on 
 indifferent material now ploughed its agonising way, bit by bit, 
 into the most intimate recesses of thought and faith. 
 
 Much of the actual struggle he was able to keep from 
 Catherine's view, as he had vowed to himself to keep it. For 
 after the squire's departure Mrs. Darcy too went joyously up 
 to London to flutter a while through the golden alleys of May- 
 fair ; and Elsmere was left once more in undisturbed possession 
 of the Murewell library. There for a while on every day
 
 CHAP, xxv THE SQUIRE 323 
 
 oh, pitiful relief ! he could hide himself from the eyes he 
 loved. 
 
 But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallow- 
 est concealments. Catherine had already had one or two 
 alarms. Once, in Robert's study, among a tumbled mass of 
 books he had pulled out in search of something missing, and 
 which she was putting in order, she had come across that very 
 book on the Prophecies which at a critical moment had so 
 deeply affected Elsmere. It lay open, and Catherine was caught 
 by the heading of a section : 'The Messianic Idea.' 
 
 She began to read, mechanically at first, and read about a 
 page. That page so shocked a mind accustomed to a purely 
 traditional and mystical interpretation of the Bible that the 
 book dropped abruptly from her hand, and she stood a moment 
 by her husband's table, her fine face pale and frowning. 
 
 She noticed, with bitterness, Mr. Wendover's name on the 
 title-page. Was it right for Robert to have such books ? Was 
 it wise, was it prudent, for the Christian to measure himself 
 against such antagonism as this ? She wrestled painfully with 
 the question. ' Oh, but I can't understand,' she said to herself 
 with an almost agonised energy. ' It is I who am timid, faith- 
 less ! He must he must know what they say ; he must have 
 gone through the dark places if he is to carry others through 
 them.' 
 
 So she stilled and trampled on the inward protest. She 
 yearned to speak of it to Robert, but something withheld her. 
 In her passionate wifely trust she could not bear to seem to 
 question the use he made of his time and thought ; and a deli- 
 cate moral scruple warned her she might easily allow her 
 dislike of the Wendover friendship to lead her into exaggera.- 
 tion and injustice. 
 
 But the stab of that moment recurred dealt now by one 
 slight incident, now by another. And after the squire's depart- 
 ure Catherine suddenly realised that the whole atmosphere of 
 their home-life was changed. 
 
 Robert was giving himself to his people with a more scrupu- 
 lous energy than ever. Never had she seen him so pitiful, so 
 full of heart for every human creature. His sermons, with their 
 constant imaginative dwelling on the earthly life of Jesus, 
 affected her now with a poignancy, a pathos, which were almost 
 unbearable. And his tenderness to her was beyond words. But 
 with that tenderness there was constantly mixed a note of re- 
 morse, a painful self -depreciation which she could hardly notice 
 in speech, but which every now and then wrung her heart. 
 And in his parish work he often showed a depression, an irri- 
 tability, entirely new to her. He who had always the happiest 
 power of forgetting to-morrow all the rubs of to-day, seemed 
 now quite incapable of saving himself and his cheerfulness in 
 the old ways, nay, had developed a capacity for sheer worry she 
 had never seen in him before. And meanwhile all the old
 
 324 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 gossips of the place spoke their mind freely to Catherine on the 
 subject of the rector's looks, coupling their remarks with a 
 variety of prescriptions, out of which Robert did sometimes 
 manage to get one of his old laughs. His sleeplessness, too, 
 which had always been a constitutional tendency, had become 
 now so constant and wearing that Catherine began to feel a 
 nervous hatred of his book- work, and of those long mornings at 
 the Hall ; a passionate wish to put an end to it, and carry him 
 away for a holiday. 
 
 But he would not hear of the holiday, and he could hardly 
 bear any talk of himself. And Catherine had been brought up 
 in a school of feeling which bade love be very scrupulous, very 
 delicate, and which recognised in the strongest way the right 
 of every human soul to its own privacy, its own reserves. That 
 something definite troubled him she was certain. What it was 
 he clearly avoided telling her, and she could not hurt him by 
 impatience. 
 
 He would tell her soon when it was right she cried piti- 
 fully to herself. Meantime both suffered, she not knowing 
 why, clinging to each other the while more passionately than 
 ever. 
 
 One night, however, coming down in her dressing-gown into 
 the study in search of a Christian Year she had left behind her, 
 she found Robert with papers strewn before him, his arms on 
 the table and his head laid down upon them. He looked up as 
 she came in, and the expression of his eyes drew her to him 
 irresistibly. 
 
 ' Were you asleep, Robert ? Do come to bed ! ' 
 
 He sat up, and with a pathetic gesture held out his arms to 
 her. She came on to his knee, putting her white arms round 
 his neck, while he leant his head against her breast. 
 
 'Are you tired with all your walking to-day?' she said 
 presently, a pang at her heart. 
 
 ' I am tired,' he said, ' but not with walking.' 
 
 ' Does your book worry you ? You shouldn't work so hard, 
 Robert you shouldn't ! ' 
 
 He started. 
 
 'Don't talk of it. Don't let us talk or think at all, only 
 feel!' 
 
 And he tightened his arms round her, happy once more for 
 a moment in this environment of a perfect love. There was 
 silence for a few moments, Catherine feeling more and more 
 disturbed and anxious. 
 
 ' Think of your mountains,' he said presently, his eyes still 
 pressed against her, ' of High Fell, and the moonlight, and the 
 house where Mary Backhouse died. Oh ! Catherine, I see you 
 still, and shall always see you, as I saw you then, my angel of 
 healing and of grace ! ' 
 
 'I too have been thinking of her to-night,' said Catherine 
 softly, 'and of the walk to Shanmoor. This evening in the
 
 CHAP, xxv THE SQUIRE 325 
 
 garden it seemed to me as though there were Westmoreland 
 scents in the air ! I was haunted by a vision of bracken, and 
 rocks, and sheep browsing up the fell slopes.' 
 
 4 Oh for a breath of the wind on High Fell ! ' cried Kobert, 
 it was so new to her, the dear voice with this accent in it 
 of yearning depression ! 4 1 want more of the spirit of the 
 mountains, their serenity, their strength. Say me that Duddon 
 sonnet you used to say to me there, as you said it to me that 
 last Sunday before our wedding, when we walked up the Shan- 
 moor road to say good-bye to that blessed spot. Oh ! how I sit 
 and think of it sometimes, when life seems to be going crookedly, 
 that rock on the fell-side where I found you, and caught you, 
 and snared you, my dove, for ever.' 
 
 And Catherine, whose mere voice was as balm to this man of 
 many impulses, repeated to him, softly in the midnight silence, 
 those noble lines in which Wordsworth has expressed, with the 
 reserve and yet the strength of the great poet, the loftiest 
 yearning of the purest hearts 
 
 ' Enough, if something from our hand have power 
 To live and move, and serve the future hour, 
 And if, as towards the silent tomb we go, 
 Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower, 
 We feel that we are greater than we know.' 
 
 ' He has divined it all,' said Kobert, drawing a long breath 
 when she stopped, which seem to relax the fibres of the inner 
 man, 'the fever and the fret of human thought, the sense of 
 littleness, of impotence, of evanescence and he has soothed 
 it all!' 
 
 ' Oh, not all, not all ! ' cried Catherine, her look kindling, and 
 her rare passion breaking through ; ' how little in comparison ! ' 
 
 For her thoughts were with him of whom it was said, ' He 
 needed not tJiat any one should bear witness concerning man, for 
 he knew what was in man' But .Robert's only response was 
 silence and a kind of quivering sigh. 
 
 4 Robert ! ' she cried, pressing her cheek against his temple, 
 4 tell me, my dear, dear husband, what it is troubles you. Some- 
 thing does I am certain certain ! ' 
 
 4 Catherine wife beloved ! ' he said to her, after another 
 pause, in a tone of strange tension she never forgot ; ' genera- 
 tions of men and women have known what it is to be led 
 spiritually into the desert, into that outer wilderness where 
 even the Lord was " tempted." What am I that I should claim 
 to escape it? And you cannot come through it with me, 
 my darling no, not even you ! It is loneliness it is solitari- 
 ness itself- ' and he shuddered. 'But pray for me pray 
 
 that He may be with me, and that at the end there may be 
 light ! ' 
 
 He pressed her to him convulsively, then gently released her. 
 His solemn eyes, fixed upon her as she stood there beside him,
 
 326 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 seemed to forbid her to say a word more. She stooped ; she 
 laid her lips to his ; it was a meeting of soul with soul ; then 
 she went softly out, breaking the quiet of the house by a stifled 
 sob as she passed upstairs. 
 
 Oh ! but at last she thought she understood him. She had 
 not passed her girlhood, side by side with a man of delicate 
 fibre, of melancholy and scrupulous temperament, and within 
 hearing of all the natural interests of a deeply religious mind, 
 religious biography, religious psychology, and within certain 
 sharply denned limits religious speculation, without being 
 brought face to face with the black possibilities of ' doubts' and 
 ' difficulties ' as barriers in the Christian path. Has not almost 
 every Christian of illustrious excellence been tried and humbled 
 by them ? Catherine, looking back upon her own youth, could 
 remember certain crises of religious melancholy, during which 
 she had often dropped off to sleep at night on a pillow wet with 
 tears. They had passed away quickly, and for ever. But she 
 went back to them now, straining her eyes through the dark- 
 ness of her own past, recalling her father's days of spiritual 
 depression, and the few difficult words she had sometimes heard 
 from him as to those bitter times of religious dryness and hope- 
 lessness, by which God chastens from time to time His most 
 faithful and heroic souls. A half -contempt awoke in her for the 
 unclouded serenity and confidence of her own inner life. If her 
 own spiritual experience had gone deeper, she told herself with 
 the strangest self -blame, she would have been able now to 
 understand Robert better to help him more. 
 
 She thought as she lay awake after those painful moments in 
 the study, the tears welling up slowly in the darkness, of many 
 things that had puzzled her in the past. She remembered the 
 book she had seen on his table ; her thoughts travelled over his 
 months of intercourse with the squire ; and the memory of Mr. 
 Newcome's attitude towards the man whom he conceived to be 
 his Lord's adversary, as contrasted with Robert's, filled her with 
 a shrinking pain she dared not analyse. 
 
 Still all through, her feeling towards her husband was in the 
 main akin to that of the English civilian at home towards 
 English soldiers abroad, suffering and dying that England may 
 be great. She had sheltered herself all her life from those 
 deadly forces of unbelief which exist in English society, by a 
 steady refusal to know what, however, any educated university 
 man must perforce know. But such a course of action was 
 impossible for Robert. He had been forced into the open, into 
 the full tide of the Lord's battle. The chances of that battle are 
 many; and the more courage the more risk of wounds and 
 pain. But the great Captain knows the great Captain does 
 not forget His own ! 
 
 For never, never had she the smallest doubt as to the issue 
 of this sudden crisis in her husband's consciousness, even when 
 she came nearest to apprehending its nature. As well might
 
 CHAP, xxv THE SQUIRE 327 
 
 she doubt the return of daylight, as dream of any permanent 
 eclipse descending upon the faith which had shone through 
 every detail of Robert's ardent impulsive life, with all its 
 struggles, all its failings, all its beauty, since she had known 
 him first. The dread did not even occur to her. In her agony 
 of pity and reverence she thought of him as passing through a 
 trial, which is specially the believer's trial the chastening by 
 which God proves the soul He loves. Let her only love and 
 trust in patience. 
 
 So that day by day as Robert's depression still continued, 
 Catherine surrounded him with the tenderest and wisest affec- 
 tion. Her quiet common sense made itself heard, forbidding 
 her to make too much of the change in him, which might after 
 all, she thought, be partly explained by the mere physical 
 results of his long strain of body and mind during the Mile End 
 epidemic. And for the rest she would not argue ; she would 
 not inquire. She only prayed that she might so lead the 
 Christian life beside him, that the Lord's tenderness, the Lord's 
 consolation, might shine upon him through her. It had never 
 been her wont to speak to Mm much about his own influence, 
 his own effect, in the parish. To the austerer Christian con- 
 siderations of this kind are forbidden : ' It is not I, but Christ 
 that worketh in me.' But now, whenever she came across any 
 striking trace of his power over the weak or the impure, the 
 sick or the sad, she would in some way make it known to him, 
 offering it to him in her delicate tenderness, as though it were a 
 gift that the Father had laid in her hand for him a token that 
 the Master was still indeed with His servant, and that all was 
 fundamentally well ! 
 
 And so much, perhaps, the contact with his wife's faith, the 
 power of her love, wrought in Robert, that during these weeks 
 and months he also never lost his own certainty of emergence 
 from the shadow which had overtaken him. And, indeed, driven 
 on from day to day as he was by an imperious intellectual 
 thirst which would be satisfied, the religion of the heart, the 
 imaginative emotional habit of years, that incessant drama 
 which the soul enacts with the Divine Powers to which it feels 
 itself committed, lived and persisted through it all. Feeling 
 was untouched. The heart was still passionately on the side of 
 all its old loves and adorations, still blindly trustful that in the 
 end, by some compromise as yet unseen, they would be restored 
 to it intact. 
 
 Some time towards the end of July Robert was coming home 
 from the Hall before lunch, tired and worn, as the morning 
 always left him, and meditating some fresh sheets of the squire's 
 proofs which had been in his hands that morning. On the road 
 crossing that to the rectory he suddenly saw Reginald Newcome, 
 thinner and whiter than ever, striding along as fast as cassock 
 and cloak would let him, his eyes on the ground, and his wide- 
 awake drawn over them. He and Elsmere had scarcely met for
 
 328 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK m 
 
 months, and Robert had lately made up his mind that Newcome 
 was distinctly less friendly, and wished to show it. 
 
 Elsmere had touched his arm before Newcome had perceived 
 any one near him. Then he drew back with a start. 
 
 ' Elsmere, you here ! I had an idea you were away for a 
 holiday ! ' 
 
 ' Oh dear, no ! ' said Robert, smiling. 'I may get away in 
 September, perhaps not till then.' 
 
 ' Mr. Wendover at home ? ' said the other, his eyes turning to 
 the Hall, of which the chimneys were just visible from where 
 they stood. 
 
 ' No, he is abroad.' 
 
 ' You and he have made friends, I understand,' said the other 
 abruptly, his eagle look returning to Elsmere ; ' I hear of you as 
 always together.' 
 
 ' We have made friends, and we walk a great deal when the 
 squire is here,' said Robert, meeting Newcome's harshness of 
 tone with a bright dignity. ' Mr. Wendover has even been 
 doing something for us in the village. You should come and 
 see the new Institute. The roof is on, and we shall open it in 
 August or September. The best building of the kind in the 
 country by far, and Mr. Wendover's gift.' 
 
 'I suppose you use the library a great deal ?' said Newcome, 
 paying no attention to these remarks, and still eyeing his com- 
 panion closely. 
 
 ' A great deal.' 
 
 Robert had at that moment under his arm a German treatise 
 on the history of the Logos doctrine, which afterwards, looking 
 back on the little scene, he thought it probable Newcome recog- 
 nised. They turned towards the rectory together, Newcome 
 still asking abrupt questions as to the squire, the length of time 
 he was to be away, Elsmere's work, parochial and literary, 
 during the past six months, the numbers of his Sunday congre- 
 gation, of his communicants, etc. Elsmere bore his catechism 
 with perfect temper, though Newcome's manner had in it a 
 strange and almost judicial imperativeness. 
 
 ' Elsmere,' said his questioner presently, after a pause, ' I am 
 going to have a retreat for priests at the Clergy House next 
 
 month. Father H ,' mentioning a famous High Churchman, 
 
 ' will conduct it. You would do me a special favour ' and sud- 
 denly the face softened, and shone with all its old magnetism on 
 Elsmere ' if you would come. I believe you would find nothing 
 to dislike in it, or in our rule, which is a most simple one.' 
 
 Robert smiled, and laid his hand on the other's arm. 
 
 ' No, Newcome, no ; I am in no mood for H .' 
 
 The High Churchman looked at him with a quick and painful 
 anxiety visible in the stern eyes. 
 
 ' Will you tell me what that means ? ' 
 
 'It means,' said Robert, clasping his hands tightly behind 
 him, his pace slackening a little to meet that of Newcome 'it
 
 CHAP, xxv THE SQUIRE 329 
 
 means that if you will give me your prayers, Newcome, your 
 companionship sometimes, your pity always, I will thank you 
 from the bottom of my heart. But I am in a state just now 
 when I must fight my battles for myself, and in God's sight only ! ' 
 
 It was the first burst of confidence which had passed his lips 
 to any one but Catherine. 
 
 Newcome stood still, a tremor of strong emotion running 
 through the emaciated face. 
 
 ' You are in trouble, Elsmere ; I felt it, I knew it, when I 
 first saw you ! ' 
 
 'Yes, fam in trouble,' said Robert quietly. 
 
 ' Opinions ? ' 
 
 ' Opinions, I suppose or facts,' said Robert, his arms drop- 
 ping wearily beside him. ' Have you ever known what it is to 
 be troubled in mind, I wonder, Newcome ? ' 
 
 And he looked at his companion with a sudden pitiful 
 curiosity. 
 
 A kind of flash passed over Mr. Newcome's face. 
 
 ' Have I ever known ? ' he repeated vaguely, and then he drew 
 las thin hand, the hand of the ascetic and the mystic, hastily 
 across his eyes, and was silent his lips moving, his gaze on the 
 
 ground, his whole aspect that of a man wrought out of himself 
 y a sudden passion of memory. 
 
 Robert watched him with surprise, and was just speaking, 
 when Mr. Newcome looked up, every drawn attenuated feature 
 working painfully. 
 
 ' Did you never ask yourself, Elsmere,' he said slowly, ' what 
 it was drove me from the bar and journalism to the East End 1 
 Do you think I don't know,' and his voice rose, his eyes flamed, 
 'what black devil it is that is gnawing at your heart now? 
 Why, man, I have been through darker gulfs of hell than you 
 have ever sounded ! Many a night I have felt myself mad 
 mad of doubt a castaway on a shoreless sea ; doubting not only 
 God or Christ, but myself, the soul, the very existence of good. 
 I found only one way out of it, and you will find only one way.' 
 
 The lithe hand caught Robert's arm impetuously the voice 
 with its accent of fierce conviction was at his ear. 
 
 ' Trample on yourself ! Pray down the demon, fast, scourge, 
 kill the body, that the soul may live ! What are we, miserable 
 worms, that we should defy the Most High, that we should set 
 our wretched faculties against His Omnipotence? Submit 
 submit-j-humble yourself, my brother ! Fling away the freedom 
 which is your ruin. There is no freedom for man. Either a, 
 slave to Christ, or a slave to his own lusts there is no other 
 choice. Go away ; exchange your work here for a time for work 
 in London. You have too much leisure here : Satan has too 
 much opportunity. I foresaw it I foresaw it when you and I 
 first met. I felt I had a message for you, and here I deliver it. 
 In the Lord's name, I bid you fly ; I bid you yield in time. 
 Better to be the Lord's captive than the Lord's betrayer I '
 
 330 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK in 
 
 The wasted form was drawn up to its full height, the arm was 
 outstretched, the long cloak fell back from it in long folds 
 voice and eye were majesty itself. Robert had a tremor of re- 
 sponsive passion. How easy it sounded, how tempting, to cut 
 the knot, to mutilate and starve the rebellious intellect which 
 would assert itself against the soul's purest instincts ! New- 
 come had done it why not he ? 
 
 And then, suddenly, as he stood gazing at his companion, the 
 spring sun, and murmur all about them, another face, another 
 life, another message, flashed on his inmost sense the face and 
 life of Henry Grey. Words torn from their context, but full 
 for him of intensest meaning, passed rapidly through his mind : 
 ' God is not wisely trusted when declared unintelligible! ' Such 
 honour rooted in dishonour stands ; such faith unfaithful makes 
 us falsely true.' ' God is for ever reason : and His communication, 
 His revelation, is reason.' 
 
 He turned away with a slight sad shake of the head. The 
 spell was broken. Mr. Newcome's arm dropped, and he moved 
 sombrely on beside Robert the hand, which held a little book 
 of Hours against his cloak, trembling slightly. 
 
 At the rectory gate he stopped. 
 
 ' Good-bye I must go home.' 
 
 ' You won't come in ? No, no, Newcome ; believe me, I am 
 no rash careless egotist, risking wantonly the most precious 
 things in life ! But the call is on me, and I must follow it. All 
 life is God's, and all thought not only a fraction of it. He 
 cannot let me wander very far ! ' 
 
 But the cold fingers he held so warmly dropped from his, and 
 Newcome turned away. 
 
 A week afterwards, or thereabouts, Robert had in some sense 
 followed Newcome's counsel. Admonished perhaps by sheer 
 physical weakness, as much as by anything else, he had for the 
 moment laid down his arms ; he had yielded to an invading 
 feebleness of the will, which refused, as it were, to carry on the 
 struggle any longer, at such a life-destroying pitch of intensity. 
 The intellectual oppression of itself brought about wild reaction 
 and recoil, and a passionate appeal to that inward witness of 
 the soul which holds its own long after the reason has practically 
 ceased to struggle. 
 
 It came about in this way. One morning he stood reading 
 in the window of the library the last of the squire's letters. It 
 contained a short but masterly analysis of the mental habits 
 and idiosyncrasies of St. Paul, a propos of St. Paul's witness to 
 the Resurrection. Every now and then, as Elsmere turned the 
 pages, the orthodox protest would assert itself, the orthodox 
 arguments make themselves felt as though in mechanical in- 
 voluntary protest. But their force and vitality was gone. Be- 
 tween the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery fallible man 
 of genius so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in 
 moral passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free
 
 CHAP, xxv THE SQUIRE 331 
 
 and temperate criticism the rector knew, in a sort of dull way, 
 that his choice was made. The one picture carried reason and 
 imagination with it ; the other contented neither. 
 
 But as he put down the letter something seemed to snap 
 within him. Some chord of physical endurance gave way. For 
 five months he had been living intellectually at a speed no man 
 maintains with impunity, and this letter of the squire's, with its 
 imperious demands upon the tired irritable brain, was the last 
 straw. 
 
 He sank down on the oriel seat, the letter dropping from his 
 hands. Outside, the little garden, now a mass of red and pink 
 roses, the hill and the distant stretches of park were wrapped 
 in a thick sultry mist, through which a dim far-off sunlight 
 struggled on to the library floor, and lay in ghostly patches on 
 thepolished boards and lower ranges of books. 
 
 The simplest religious thoughts began to flow over him the 
 simplest childish words of prayer were on his lips. He felt 
 himself delivered, he knew not how or why. 
 
 He rose deliberately, laid the squire's letter among his other 
 papers, and tied them up carefully ; then he took up the books 
 which lay piled on the squire's writing-table : all those volumes 
 of German, French, and English criticism, liberal or apologetic, 
 which he had been accumulating round him day by day with a 
 feverish toilsome impartiality, and began rapidly and methodi- 
 cally to put them back in their places on the shelves. 
 
 'I have done too much thinking, too much reading,' he was 
 saying to himself as he went through his task. ' Now let it be 
 the turn of something else ! ' 
 
 And still as he handled the books, it was as though Catherine's 
 figure glided backwards and forwards beside him, across the 
 smooth floor, as though her hand were on his arm, her eyes 
 shining into his. Ah he knew well what it was had made the 
 sharpest sting of this wrestle through which he had been pass- 
 ing ! It was not merely religious dread, religious shame ; that 
 terror of disloyalty to the Divine Images which have filled the 
 soul's inmost shrine since its first entry into consciousness, 
 such as every good man feels in a like strait. This had been 
 strong indeed ; but men are men, and love is love ! Ay, it was 
 to the dark certainty of Catherine's misery that every advance 
 in knowledge and intellectual power had brought him nearer. 
 It was from that certainty that he now, and for the last time, 
 recoiled. It was too much. It could not be borne. 
 
 He walked home, counting up the engagements of the next 
 few weeks the school-treat, two club field-days, a sermon in 
 the county town, the probable opening of the new Workmen's 
 Institute, and so on. Oh ! to be through them all and away, 
 away amid Alpine scents and silences. He stood a moment 
 beside the gray slowly-moving river, half hidden beneath the 
 rank flower-growth, the tansy and willow-herb, the luxuriant 
 elder and trailing brambles of its August banks, and thought
 
 332 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK m 
 
 with hungry passion of the clean-swept Alpine pasture, the fir- 
 woods, and the tameless mountain streams. In three weeks or 
 less he and Catherine should be climbing the Jaman or the Dent 
 du Midi. And till then he would want all his time for men and 
 women. Books should hold him no more. 
 
 Catherine only put her arms round his neck in silence when 
 he told her. The relief was too great for words. He, too, held 
 her close, saying nothing. But that night, for the first time 
 for weeks, Elsmere's wife slept in peace and woke without dread 
 of the day before her.
 
 BOOK IV 
 
 CEISIS
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 THE next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read 
 nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, 
 pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new Institute 
 sometimes fishing, sometimes passing long summer hours on 
 the commons with his club boys, hunting the ponds for cad- 
 dises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into the furze-bushes 
 for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the gravel- 
 pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of 
 enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and miry as his 
 own, to deposit the treasures of the day in the club -room. 
 Once more the rector, though physically perhaps less ardent 
 than of yore, was the life of the 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 j 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 j
 
 336 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 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 home- 
 ward journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more 
 shrunken ; more full of force, of harsh epigram, of grim anec- 
 dote 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 with- 
 out the appendage. But Elsmere pshaw ! he will go muddling 
 on to the end of the chapter ! '
 
 CHAP, xxvi CRISIS 337 
 
 The squire, indeed, was like a hunter whose prey escapes him 
 at the very moment of capture, and there grew on him a mock- 
 ing 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. Wend- 
 over, 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, ana 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 gruqgingly 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 afiect his work. Good God, what nonsense ! 
 As if any one inquired what an English parson believed nowa- 
 days, 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.' 
 
 z
 
 338 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 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. ' Benan 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. Beceptiveness 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 Boyal Society, a famous mathema- 
 tician, 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
 
 CHAP, xxvi CRISIS 839 
 
 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 appear- 
 ance was picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skilful mixture of 
 black and creamy yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as care- 
 lessly 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 singu- 
 larly 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 neighbour- 
 hood, 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 ? 
 
 'That depends upon your general ideas of what is worth 
 while,' he answered smiling. 
 
 'Oh, everything is worth while that passes the time,' she 
 said hurriedly. ' The clergy of the old regime went through life 
 half asleep. That was their way of passing it. Your way, being 
 a modern, is to bustle and try experiments.' 
 
 Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over 
 Elsmere's keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of in- 
 tellectual and social assumption enwrapped her, which annoyed 
 Robert in much the same way as Langham's philosophical airs 
 were wont to do. He was drawn without knowing it into a 
 match of wits wherein his strokes, if they lacked the finish and 
 subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness or 
 mental resource. Madame de Netteville's tone insensibly 
 changed, her manner quickened, her great eyes gradually 
 unclosed. 
 
 Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the 
 reality of influence, Madame de Netteville paradoxically main- 
 taining that no human being had ever really converted, trans- 
 formed, or convinced another, the voice of young Wishart, 
 shrill and tremulous, rose above the general level of talk. 
 
 ' I am quite ready ; I am not the least afraid of a definition. 
 Theology is organised knowledge in the field of religion, a 
 science like any other science ! '
 
 340 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 ' Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,' said Mr. Spooner, leaning 
 forward with his hands round his knees, and speaking with the 
 most elegant and good-humoured sangfroid imaginable, 'the 
 science of the world's ghosts ! I cannot imagine any more 
 fascinating.' 
 
 'Well,' said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a deep 
 breath, ' that was a remark to have hurled at you all at once 
 out of doors on a summer's afternoon ! Oh, Mr. Spooner ! ' she 
 said, raising her voice, ' don't play the heretic here ! There is 
 no fun in it ; there are too many with you.' 
 
 ' I did not begin it, my dear madam, and your reproach is 
 unjust. On one side of me Archbishop Manning's fidus Achates,' 
 and the speaker took off his large straw hat and gracefully 
 waved it first to the right, then to the left. ' On the other, the 
 rector of the parish. " Cannon to right of me, cannon to left of 
 me." I submit my courage is unimpeachable ! ' 
 
 He spoke with a smiling courtesy as excessive as his silky 
 moustache, his long straw-coloured beard, and his Panama hat. 
 Madame de Netteville surveyed him with cool critical eyes. 
 Eobert smiled slightly, acknowledged the bow, but did not 
 speak. 
 
 Mr. Wishart evidently took no heed of anything but his own 
 thoughts. He sat bolt upright with shining excited eyes. 
 
 'Ah, I remember that article of yours in the Fortnightly/ 
 How you sceptics miss the point ! ' 
 
 And out came a stream of argument and denunciation which 
 had probably lain lava-hot at the heart of the young convert 
 for years, waiting for such a moment as this, when he had 
 before him at close quarters two of the most famous antagonists 
 of his faith. The outburst was striking, but certainly unpardon- 
 ably ill-timed. Madame de Netteville retreated into herself 
 with a shrug. Robert, in whom a sore nerve had been set 
 jarring, did his utmost to begin his talk with her again. 
 
 In vain! for the squire struck in. He had been sitting 
 huddled together his cynical eyes wandering from Wishart to 
 Elsmere when suddenly some extravagant remark of the 
 young Catholic, and Robert's effort to edge away from the 
 conversation, caught his attention at the same moment. His 
 face hardened, and in his nasal voice he dealt a swift epigram 
 at Mr. Wishart, which for the moment left the young disputant 
 floundering. 
 
 But only for the moment. In another minute or two the 
 argument, begun so casually, had developed into a serious trial 
 of strength, in which the squire and young Wishart took the 
 chief parts, while Mr. Spooner threw in a laugh and a sarcasm 
 here and there. 
 
 And as long as Mr. Wendover talked, Madame de Netteville 
 listened. Robert's restless repulsion to the whole incident, his 
 passionate wish to escape from these phrases and illustrations 
 and turns of argument which were all so wearisomely stale and
 
 CHAP, xxvi CRISIS 341 
 
 familiar to him, found no support in her. Mrs. Darcy dared 
 not second his attempts at chat, for Mr. Wendover, on the rare 
 occasions when he held forth, was accustomed to be listened to ; 
 and Elsmere was of too sensitive a social fibre to break up the 
 party by an abrupt exit, which could only have been interpreted 
 in one way. 
 
 So he stayed, and perforce listened, but in complete silence. 
 None of Mr. Wendover's side-hits touched him. Only as the 
 talk went on, the rector in the background got paler and paler ; 
 his eyes, as they passed from the mobile face of the Catholic 
 convert, already, for those who knew, marked with the signs of 
 death, to the bronzed visage of the squire, grew duller more 
 instinct with a slowly-dawning despair. 
 
 Half an hour later he was once more on the road leading to 
 the park gate. He had a vague memory that at parting the 
 squire had shown him the cordiality of one suddenly anxious to 
 apologise by manner, if not by word. Otherwise everthing was 
 forgotten. He was only anxious, half dazed as he was, to make 
 out wherein lay the vital difference between his present self and 
 the Elsmere who had passed along that road an hour before. 
 
 He had heard a conversation on religious topics, wherein 
 nothing was new to him, nothing affected him intellectually at 
 all. What was there in that to break the spring of life like 
 this ? He stood still, heavily trying to understand himself. 
 
 Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, every 
 word of that hectic young pleader for Christ and the Christian 
 certainties would have roused in him a leaping passionate 
 sympathy the heart's yearning assent, even when the intellect 
 was most perplexed. Now that inmost strand had given way. 
 Suddenly the disintegrating force he had been so pitifully, so 
 blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into the 
 sanctuary ! What had happened to him had been the first real 
 failure of feeling, the first treachery of the heart. Wishart's 
 hopes and hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty 
 faculties, had aroused in him no echo, no response. His soul 
 had been dead within him. 
 
 As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the gate 
 it seemed to Robert that he was going through, once more, that 
 old fierce temptation of Bunyan's, 
 
 ' For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously 
 delivered me, and had set me down so sweetly in the faith of 
 His Holy Gospel, and had given me such strong consolation 
 and blessed evidence from heaven, touching my interest in His 
 love through Christ, the tempter came upon me again, and that 
 with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than before. 
 And that was, " To sell and part with this most blessed Christ ; 
 to exchange Him for the things of life, for anything ! " The 
 temptation lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow 
 me so continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month :
 
 342 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 no, not sometimes one hour in many days together, for it did 
 always, in almost whatever I thought, intermix itself therewith, 
 in such sort that I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, 
 chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look on this or that, but still 
 the temptation would come : " Sell Christ for this, or sell Christ 
 for that, sell Him, sell Him ! '" 
 
 Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this 
 selva oscura of life ? The selling of the Master, of ' the love so 
 sweet, the unction spiritual,' for an intellectual satisfaction, the 
 ravaging of all the fair places of the heart by an intellectual 
 need ! 
 
 And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, 
 which made the summer air a darkness, and closed every sense 
 in him to the evening beauty, he felt the irresistible march and 
 pressure of the new instincts, the new forces, which life and 
 thought had been calling into being. The words of St. 
 Augustine which he had read to Catherine, taken in a strange 
 new sense, came back .to him ' Commend to the keeping of 
 the Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt 
 lose nothing ! ' 
 
 Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the whole 
 nature in this way ? 
 
 Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, 
 and his face turned like the face of a blind man towards a 
 world of which it saw nothing, went through a desperate 
 catechism of himself. 
 
 ' Do I believe in God ? Surely, surely ! " Though He slay me 
 yet will I trust in Him ! " Do 1 believe in Christ ? Yes, in the 
 teacher, the martyr, the symbol to us Westerns of all things 
 heavenly and abiding, the image and pledge of the invisible life 
 of the spirit, with all my soul and all my mind ! 
 
 ' But in the Man-God, the Word from Eternity, in a wonder- 
 working Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living 
 Intercessor and Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren ? ' 
 
 He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, 
 and there rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an 
 audible voice, words of irrevocable meaning. 
 
 ' Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself 
 felt, enjoys, equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, 
 and " miracles do not happen ! " ' 
 
 It was done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after 
 his lesser defeat. 
 
 ' Now was the battle won, and down fell I as a bird that is 
 shot from the top of a tree into great guilt and fearful despair 
 Thus getting _ out of my bed I went moping in the field; but 
 God knows with as heavy an heart as mortal man I think could 
 bear, where for the space of two hours I was like a man bereft 
 of life.' 
 
 All these years of happy spiritual certainty, of rejoicing 
 oneness with Christ, to end in this wreck and loss ! Was not
 
 CIIAP. xxvi CRISIS 343 
 
 this indeed l il gran rifiuto' the greatest of which human 
 daring is capable ? The lane darkened round him. Not a soul 
 was in sight. The only sounds were the sounds of a gently- 
 breathing nature, sounds of birds and swaying branches and 
 intermittent gusts of air rustling through the gorse and the 
 drifts of last year's leaves in the wood beside him. He moved 
 mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of 
 desolate terror had passed away, with a new inrushing sense 
 which seemed to him a sense of liberty of infinite expansion. 
 
 Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped 
 away, and there to the left on the westernmost edge of the hill 
 lay the square stone rectory, its windows open to the evening 
 coolness, a white flutter of pigeons round the dovecote on the 
 side lawn, the gold of the August wheat in the great cornfield 
 showing against the heavy girdle of oak-wood. 
 
 Robert stood gazing at it the home consecrated by love, 
 by effort, by faith. The high alternations of intellectual and 
 spiritual debate, the strange emerging sense of deliverance, 
 gave way to a most bitter human pang of misery. 
 
 ' God I My wife my work ! ' 
 
 . . . There was a sound of a voice calling Catherine's voice 
 calling for him. He leant against the gate of the wood-path, 
 struggling sternly with himself. This was no simple matter of 
 his own intellectual consistency or happiness. Another's whole 
 life was concerned. Any precipitate speech, or hasty action, 
 would be a crime. A man is bound above all things to protect 
 those who depend on him from his own immature or revocable 
 impulses. Not a word yet, till this sense of convulsion and 
 upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once more its 
 own master. 
 
 He opened the gate and went towards her. She was strolling 
 along the path looking out for him, one delicate hand gathering 
 up her long evening dress that very same black brocade she 
 had worn in the old days at Burwood the other playing with 
 their Dandie Dinmont puppy who was leaping beside her. As 
 she caught sight of him, there was the flashing smile, the hurry- 
 ing step. And he felt he could but just drag himself to meet 
 her. 
 
 ' Robert, how long you have been ! I thought you must have 
 stayed to dinner after all ! And how tired you seem ! ' 
 
 ' I had a long walk,' he said, catching her hand, as it slipped 
 itself under his arm, and clinging to it as though to a support. 
 ' And I am tired. There is no use whatever in denying it. 
 
 His voice was light, but if it had not been so dark she must 
 have been startled by his face. As they went on towards the 
 house, however, she scolding him for over-walking, he won his 
 battle with himself. He went through the evening so that even 
 Catherine's jealous eyes saw nothing but extra fatigue. In the 
 most desperate straits of life love is still the fountain of all 
 endurance, and if ever a man loved it was Robert Elsmere.
 
 344 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 But that night, as he lay sleepless in their quiet room, with 
 the window open to the stars and to the rising gusts of wind, 
 which blew the petals of the cluster-rose outside in drifts of 
 ' fair weather snow ' on to the window-sill, he went through an 
 agony which no words can adequately describe. 
 
 He must, of course, give up his living and his orders. His 
 standards and judgments had always been simple and plain in 
 these respects. In other men it might be right and possible 
 that they should live on in the ministry of the Church, doing 
 the humane and charitable work of the Church, while refusing 
 assent to the intellectual and dogmatic framework on which 
 the Church system rests ; but for himself it would be neither 
 right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or 
 reason about it. There was a favourite axiom of Mr. Grey's 
 which had become part of his pupil's spiritual endowment, 
 and which was perpetually present to him at this crisis of 
 his life, in the spirit, if not in the letter ' Conviction is the 
 Conscience of the Mind.' And with this intellectual conscience 
 he was no more capable of trifling than with the moral con- 
 science. 
 
 The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds 
 impressed themselves upon him ! the stir of the child's waking 
 soon after midnight in the room overhead ; the cry of the owls 
 on the oak-wood ; the purring of the night- jars on the common ; 
 the morning chatter of the swallows round the eaves. 
 
 With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself 
 and looked at Catherine. She was sleeping with that light 
 sound sleep which belongs to health of body and mind, one 
 hand under her face, the other stretched out in soft relaxation 
 beside her. Her husband hung over her in a bewilderment of 
 feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent pictures of 
 the future ; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous 
 details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How 
 her sleep, her ignorance, reproached him ! He thought of the 
 wreck of all her pure ambitions for him, for their common 
 work, for the people she had come to love ; the ruin of her life 
 of charity and tender usefulness, the darkening of all her hopes, 
 the shaking of all her trust. Two years of devotion, of exquisite 
 self-surrender, had brought her to this ! It was for this he had 
 lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she had opened 
 to him all her sweet stores of faith, all the deepest springs of 
 her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer ! The thought of it 
 and his own helplessness wrung his heart. 
 
 Oh, could he keep her love through it all 1 There was an 
 unspeakable dread mingled with his grief his remorse. It 
 had been there for months. In her eyes would not only pain 
 but sin divide them ? Could he possibly prevent her whole 
 relation to him from altering and dwindling ? 
 
 It was to be the problem of his remaining life. With a great 
 cry of the soul to that God it yearned and felt for through all
 
 CHAP, xxv! i CRISIS 345 
 
 the darkness and ruin which encompassed it, he laid his hand 
 on hers with the timidest passing touch. 
 
 ' Catherine, I will make amends ! My wife, I will make 
 amends ! ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXVII 
 
 THE next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept on 
 after their usual waking time, and remembering his exhaustion 
 of the night before, left him softly, and kept the house quiet 
 that he might not be disturbed. She was in charge of the now 
 toddling Mary in the dining-room when the door opened and 
 Robert appeared. 
 
 At sight of him she sprang up with a half -cry ; the face 
 seemed to have lost all its fresh colour, its look of sun and air ; 
 the eyes were sunk ; the lips and chin lined and drawn. It 
 was like a face from which the youth had suddenly been struck 
 out. 
 
 ' Robert ! ' but her question died on her lips. 
 
 ' A bad night, darling, and a bad headache,' he said, groping 
 his way, as it seemed to her, to the table, his hand leaning on 
 her arm. ' Give me some breakfast.' 
 
 She restrained herself at once, put him into an armchair by 
 the window, and cared for him in her tender noiseless way. 
 But she had grown almost as pale as he, and her heart was like 
 lead. 
 
 ' Will you send me off for the day to Thurston ponds ? ' he 
 said presently, trying to smile with lips so stiff and nerveless 
 that the will had small control over them. 
 
 'Can you walk so far? You did overdo it yesterday, you 
 know. You have never got over Mile End, Robert.' 
 
 But her voice had a note in it which in his weakness he could 
 hardly bear. He thirsted to be alone again, to be able to think 
 over quietly what was best for her for them both. There 
 must be a next step, and in her neighbourhood he was too 
 feeble, too tortured, to decide upon it. 
 
 ' No more, dear no more,' he said impatiently, as she tried 
 to feed him ; then he added as he rose : ' Don't make arrange- 
 ments for our going next week, Catherine ; it can't be so soon.' 
 
 Catherine looked at him with eyes of utter dismay. The 
 sustaining hope of all these difficult weeks, which had slipped 
 with such terrible unexpectedness into their happy life, was 
 swept away from her. 
 
 ' Robert, you ought to go.' 
 
 ' I have too many things to arrange,' he said sharply, almost 
 irritably. Then his tone changed : ' Don't urge it, Catherine.' 
 
 His eyes in their weariness seemed to entreat her not to 
 argue. She stooped and kissed him, her lips trembling.
 
 346 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 ' When do you want to go to Thurston ? ' 
 
 'As soon as possible. Can you find me my fishing-basket 
 and get me some sandwiches ? I shall only lounge there and 
 take it easy.' 
 
 She did everything for him that wifely hands could do. Then 
 when his fishing-basket was strapped on, and his lunch was 
 slipped into the capacious pocket of the well-worn shooting 
 coat, she threw her arms round him. 
 
 ' Robert, you will come away soon.' 
 
 He roused himself and kissed her. 
 
 ' I will,' he said simply, withdrawing, however, from her grasp, 
 as though he could not bear those close pleading eyes. ' Good- 
 bye ! I shall be back some time in the afternoon.' 
 
 From her post beside the study window she watched him 
 take the short cut across the cornfield. She was miserable, and 
 all at sea. A week ago he had been so like himself again, and 
 
 now ! Never had she seen him in anything like this state 
 
 of physical and mental collapse. 
 
 ' Oh, Robert,' she cried under her breath, with an abandon- 
 ment like a child's, strong soul that she was, ' why won't you 
 tell me, dear ? Why won't you let me share ? I might help you 
 through I might.' 
 
 She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A weaker 
 woman would have implored, tormented, till she knew all. 
 Catherine's very strength and delicacy of nature, and that 
 respect which was inbred in her for the sacra of the inner life, 
 stood in her way. She could not catechise him, and force his 
 confidence on this subject of all others. It must be given freely. 
 And oh ! it was so long in coming ! 
 
 Surely, surely, it must be mainly physical, the result of over- 
 strain expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, j ust as 
 daily life reproduces itself in dreams. The worldly man suffers 
 at such times through worldly things, the religious man through 
 his religion. Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this 
 kind, and with certain more or less vague preparations for 
 departure, Catherine got through the morning as best she might. 
 
 Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under a 
 sky which, after a few threatening showers, promised once 
 more to be a sky of intense heat. He had with him all the 
 tackle necessary for spooning pike, a sport the novelty and 
 success of which had hugely commended it the year before to 
 those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much developed in 
 him. 
 
 And now oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the 
 long stretches of sandy road ! By the time he reached the ponds 
 he was tired out ; but instead of stopping at the largest of the 
 three, where a picturesque group of old brick cottages brought 
 a reminder of man and his works into the prairie solitude of 
 the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just beyond, now 
 hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing his
 
 CHAP, xxvn CRISIS 347 
 
 way through the closely-set trees, he made some futile attempts 
 at fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was 
 over and lay it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for 
 hours, vaguely watching the reflection of the clouds, the gambols 
 and quarrels of the waterfowl, the ways of the birds, the alter- 
 nations of sun and shadow on the softly-moving trees, the real 
 self of him passing all the while through an interminable inward 
 drama, starting from the past, stretching to the future, steeped 
 in passion, in pity, in regret. 
 
 He thought or the feelings with which he had taken orders, 
 of Oxford scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, 
 the successes of his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly 
 mistake it had all been ! He felt a kind of sore contempt for 
 himself, for his own lack of prescience, of self-knowledge. His 
 life looked to him so shallow and worthless. How does a man 
 ever retrieve such a false step ? He groaned aloud as he thought 
 of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes, and all that 
 natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and consistency 
 of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he touched 
 the depths of self-humiliation. 
 
 As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might 
 be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the 
 tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in 
 the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its form- 
 ative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations were 
 swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. Only the 
 habit of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a Power 
 beyond sense a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had 
 been stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was 
 never a moment when Elsmere felt himself utterly forsaken. 
 
 But his people his work ! Every now and then into the 
 fragmentary debate still going on within him there would flash 
 little pictures of Murewell. The green, with the sun on the 
 house-fronts, the awning over the village shop, the vane on the 
 old ' Manor-house,' the familiar figures at the doors ; his church, 
 with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear to him as 
 though he were that moment in the pulpit ; the children he had 
 taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or 
 brutalised peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets 
 lie had learnt, all these memories and images clung about him 
 as though with ghostly hands, asking, ' Why will you desert us ? 
 You are ours stay with us ! ' 
 
 Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with 
 a tense realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before 
 him the arrangements with his locum tenens, the interview 
 with the bishop, the parting witli the rectory. It even occurred 
 to him to wonder what must be 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.
 
 348 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 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 1 
 
 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
 
 CHAP, xxvn CRISIS 349 
 
 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 1 ' 
 
 '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 any- 
 thing 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
 
 350 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK rv 
 
 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, irre- 
 sponsiveness, 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 blurt- 
 ing 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.
 
 CHAP, xxvii CRISIS 351 
 
 ' 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 ine.' 
 
 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 
 climbea 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 front-
 
 352 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 ing 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 upon you, to claim all your 
 friendship can give me.' 
 
 He stopped. Mr. Grey was silent his expression changing 
 instantly, the bright eyes profoundly, anxiously attentive. 
 
 'I have just come to the conclusion,' said Robert, after a 
 moment, with quick abruptness, 'that I ought now at this 
 moment to leave the Church, and give up my living, for reasons 
 which I will describe to you. But before I act on the conclu- 
 sion, I wanted the light of your mind upon it, seeing that that 
 other persons than myself are concerned.' 
 
 ' Give up your living ! ' echoed Mr. Grey in a low voice of 
 astonishment. He sat looking at the face and figure of the man 
 before him with a half -frowning expression. How often Robert 
 had seen some rash exuberant youth quelled by that momentary 
 frown ! Essentially conservative as was the inmost nature of 
 the man, for all his radicalism there were few tilings for which 
 Henry Grey felt more instinctive distaste than for unsteadiness 
 of will and purpose, however glorified by fine names. Robert 
 knew it, and, strangely enough, felt for a moment in the presence 
 of the heretical tutor as a culprit before a judge. 
 
 ' It is, of course, a matter of opinions,' he said, with an effort. 
 ' Do you remember, before I took orders, asking whether I had 
 ever had difficulties, and I told you that I had probably never 
 gone deep enough. It was profoundly true, though I didn't 
 
 really mean it. But this year No, no, I have not been 
 
 merely vain and hasty ! I may be a shallow creature, but it has 
 been natural growth, not wantonness.' 
 
 And at last his eyes met Mr. Grey's firmly, almost with 
 solemnity. It was as if in the last few moments he had been 
 instinctively testing the quality of his own conduct and motives 
 by the touchstone of the rare personality beside him ; and they 
 had stood the trial. There was such pain, such sincerity, above 
 all such freedom from littleness of soul implied in words and
 
 CHAP, xxvn CRISIS 353 
 
 look, that Mr. Grey quickly held out his hand. Robert grasped 
 it, and felt that the way was clear before him. 
 
 ' Will you give me an account of it ? ' said Mr. Grey, and his 
 tone was grave sympathy itself. ' Or would you rather confine 
 yourself to generalities and accomplished facts ? ' 
 
 ' I will try and give you an account of it,' said Robert ; and 
 sitting there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the 
 yellowing afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden-walls 
 between them and the new Museum, he went through the 
 history of the last two years. He described the beginnings of 
 his historical work, the gradual enlargement of the mind's 
 horizons, and the intrusion within them of question after 
 question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the 
 squire's name. 
 
 ' Ah !' exclaimed Mr. Grey, 'I had forgotten you were that 
 man's neighbour. I wonder he didn't set you against the whole 
 business, inhuman old cynic ! ' 
 
 He spoke with the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in 
 
 Eractice to an everyday ministry to human need, for the intel- 
 jctual egotist. Robert caught and relished the old pugnacious 
 flash in the eye, the Midland strength of accent. 
 
 ' Cynic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought him 
 about his drains and his cottages, however,' and he smiled 
 sadly ' before I began to read his books. But the man's genius 
 is incontestable, his learning enormous. He found me in a 
 susceptible state, and I recognise that his influence immensely 
 accelerated a process already begun.' 
 
 Mr. Grey was struck with the simplicity and fulness of the 
 avowal. A lesser man would hardly have made it in the same 
 way. Rising to pace up and down the room the familiar 
 action recalling vividly to Robert the Sunday afternoons of 
 bygone years he began to put questions with a clearness and 
 decision that made them so many guides to the man answering, 
 through the tangle of his own recollections. 
 
 ' I see,' said the tutor at last, his hands in the pockets of his 
 short gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. 'Well, the pro- 
 cess in you has been the typical process of the present day. 
 Abstract thought has had little or nothing to say to it. It has 
 been all a question of literary and historical evidence. / am 
 old-fashioned enough ' and he smiled ' to stick to the a priori 
 impossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher ! You 
 have come to see how miracle is manufactured, to recognise in 
 it merely a natural inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, 
 in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental, induc- 
 tive. I imagine ' he looked up ' you didn't get much help out 
 of the orthodox apologists ? ' 
 
 Robert shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' It often seemed to me,' he said drearily, ' I might have got 
 through, but for the men whose books I used to read and 
 respect most in old days. The point of view is generally so
 
 354 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 extraordinarily limited. Westcott, for instance, who means so 
 much nowadays to the English religious world, first isolates 
 Christianity from all the other religious phenomena of the 
 world, and then argues upon its details. You might as well 
 isolate English jurisprudence, and discuss its details without 
 any reference to Teutonic custom or Roman law ! You may 
 be as logical or as learned as you like within the limits chosen, 
 but the whole result is false ! You treat Christian witness and 
 Biblical literature as you would treat no other witness, and no 
 other literature in the world. And you cannot show cause 
 enough. For your reasons depend on the very witness under 
 dispute. And so you go on arguing in a circle, ad infinitum.' 
 
 But his voice dropped. The momentary eagerness died away 
 as quickly as it had risen, leaving nothing but depression be- 
 hind it. 
 
 Mr. Grey meditated. At last he said, with a delicate change 
 of tone, 
 
 'And now if I may ask it, Elsmere how far has this de- 
 structive process gone ? ' 
 
 'I can't tell you,' said Robert, turning away almost with a 
 groan ; ' I only know that the things I loved once I love still, 
 and that that if I had the heart to think at all, I should see 
 more of God in the world than I ever saw before ! ' 
 
 The tutor's eye flashed. Robert had gone back to the window, 
 and was miserably looking out. After all, he had told only half 
 his story. 
 
 'And so you feel you must give up your living ? ' 
 
 ' What else is there for me to do ? cried Robert, turning upon 
 him, startled by the slow deliberate tone. 
 
 'Well, of course, you know that there are many men, men 
 with whom both you and I are acquainted, who hold very much 
 what I imagine your opinions now are, or will settle into, who 
 are still in the Church of England, doing admirable work there ! ' 
 
 ' I know,' said Elsmere quickly ' I know ; I cannot conceive 
 it, nor could you. Imagine standing up Sunday after Sunday 
 to say the things you do not believe, using words as a conven- 
 tion which those who hear you receive as literal truth, and 
 trusting the maintenance of your position either to your neigh- 
 bour's forbearance or to your own powers of evasion ! With the 
 ideas at present in my head, nothing would induce me to preach 
 another Easter Day sermon to a congregation that have both a 
 moral and a legal right to demand from me an implicit belief in 
 the material miracle ! ' 
 
 ' Yes,' said the other gravely ' yes, I believe you are right. 
 It can't be said the Broad Church movement has helped us 
 much ! How greatly it promised ! how little it has performed ! 
 For the private person, the worshipper, it is different or I 
 think so. No man pries into our prayers ; and to cut ourselves 
 off from common worship is to lose that fellowship which is in 
 itself a witness and vehicle of God.'
 
 CHAP, xxvn CRISIS 355 
 
 But his tone had grown hesitating, and touched with melan- 
 choly. 
 
 There was a moment's silence. Then Robert walked up to 
 him again. 
 
 'At the same time,' he said falteringly, standing before the 
 elder man, as he might have stood as an undergraduate, ' let me 
 not be rash ! If you think this change has been too rapid to 
 last if you, knowing me better than at this moment I can know 
 myself if you bid me wait a while, before I take any overt step, 
 
 I will wait oh, God knows I will wait ! my wife ' and his 
 
 husky voice failed him utterly. 
 
 ' Y our wife ! ' cried Mr. Grey, startled. ' Mrs. Elsmere does 
 not know ? ' 
 
 'My wife knows nothing, or almost nothing and it will 
 break her heart ! ' 
 
 He moved hastily away again, and stood with his back to his 
 friend, his tall narrow form outlined against the window. Mr. 
 Grey was left in dismay, rapidly turning over the impressions 
 of Catherine left on him by his last year's sight of her. That 
 pale distinguished woman with her look of strength and char- 
 acter, he remembered Langham's analysis of her, and of the 
 silent religious intensity she had brought with her from her 
 training among the northern hills. 
 
 Was there a bitterly human tragedy preparing under all this 
 thought-drama he had been listening to ? 
 
 Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged 
 hand almost timidly upon him. 
 
 ' Elsmere, it won't break her heart ! You are a good man. 
 She is a good woman.' What an infinity of meaning there was 
 in the simple words ! ' Take courage. Tell her at once tell 
 her everything and let her decide whether there shall be any 
 waiting. I cannot help you there ; she can ; she will probably 
 understand you better than you understand yourself.' 
 
 He tightened his grasp, and gently pushed his guest into a 
 chair beside him. Robert was deadly pale, his face quivering 
 painfully. The long physical strain of the past months had 
 weakened for the moment all the controlling forces of the will. 
 Mr. Grey stood over him the whole man dilating, expanding, 
 under a tyrannous stress of feeling. 
 
 'It is hard, it is bitter,' he said slowly, with a wonderful 
 manly tenderness. ' I know it, I have gone through it. So has 
 many and many a poor soul that you and I have known ! But 
 there need be no sting in the wound unless we ourselves 
 envenom it. I know oh ! I know very well the man of the 
 world scoffs, but to him who has once been a Christian of the 
 old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the 
 rending asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with 
 half the confidence, half the joy, of life ! But take heart,' and 
 the tone grew still more solemn, still more penetrating. ' It is 
 the education of God ! Do not imagine it will put you farther
 
 356 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 from Him ! He is in criticism, in science, in doubt, so long as 
 the doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as yours is. He is in all 
 life, in all thought. The thought of man, as it has shaped 
 itself in institutions, in philosophies, in science, in patient 
 critical work, or in the life of charity, is the one continuous 
 revelation of God ! Look for Him in it all ; see how, little by 
 little, the Divine indwelling force, using as its tools but 
 merely as its tools ! man's physical appetites and condi- 
 tions, has built up conscience and the moral life ; think how 
 every faculty of the mind has been trained in turn to take its 
 part in the great work of faith upon the visible world ! Love 
 and imagination built up religion, shall reason destroy it 1 
 No ! reason is God's like the rest ! Trust it, trust him. The 
 leading strings of the past are dropping from you ; they are 
 dropping from the world, not wantonly, or by chance, but in 
 the providence of God. Learn the lesson of your own pain, 
 learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in 
 your own soul, in the constant verifications of experience, in 
 the life of Christian love. Spiritually you have gone through 
 the last wrench, I promise it you ! You being what you are, 
 nothing can cut this ground from under your feet. Whatever 
 may have been the forms of human belief, faith, the faith 
 which saves, has always been rooted here ! All things change, 
 creeds and philosophies and outward systems, but God 
 remains ! 
 
 ' " Life, that in me has rest, 
 
 As I, undying Life, have power in Thee ! " ' 
 
 The lines dropped with low vibrating force from lips unaccus- 
 tomed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a 
 moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it 
 seemed to Robert, gazing at him with fixed eyes, that the man's 
 whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, was charged 
 with benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing 
 and consecration had been laid upon him. The fiery soul 
 beside him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own. 
 So the torch of God passes on its way, hand reaching out to 
 hand. 
 
 He bent forwai-d, stammering incoherent words of assent and 
 gratitude, he knew not what. Mr. Grey, who had sunk into his 
 chair, gave him time to recover himself. The intensity of the 
 tutor's own mood relaxed ; and presently he began to talk to 
 his guest, in a wholly different tone, of the practical detail of the 
 step before him, supposing it to be taken immediately, discussing 
 the probable attitude of Robert's bishop, the least conspicuous 
 mode of withdrawing from the living, and so on all with 
 gentleness and sympathy indeed, but with an indefinable change 
 of manner, which showed that he felt it well both for himself 
 and Elsmere to repress any further expression of emotion. 
 There was something, a vein of stoicism perhaps, in Mr. Grey's
 
 CHAP, xxvin CRISIS 357 
 
 temper of mind, which, while it gave a special force and sacred- 
 ness to his rare moments of fervent speech, was wont in 
 general to make men more self-controlled than usual in his 
 presence. Robert felt now the bracing force of it. 
 
 ' Will you stay with us to dinner ? ' Mr. Grey asked when 
 at last Elsmere got up to go. 'There are one or two lone 
 Fellows coming asked before your telegram came, of course. 
 Do exactly as you like.' 
 
 ' I think not,' said Robert, after a pause. ' I longed to see 
 you, but I am not fit for general society.' 
 
 Mr. Grey did not press him. He rose and went with his 
 visitor to the door. 
 
 ' Good-bye, good-bye ! Let me always know what I can do 
 for you. And your wife poor thing, poor thing ! Go and tell 
 her, Elsmere ; don't lose a moment you can help. God help her 
 and you ! ' 
 
 They grasped each other's hands. Mr. Grey followed him 
 down the stairs and along the narrow hall. He opened the 
 hall door, and smiled a last smile of encouragement and 
 sympathy into the eyes that expressed such a young moved 
 gratitude. The door closed. Little did Elsmere realise 
 that never, in this life, would he see that smile or hear that 
 voice again ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXVIII 
 
 IN half an hour from the time Mr. Grey's door closed upon him, 
 Elsmere had caught a convenient cross-country train, and had 
 left the Oxford towers and spires, the shrunken summer Isis, 
 and the flat hot river meadows far behind him. He had meant 
 to stay at Merton, as we know, for the night. Now, his one 
 thought was to get back to Catherine. The urgency of Mr. 
 Grey s words was upon him, and love had a miserable pang 
 that it should have needed to be ui'ged. 
 
 By eight o'clock he was again at Churton. There were no 
 carriages waiting at the little station, but the thought of the 
 walk across the darkening common through the August moon- 
 rise had been a refreshment to him in the heat and crowd of 
 the train. He hurried through the small town, where the 
 streets were full of summer idlers, and the lamps were twink- 
 ling in the still balmy air, along a dusty stretch of road, leaving 
 man and his dwellings farther and farther to the rear of him. 
 till at last he emerged on a boundless tract of common, and 
 struck to the right into a cart-track leading to Murewell. 
 
 He was on the top of a high sandy ridge, looking west and 
 north, over a wide evening world of heather and wood and 
 hill. To the right, far ahead, across the misty lower grounds 
 into which he was soon to plunge, rose the woods of Murewell,
 
 358 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 black and massive in the twilight distance. To the left, but on 
 a nearer plane, the undulating common stretching downwards 
 from where he stood rose suddenly towards a height crowned 
 with a group of gaunt and jagged firs landmarks for all the 
 plain of which every ghostly bough and crest was now sharply 
 outlined against a luminous sky. For the wide heaven in front 
 of him was still delicately glowing in all its under parts with 
 soft harmonies of dusky red or blue, while in its higher zone 
 the same tract of sky was closely covered with the finest net- 
 work of pearl-white cloud, suffused at the moment with a silver 
 radiance so intense that a spectator might almost have dreamed 
 the moon had forgotten its familiar place of rising, and was 
 about to mount into a startled expectant west. Not a light in 
 all the wide expanse, and for a while not a sound of human 
 life, save the beat of Robert's step, or the occasional tap of his 
 stick against the pebbles of the road. 
 
 Presently he reached the edge of the ridge whence the rough 
 track he was following sank sharply to the lower levels. Here 
 was a marvellous point of view, and the rector stood a moment, 
 beside a bare weather-blasted fir, a ghostly shadow thrown 
 behind him. All around the gorse and heather seemed still 
 radiating light, as though the air had been so drenched in 
 sunshine that even long after the sun had vanished the invading 
 darkness found itself still unable to win firm possession of earth 
 and sky. Every little stone in the sandy road was still weirdly 
 visible ; the colour of the heather, now in lavish bloom, could be 
 felt though hardly seen. 
 
 Before him melted line after line of woodland, broken by 
 hollow after hollow, filled with vaporous wreaths of mist. 
 About him were the sounds of a wild nature. The air was 
 resonant with the purring of the night -jars, and every now 
 and then he caught the loud clap of their wings as they swayed 
 unsteadily through the furze and bracken. Overhead a trio of 
 wild ducks flew across, from pond to pond, their hoarse cry 
 descending through the darkness. The partridges on the hill 
 called to each other, and certain sharp sounds betrayed to the 
 solitary listener the presence of a flock of swans on a neigh- 
 bouring pool. 
 
 The rector felt himself alone on a wide earth. It was almost 
 with a start of pleasure that he caught at last the barking of 
 dogs on a few distant farms, or the dim thunderous rush of a 
 train through the wide wooded landscape beyond the heath. 
 Behind that frowning mass of wood lay the rectory. The lights 
 must be lit in the little drawing-room ; Catherine must be 
 sitting by the lamp, her fine head bent over book or work, 
 grieving for him perhaps, her anxious expectant heart going out 
 to him through the dark. He thinks of the village lying 
 wrapped in the peace of the August night, the lamp rays from 
 shop-front or casement streaming out on to the green; he 
 thinks of his child, of his dead mother, feeling heavy and
 
 CHAP, xxvin CRISIS 359 
 
 bitter within him all the time the message of separation and 
 exile. 
 
 But his mood was no longer one of mere dread, of helpless 
 pain, of miserable self -scorn. Contact with Henry Grey had 
 brought him that rekindling of the flame of conscience, that 
 medicinal stirring of the soul's waters, which is the most 
 precious boon that man can give to man. In that sense which 
 attaches to every successive resurrection of our best life from 
 the shades of despair or selfishness, he had that day, almost that 
 hour, been born again. He was no longer filled mainly with the 
 sense of personal failure, with scorn for his own blundering 
 impetuous temper^ so lacking in prescience and in balance ; or, 
 in respect to his wife, with such an anguished impotent remorse. 
 He was nerved and braced: whatever oscillations the mind 
 might go through in its search for another equilibrium, to-night 
 there was a moment of calm. The earth to him was once more 
 full of God, existence full of value. 
 
 ' The things I have always loved, I love still ! ' he had said to 
 Mr. Grey. And in this healing darkness it was as if the old 
 loves, the old familiar images of thought, returned to him new- 
 clad, re-entering the desolate heart in a white- winged procession 
 of consolation. On the heath beside him the Christ stood once 
 more, and as the disciple felt the sacred presence he could bear 
 for the first time to let the chafing pent-up current of love flow 
 into the new channels, so painfully prepared for it by the toil 
 of thought. ' EitJier God or an impostor. What scorn the heart, 
 the intellect, threw on the alternative ! Not in the dress of 
 speculations which represent the product of long past, long 
 superseded looms of human thought, but in the guise of common 
 manhood, laden like his fellows with the pathetic weight of 
 human weakness and human ignorance, the Master moves 
 towards him 
 
 ' Like you, my son, I struggled and I prayed. Like you, I had 
 my days of doubt and nights of wrestling. I had my dreams, my 
 delusions, with my fellows. I was weak; I suffered; I died. 
 But God was in me, and the courage, the patience, the love He gave 
 to me, the scenes of the poor human hfe He inspired, have be- 
 come by His will the world's eternal lesson man's primer of 
 Divine things, hung high in the eyes of all, simple and wise, that 
 all may see and all may learn. Take it to your Jieart again that 
 life, that pain, of mine ! Use it to new ends ; apprehend it in new 
 ways ; but knowledge shall not take it from you ; and love, instead 
 of weakening or forgetting, if it be but faithful, shall find ever fresh 
 power of realising and renewing itself.' 
 
 So said the vision ; and carrying the passion of it deep in his 
 heart the rector went his way, down the long stony hill, past 
 the solitary farm amid the trees at the foot of it, across the 
 grassy common beyond, with its sentinel clumps of beeches, 
 past an ethereal string of tiny lakes just touched by the moon- 
 rise, beside some of the first cottages of Murewell, up the hill,
 
 360 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 with pulse beating and step quickening, and round into the 
 stretch of road leading to his own gate. 
 
 As soon as he had passed the screen made by the shrubs on 
 the lawn, he saw it all as he had seen it in his waking dream on 
 the common the lamplight, the open windows, the white 
 muslin curtains swaying a little in the soft evening air, and 
 Catherine's figure seen dimly through them. 
 
 The noise of the gate, however of the steps on the drive 
 had startled her. He saw her rise quickly from her low chair, 
 put some work down beside her, and move in haste to the 
 window. 
 
 ' Robert ! ' she cried in amazement. 
 
 'Yes,' he answered, still some yards from her, his voice 
 coming strangely to her out of the moonlit darkness. 'I 
 did my errand early ; I found I could get back ; and here 
 I am.' 
 
 She flew to the door, opened it, and felt herself caught in his 
 arms. 
 
 ' Robert, you are quite damp ! ' she said, fluttering and 
 shrinking, for all her sweet habitual gravity of manner 
 was it the passion of that yearning embrace? 'Have you 
 walked?' 
 
 'Yes. It is the dew on the common, I suppose. The grass 
 was drenched.' 
 
 ' Will you have some food ? They can bring back the supper 
 directly.' 
 
 'I don't want any food now,' he said, hanging up his hat. 
 'I got some lunch in town, and a cup of soup at Reading 
 coming back. Perhaps you will give me some tea soon not 
 yet.' 
 
 He came up to her, pushing back the thick disordered locks 
 of hair from his eyes with one hand, the other held out to her. 
 As he came under the light of the hall lamp she was so startled 
 by the gray pallor of the face that she caught hold of his out- 
 stretched hand with both hers. What she said he never knew 
 her look was enough. He put his arm round her, and as he 
 opened the drawing-room door holding her pressed against him, 
 she felt the desperate agitation in him penetrating, beating 
 against an almost iron self-control of manner. He shut the 
 door behind them. 
 
 ' Robert, dear Robert ! ' she said, clinging to him, ' there is 
 bad news, tell me there is something to tell me ! Oh ! what is 
 it what is it ? ' 
 
 It was almost like a child's wail. His brow contracted still 
 more painfully. 
 
 ' My darling,' he said ; ' my darling my dear dear wife ! ' 
 and he bent his head down to her as she lay against his breast, 
 kissing her hair with a passion of pity, of remorse, of tender- 
 ness, which seemed to rend his whole nature. 
 
 ' Tell me tell me Robert ! '
 
 CHAP, xxvrii CRISIS 361 
 
 He guided her gently across the room, past the sofa over 
 which her work lay scattered, past the flower-table, now a 
 many-coloured mass of roses, which was her especial pride, past 
 the remains of a brick castle which had delighted Mary's won- 
 dering eyes and mischievous fingers an hour or two before, to a 
 low chair by the open window looking on the wide moonlit 
 expanse of cornfield. He put her into it, walked to the window 
 on the other side of the room, shut it, and drew down the blind. 
 Then he went back to her, and sank down beside her, kneeling, 
 her hands in his. 
 
 ' My dear wife you have loved me you do love me ? ' 
 
 She could not answer, she could only press his hands with 
 her cold fingers, with a look and gesture that implored him to 
 speak. 
 
 ' Catherine,' he said, still kneeling before her, ' you remem- 
 ber that night you came down to me in the study, the night I 
 told you I was in trouble and you could not help me. Did you 
 guess from what I said what the trouble was ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' she answered, trembling, ' yes, I did, Robert ; I thought 
 you were depressed troubled about religion.' 
 
 ' And I know,' he said with an outburst of feeling, kissing 
 her hands as they lay in his ' I know very well that you went 
 upstairs and prayed for me, my white -sou led angel ! But 
 Catherine, the trouble grew it got blacker and blacker. You 
 were there beside me, and you could not help me. I dared not 
 tell you about it ; I could only struggle on alone, so terribly 
 alone, sometimes ; and now I am beaten, beaten. And I come 
 to you to ask you to help me in the only thing that remains to 
 me. Help me, Catherine, to be an honest man to follow con- 
 science to say and do the truth ! ' 
 
 ' Robert,' she said piteously, deadly pale, ' I don't under- 
 stand.' 
 
 ' Oh, my poor darling ! ' he cried, with a kind of moan of 
 pity and misery. Then still holding her, he said, with strong 
 deliberate emphasis, looking into the gray-blue eyes the 
 quivering face so full of austerity and delicacy, 
 
 ' For six or seven months, Catherine really for much longer, 
 though I never knew it I have been fighting with doubt 
 doubt of orthodox Christianity doubt of what the Church 
 teaches of what I have to say and preach every Sunday. First 
 it crept on me I knew not how. Then the weight grew heavier, 
 and I began to struggle with it. I felt I must struggle with it. 
 Many men, I suppose, in my position would have trampled on 
 their doubts would have regarded them as sin in themselves, 
 would have felt it their duty to ignore them as much as pos- 
 sible, trusting to time and God's help. I could not ignore them. 
 The thought of questioning the most sacred beliefs that you 
 and I ' and his voice faltered a moment ' held in common was 
 misery to me. On the other hand, I knew myself. I knew that 
 I could no more go on living to any purpose, with a whole
 
 362 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 region of the mind shut up, as it were, barred away from the 
 rest of me, than I could go on living with a secret between 
 myself and you. I could not hold my faith by a mere tenure of 
 tyranny and fear. Faith that is not free that is not the faith 
 of the whole creature, body, soul, and intellect seemed to me a 
 faith worthless both to God and man ! ' 
 
 Catherine looked at him stupefied. The world seemed to be 
 turning round her. Infinitely more terrible than his actual 
 words was the accent running through words and tone and 
 gesture the accent of irreparableness, as of something dismally 
 done and finished. What did it all mean ? For what had he 
 brought her there ? She sat stunned, realising with awful force 
 the feebleness, the inadequacy, of her own fears. 
 
 He, meanwhile, had paused a moment, meeting her gaze with 
 those yearning sunken eyes. Then he went on, his voice 
 changing a little, 
 
 ' But if I had wished it ever so much, I could not have helped 
 myself. The process, so to speak, had gone too far by the time 
 I knew where I was. I think the change must have begun 
 before the Mile End time. Looking back, I see the foundations 
 were laid in in the work of last winter.' 
 
 She shivered. He stooped and kissed her hands again 
 passionately. ' Am I poisoning even the memory of our past 
 for you?' he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he 
 hurried on again : ' After Mile End you remember I began to 
 see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so ! It 
 was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak 
 shuttlecock as that ! But being where I was before our inti- 
 macy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to 
 minimise it. I was not made to stand alone ! ' 
 
 And again that bitter, perplexed, half-scornful sense of his 
 own pliancy at the hands of circumstance as compared with the 
 rigidity of other men descended upon him. Catherine made a 
 faint movement as though to draw her hands away. 
 
 ' Was it well,' she said, in a voice which sounded like a harsh 
 echo of her own, ' was it right for a clergyman to discuss sacred 
 things with such a man? 
 
 He let her hands go, guided for the moment by a delicate 
 imperious instinct which bade him appeal to something else 
 than love. Rising, he sat down opposite to her on the low 
 window seat, while she sank back into her chair, her fingers 
 clinging to the arm of it, the lamplight far behind deepening 
 all the shadows of the face, the hollows in the cheeks, the line 
 of experience and will about the mouth. The stupor in which 
 she had just listened to him was beginning to break up. Wild 
 forces of condemnation and resistance were rising in her ; and 
 he knew it. He knew, too, that as yet she only half realised 
 the situation, and that blow after blow still remained to him 
 to deal. 
 
 'Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with
 
 CHAP, xxvin CRISIS 363 
 
 the squire ? ' he repeated, his face resting on his hands. ' What 
 are religious matters, Catherine, and what are not ? ' 
 
 Then, still controlling himself rigidly, his eyes fixed on the 
 shadowy face of his wife, his ear catching her quick uneven 
 breath, he went once more through the dismal history of the 
 last few months, dwelling on his state of thought before the 
 intimacy with Mr. Wendover began, on his first attempts to 
 escape the squire's influence, on his gradual pitiful surrender. 
 Then he told the story of the last memorable walk before the 
 squire's journey, of the moment in the study afterwards, and of 
 the months of feverish reading and wrestling which had fol- 
 lowed. Half-way through it a new despair seized him. What 
 was the good or all he was saying ? He was speaking a lan- 
 guage she did not really understand. What were all these 
 critical and literary considerations to her ? 
 
 The rigidity of her silence showed him that her sympathy 
 was not with him, that in comparison with the vibrating pro- 
 test of her own passionate faith which must be now ringing 
 through her, whatever he could urge must seem to her the 
 merest culpable trifling with the soul's awful destinies. In an 
 instant of tumultuous speech he could not convey to her the 
 temper and results of his own complex training, and on that 
 training, as he very well knew, depended the piercing, convinc- 
 ing force of all that he was saying. There were gulfs between 
 them gulfs which ; as it seemed to him, in a miserable insight, 
 could never be bridged again. Oh, the frightful separateness 
 of experience ! 
 
 Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the 
 conversation at the Hall, described in broken words of fire 
 and pain the moment of spiritual wreck which had come upon 
 him in the August lane, his night of struggle, his resolve to go 
 to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so much narrating as 
 pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love's. Love was 
 at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the pale 
 varying face, were really pleading, through all the long story of 
 intellectual change. 
 
 At the mention of Mr. Grey Catherine grew restless ; she 
 sat up suddenly, with a cry of bitterness. 
 
 ' Robert, why did you go away from me ? It was cruel. I 
 should have known first. He had no right no right ! ' 
 
 She clasped her hands round her knees, her beautiful mouth 
 set and stern. The moon had been sailing westward all this 
 time, and as Catherine bent forward the yellow light caught 
 her face, and brought out the haggard change in it. He held 
 out his hands to her with a low groan, helpless against her re- 
 proach, her jealousy. He dared not speak of what Mr. Grey 
 had done for him, of the tenderness of his counsel towards her 
 specially. He felt that everything he could say would but tor- 
 ture the wounded heart still more. 
 
 But she did not notice the outstretched hands. She covered
 
 364 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 her face in silence a moment, as though trying to see her way 
 more clearly through the mazes of disaster ; and he waited. At 
 last she looked up. 
 
 ' I cannot follow all you have been saying,' she said, almost 
 harshly. 'I know so little of books, I cannot give them the 
 place you do. You say you have convinced yourself the Gospels 
 are like other books, full of mistakes, and credulous, like the 
 people of the time ; and therefore you can't take what they say 
 as you used to take it. But what does it all quite mean ? Oh, 
 I am not clever I cannot see my way clear from thing to thing 
 as you do. If there are mistakes, does it matter so so terribly 
 to you ? ' and she faltered. ' Do you think nothing is true be- 
 cause something may be false ? Did not did not Jesus still 
 live, and die, and rise again ? can you doubt do you doubt 
 that He rose that He is God that He is in heaven that we 
 shall see Him ? ' 
 
 She threw an intensity into every word, which made the 
 short breathless questions thrill through him, through the 
 nature saturated and steeped as hers was in Christian asso- 
 ciation, with a bitter accusing force. But he did not flinch 
 from them. 
 
 'I can believe no longer in an Incarnation and Resurrection,' 
 he said slowly, but with a resolute plainness. ' Christ is risen 
 in our hearts, in the Christian life of charity. Miracle is a 
 natural product of human feeling and imagination ; and God 
 was in Jesus pre-eminently, as He is in all great souls, but 
 not otherwise not otherwise in kind than He is in me or 
 you.' 
 
 His voice dropped to a whisper. She grew paler and paler. 
 
 ' So to you,' she said presently in the same strange altered 
 voice. ' My father when I saw that light on his face before 
 he died, when I heard him cry, " Master, / come ! " was dying 
 deceived deluded. Perhaps even,' and she trembled, 'you 
 think it ends here our life our love ? ' 
 
 It was agony to him to see her driving herself through this 
 piteous catechism. The lantern of memory flashed a moment 
 on to the immortal picture of Faust and Margaret. Was it not 
 only that winter they had read the scene together ? 
 
 Forcibly he possessed himself once more of those closely 
 locked hands, pressing their coldness on his own burning eyes 
 and forehead in hopeless silence. 
 
 ' Do you, Robert 1 ' she repeated insistently. _ 
 
 'I know nothing,' he said, his eyes still hidden. 'I know 
 nothing ! But I trust God with all that is dearest to me, 
 with our love, with the soul that is His breath, His work 
 in us ! ' 
 
 The pressure of her despair seemed to be wringing his own 
 faith out of him, forcing into definiteness things and thoughts 
 that had been lying in an accepted, even a welcomed, ob- 
 scurity.
 
 CHAP, xxvin CRISIS 365 
 
 She tried again to draw her hands away, but he would not 
 let them go. ' And the end of it all, Robert ? ' she said ' the 
 end of it?' 
 
 Never did he forget the note of that question, the desolation 
 of it, the indefinable change of accent. It drove him into a 
 harsh abruptness of reply. 
 
 ' The end of it so far must be, if I remain an honest man, 
 that I must give up my living, that I must cease to be a min- 
 ister of the Church of England. What the course of our life 
 after that shall be is in your hands absolutely.' 
 
 She caught her breath painfully. His heart was breaking 
 for her, and yet there was something in her manner now which 
 kept down caresses and repressed all words. 
 
 Suddenly, however, as he sat there mutely watching her, he 
 found her at his knees, her dear arms around him, her face 
 against his breast. 
 
 ' Kobert, my husband, my darling, it cannot be ! It is a mad- 
 ness a delusion. God is trying you, and me ! You cannot be 
 planning so to desert Him, so to deny Christ you cannot, my 
 husband. Come away with me, away from books and work, 
 into some quiet place where He can make Himself heard. You 
 are overdone, overdriven. Do nothing now say nothing ex- 
 cept to me. Be patient a little, and He will give you back 
 Himself ! What can books and arguments matter to you or 
 me ? Have we not known and felt Him as He is have we not, 
 Robert ? Come ! ' 
 
 She pushed herself backwards, smiling at him with an ex- 
 quisite tenderness. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. 
 They were wet on his own. Another moment and Robert would 
 have lost the only clue which remained to him through the 
 mists of this bewildering world. He would have yielded again 
 as he had many times yielded before, for infinitely less reason, 
 to the urgent pressure of another's individuality, and having 
 jeopardised love for truth, he would now have murdered or 
 tried to murder in himself the sense of truth for love. 
 
 But he did neither. 
 
 Holding her close pressed against him, he said in breaks of 
 intense speech : ' If you wish, Catherine, I will wait I will 
 wait till you bid me speak but I warn you there is something 
 dead in me something gone and broken. It can never live 
 again except in forms which now it would only pain you more 
 to think of. It is not that I think differently or this point or 
 that point but of life and religion altogether. I see God's pur- 
 poses in quite other proportions as it were. Christianity seems 
 to me something small and local. Behind it, around it includ- 
 ing it I see the great drama of the world, sweeping on led by 
 God from change to change, from act to act. It is not that 
 Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect human 
 reflection or a part of truth. Truth has never been, can never 
 be, contained in any one creed or system ! '
 
 366 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 She heard, but through her exhaustion, through the bitter 
 sinking of hope, she only half understood. Only she realised 
 that she and he were alike helpless both struggling in the grip 
 of some force outside themselves, inexorable, ineluctable. 
 
 Robert felt her arms relaxing, felt the dead weight of her 
 form against him. He raised her to her feet, he half carried her 
 to the door, and on to the stairs. She was nearly fainting, but 
 her will held it at bay. He threw open the door of their room, 
 led her in, lifted her unresisting on to the bed. Then her 
 head fell to one side, and her lips grew ashen. In an instant or 
 two he had done for her all that his medical knowledge could 
 suggest with rapid decided hands. She was not quite uncon- 
 scious ; she drew up round her, as though with a strong vague 
 sense of chill, the shawl he laid over her, and gradually the 
 slightest shade of colour came back to her lips. But as soon as 
 she opened her eyes and met those of Robert fixed upon her, the 
 heavy lids dropped again. 
 
 ' Would you rather be alone ? ' he said to her, kneeling beside 
 her. 
 
 She made a faint affirmative movement of the head, and the 
 cold hand he had been chafing tried feebly to withdraw itself. 
 He rose at once, and stood a moment beside her, looking down 
 at her. Then he went. 
 
 CHAPTEE XXIX 
 
 HE shut the door softly, and went downstairs again. It was 
 between ten and eleven. The lights in the lower passage were 
 just extinguished ; every one else in the house had gone to bed. 
 Mechanically he stooped and put away the child's bricks, he 
 pushed the chairs back into their places, and then he paused a 
 while before the open window. But there was not a tremor on 
 the set face. He felt himself capable of no more emotion. The 
 fount of feeling, of pain, was for the moment dried up. What 
 he was mainly noticing was the effect of some occasional gusts 
 of night- wind on the moonlit cornfield ; the silver ripples they 
 sent through it ; the shadows thrown by some great trees in the 
 western corners of the field ; the glory of the moon itself in the 
 pale immensity of the sky. 
 
 Presently he turned away, leaving one lamp still burning in 
 the room, softly unlocked the hall door, took his hat, and went 
 out. He walked up and down the woodpath or sat on the bench 
 there for some time, thinking indeed, but thinking with a certain 
 stern practical dryness. Whenever he felt the thrill of feeling 
 stealing over him again, he would make a sharp effort at repres- 
 sion. Physically he could not bear much more, and he knew it. 
 A part remained for him to play, which must be played with 
 tact, with prudence, and with firmness. Strength and nerves
 
 CHAP, xxix CRISIS 367 
 
 had been sufficiently weakened already. For his wife's sake, 
 his people's sake, his honourable reputation's sake, he must 
 guard himself from a collapse which might mean far more than 
 physical failure. 
 
 So in the most patient methodical way he began to plan out 
 the immediate future. As to waiting, the matter was still in 
 Catherine's hands ; but he knew that finely tempered soul ; he 
 knew that when she had mastered her poor woman's self, as she 
 had always mastered it from her childhood, she would not bid 
 him wait. He hardly took the possibility into consideration. 
 The proposal had had some reality in his eyes when he went 
 to see Mr. Grey ; now it had none, though he could hardly have 
 explained why. 
 
 He had already made arrangements with an old Oxford 
 friend to take his duty during his absence on the Continent. It 
 had been originally suggested that this Mr. Armitstead should 
 come to Murewell on the Monday following the Sunday they 
 were now approaching, spend a few days with them before their 
 departure, and be left to his own devices in the house and parish, 
 about the Thursday or Friday. An intense desire now seized 
 Robert to get hold of the man at once, before the next Sunday. 
 It was strange how the interview with his wife seemed to have 
 crystallised, precipitated, everything. How infinitely more real 
 the whole matter looked to him since the afternoon ! It had 
 passed at any rate for the time out of the region of thought, 
 into the hurrying evolution of action, and as soon as action 
 began it was characteristic of Robert's rapid energetic nature 
 to feel this thirst, to make it as prompt, as complete, as possible. 
 The fiery soul yearned for a fresh consistency, though it were a 
 consistency of loss and renunciation. 
 
 To-morrow he must write to the bishop. The bishop's resi- 
 dence was only eight or ten miles from Murewell ; he supposed 
 his interview with him would take place about Monday or 
 Tuesday. He could see the tall stooping figure of the kindly 
 old man rising to meet him ; he knew exactly the sort of argu- 
 ments that would be brought to bear upon him. Oh, that it 
 were done with this wearisome dialectical necessity ! His life 
 for months had been one long argument. If he were but left 
 free to feel, and live again ! 
 
 The practical matter which weighed most heavily upon him 
 was the function connected with the opening of the new Insti- 
 tute, which had been fixed for the Saturday the next day but 
 one. How was he but much more how was Catherine to get 
 through it 1 His lips would be sealed as to any possible with- 
 drawal from the living, for he could not by then have seen the 
 bishop. He looked forward to the gathering, the crowds, the 
 local enthusiasm, the signs of his own popularity, with a sick- 
 ening distaste. The one thing real to him through it all would 
 be Catherine's white face, and their bitter joint consciousness. 
 
 And then he said to himself, sharply, that his own feelings
 
 368 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK rv 
 
 counted for nothing. Catherine should be tenderly shielded 
 from all avoidable pain, but for himself there must be no flinch- 
 ing, no self-indulgent weakness. Did he not owe every last 
 hour he had to give to the people amongst whom he had planned 
 to spend the best energies of life, and for whom his own act 
 was about to part him in this lame impotent fashion 1 
 
 Midnight ! The sounds rolled silverly out, effacing the soft 
 murmurs of the night. So the long interminable day was over, 
 and a new morning had begun. He rose, listening to the echoes 
 of the bell, and as the tide of feeling surged back upon him 
 passionately commending the new-born day to God. 
 
 Then he turned towards the house, put the light out in the 
 drawing-room, and went upstairs, stepping cautiously. He 
 opened the door of Catherine's room. The moonlight was 
 streaming in through the white blinds. Catherine, who had 
 undressed, was lying now with her face hidden in the pillow, 
 and one white-sleeved arm flung across little Mary's cot. The 
 night was hot, and the child would evidently have thrown off 
 all its coverings had it not been for the mother's hand, which 
 lay lightly on the tiny shoulder, keeping one thin blanket in its 
 place. 
 
 ' Catherine,' he whispered, standing beside her. 
 
 She turned, and by the light of the candle he held shaded 
 from her he saw the austere remoteness of her look, as of one 
 who had been going through deep waters of misery, alone with 
 God. His heart sank. For the first time that look seemed to 
 exclude him from her inmost life. 
 
 He sank down beside her, took the hand lying on the child, 
 and laid down his head upon it, mutely kissing it. But he said 
 nothing. Of what further avail could words be just then to 
 either of them 1 Only he felt through every fibre the coldness, 
 the irresponsiveness of those fingers lying in his. 
 
 ' Would it prevent your sleeping,' he asked her presently, ' if 
 I came to read here, as I used to when you were ill 1 I could 
 shade the light from you, of course.' 
 
 She raised her head suddenly. 
 
 ' But you you ought to sleep.' 
 
 Her tone was anxious, but strangely quiet and aloof. 
 
 ' Impossible ! ' he said, pressing his hand over his eyes as he 
 rose. At any rate I will read first.' 
 
 His sleeplessness at any time of excitement or strain was so 
 inveterate, and so familiar to them both by now, that she could 
 say nothing. She turned away with a long sobbing breath, 
 which seemed to go through her from head to foot. He stood 
 a moment beside her, fighting strong impulses of remorse and 
 passion, and ultimately maintaining silence and self-control. 
 
 In another minute or two he was sitting beside her feet, in a 
 low chair drawn to the edge of the bed, the light arranged so as 
 to reach his book without touching either mother or child. He 
 had run over the book-shelf in his own room, shrinking pain-
 
 CHAP, xxix CRISIS 369 
 
 fully from any of his common religious favourites as one shrinks 
 from touching a still sore and throbbing nerve, and had at last 
 carried off a volume of Spenser. 
 
 And so the night began to wear away. For the first hour or 
 two, every now and then, a stifled sob would make itself just 
 faintly heard. It was a sound to wring the heart, for what 
 it meant was that not even Catherine Elsmere's extraordinary 
 powers of self -suppression could avail to check the outward 
 expression of an inward torture. Each time it came and went, 
 it seemed to Elsmere that a fraction of his youth went with it. 
 
 At last exhaustion brought her a restless sleep. As soon as 
 Elsmere caught the light breathing which told him she was not 
 conscious of her grief, or of him, his book slipped on to his knee. 
 
 1 Open the temple gates unto my love, 
 
 Open them wide that she may enter in, 
 And all the posts adorn as doth behove, 
 
 And all the pillars deck with garlands trim, 
 For to receive this saint with honour due 
 That cometh in to you. 
 
 With trembling steps and humble reverence, 
 She cometh in before the Almighty's view.' 
 
 The leaves fell over as the book dropped, and these lines, 
 which had been to him, as to other lovers, the utterance of his 
 own bridal joy, emerged. They brought about him a host of 
 images a little gray church penetrated everywhere by the roar 
 of a swollen river ; outside, a road filled with empty farmers' 
 carts, and shouting children carrying branches of mountain-ash 
 winding on and up into the heart of wild hills dyed with red- 
 dening fern, the sun- gleams stealing from crag to crag, and 
 shoulder to shoulder ; inside, row after row of intent faces, all 
 turned towards the central passage, and, moving towards him, 
 a figure ' clad all in white, that seems a virgin best,' whose every 
 step brings nearer to him the heaven of his heart's desire. 
 Everything is plain to him Mrs. Thornburgh's round cheeks 
 and marvellous curls and jubilant airs, Mrs. Ley burn's mild 
 and tearful pleasure, the vicar's solid satisfaction. With what 
 confiding joy had those who loved her given her to him ! And 
 he knows well that out of all griefs, the grief he has brought upon 
 her in two short years is the one which will seem to her hardest 
 to bear. Very few women of the present day could feel this 
 particular calamity as Catherine Elsmere must feel it. 
 
 ' Was it a crime to love and win you, my darling ? ' he cried 
 to her in his heart. ' Ought I to have had more self-knowledge? 
 could I have guessed where I was taking you ? Oh, how could 
 I know how could I know.' 
 
 But it was impossible to him to sink himself wholly in the 
 past. Inevitably such a nature as Elsmere's turns very quickly 
 from despair to nope ; from the sense of failure to the passionate 
 planning of new effort. In time will he not be able to comfort 
 her, and, after a miserable moment of transition, to repair her 
 
 2B
 
 370 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 trust in him and make their common life once more rich towards 
 God and man 1 ? There must be painful readjustment and fric- 
 tion, no doubt. He tries to see the facts as they truly are, fight- 
 ing against his own optimist tendencies, and realising as best 
 he can all the changes which his great change must introduce 
 into their most intimate relations. But after all can love and 
 honesty and a clear conscience do nothing to bridge over, nay, 
 to efface, such differences as theirs will be 1 
 
 Oh to bring her to understand him ! At this moment he 
 shrinks painfully from the thought of touching her faith his 
 own sense of loss is too heavy, too terrible. But if she will only 
 be still open with him ! still give him her deepest heart, any 
 lasting difference between them will surely be impossible. Each 
 will complete the other, and love knit up the ravelled strands 
 again into a stronger unity. 
 
 Gradually he lost himself in half -articulate prayer, in the 
 solemn girding of the will to this future task of a recreating 
 love. And by the time the morning light had well established 
 itself sleep had fallen on him. When he became sensible of the 
 longed-for drowsiness, he merely stretched out a tired hand and 
 drew over him a shawl hanging at the foot of the bed. He was 
 too utterly worn out to think of moving. 
 
 When he woke the sun was streaming into the room, and 
 behind him sat the tiny Mary on the edge of the bed, the 
 rounded apple cheeks and wild-bird eyes aglow with mischief 
 and delight. She had climbed out of her cot, and, finding no 
 check to her progress, had crept on, till now she sat triumph- 
 antly, with one diminutive leg and rosy foot doubled under her, 
 and her father's thick hair at the mercy of her invading fingers, 
 which, however, were as yet touching him half timidly, as 
 though something in his sleep had awed the baby sense. 
 
 But Catherine was gone. 
 
 He sprang up with a start. Mary was frightened by the 
 abrupt movement, perhaps disappointed by the escape of her 
 prey, and raised a sudden wail. 
 
 He carried her to her nurse, even forgetting to kiss the little 
 wet cheek, ascertained that Catherine was not in the house, and 
 then came back, miserable, with the bewilderment of sleep still 
 upon him. A sense of wrong rose high within him. How could 
 she have left him thus without a word 1 
 
 It had been her way, sometimes, during the summer, to go 
 out early to one or other of the sick folk who were under her 
 especial charge. Possibly she had gone to a woman, just con- 
 fined, on the farther side of the village, who yesterday had been 
 in danger. 
 
 But, whatever explanation he could make for himself, he was 
 none the less irrationally wretched. He bathed, dressed, and 
 sat down to his solitary meal in a state of tension and agitation 
 indescribable. All the exaltation, the courage of the night, was 
 gone.
 
 CHAP, xxix CRISIS 371 
 
 Nine o'clock, ten o'clock, and no sign of Catherine. 
 
 ' Your mistress must have been detained somewhere,' he said 
 as quietly and carelessly as he could to Susan, the parlour-maid, 
 who had been with them since their marriage. ' Leave breakfast 
 things for one.' 
 
 'Mistress took a cup of milk when she went out, cook 
 says,' observed the little maid with a consoling intention, won- 
 dering the while at the rector's haggard mien and restless 
 movements. 
 
 ' Nursing other people indeed ! ' she observed severely down- 
 stairs, glad as we all are at times to pick holes in excellence 
 which is inconveniently high. ' Missis had a deal better stay at 
 home and nurse him I ' 
 
 The day was excessively hot. Not a leaf moved in *the 
 garden ; over the cornfield the air danced in long vibrations of 
 heat ; the woods and hills beyond were indistinct and colourless. 
 Their dog Dandy lay sleeping in the sun, waking up every now 
 and then to avenge himself on the flies. On the far edge of the 
 cornfield reaping was beginning. Robert stood on the edge of 
 the sunk fence, his blind eyes resting on the line of men. his ear 
 catching the shouts of the farmer directing operations from his 
 gray horse. He could do nothing. The night before, in the 
 wood-path, he had clearly mapped out the day's work. A 
 mass of business was waiting, clamouring to be done. He tried 
 to begin on this or that, and gave up everything with a groan, 
 wandering out again to the gate on to the wood-path to sweep 
 the distances of road or field with hungry straining eyes. 
 
 The wildest fears had taken possession of him. Running in 
 his head was a passage from The confessions, describing Monica's 
 horror of her son's heretical opinions. ' Shrinking from and de- 
 testing the blasphemies of his error, she began to doubt whether 
 it was right in her to allow her son to live in her house and to 
 eat at the same table with her ; ' and the mother's heart, he re- 
 membered, could only be convinced of the lawfulness of its own 
 yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth's conversion. He 
 recalled, with a shiver, how in the life of Madame Guyon, after 
 describing the painful and agonising death of a kind but com- 
 paratively irreligious husband, she quietly adds, ' As soon as I 
 heard that my husband had just expired, I said to Thee, O my 
 God, Thou hast broken my bonds, and I will offer to Thee a 
 sacrifice of praise ! ' He thought of John Henry Newman, dis- 
 owning all the ties of kinship with his younger brother because 
 of divergent views on the question of baptismal regeneration ; 
 of the long tragedy of Blanco White's life, caused by the slow 
 dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground of heretical 
 belief. What right had he, or any one in such a strait as his, 
 to assume that the faith of the present is no longer capable of 
 the same stern self -destructive consistency as the faith of the 
 past ? He knew that to such Christian purity, such Christian 
 inwardness as Catherine's, the ultimate sanction and legitimacy
 
 372 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK TV 
 
 of marriage rest, both in theory and practice, on a common ac- 
 ceptance of the definite commands and promises of a miraculous 
 revelation. He had had a proof of it in Catherine's passionate 
 repugnance to the idea of Rose's marriage with Edward 
 Langham. 
 
 Eleven o'clock striking from the distant tower. He walked 
 desperately along the wood-path, meaning to go through the 
 copse at the end of it towards the park, and look there. He had 
 just passed into the copse, a thick interwoven mass of young 
 trees, when he heard the sound of the gate which on the farther 
 side of it led on to the road. He hurried on ; the trees closed 
 behind him ; the grassy path broadened ; and there, under an 
 arch of young oak and hazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the 
 sound of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her ; he 
 could not go on. Husband and wife looked at each other one 
 long quivering moment. Then Catherine sprang forward with 
 a sob and threw herself on his breast. 
 
 They clung to each other, she in a passion of tears tears of 
 such self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living 
 soul had ever seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him 
 he was trembling from head to foot, his arms scarcely strong 
 enough to hold her, his young worn face bent down over her. 
 
 ' Oh, Robert ! ' she sobbed at last, putting up her hand and 
 touching his hair, ' you look so pale, so sad.' 
 
 ' I have you again ! ' he said simply. 
 
 A thrill of remorse ran through her. 
 
 ' I went away,' she murmured, her face still hidden ' I went 
 away, because when I woke up it all seemed to me, suddenly, 
 too ghastly to be believed ; I could not stay still and bear it. 
 But, Robert, Robert, I kissed you as I passed ! I was so thank- 
 ful you could sleep a little and forget. I hardly know where I 
 have been most of the time I think I have been sitting in a 
 corner of the park, where no one ever comes. I began to think 
 of all you said to me last night to put it together to try and 
 understand it, and it seemed to me more and more horrible ! I 
 thought of what it would be like to have to hide my prayers 
 from you my faith in Christ my hope of heaven. I thought 
 of bringing up the child how all that was vital to me would 
 be a superstition .to you, which you would bear with for my 
 sake. I thought of death,' and she shuddered ' your death, or 
 my death, and how this change in you would cleave a gulf of 
 misery between us. And then I thought of losing my own faith, 
 of denying Christ. It was a nightmare I saw myself on a long 
 road, escaping with Mary in my arms, escaping from you ! Oh, 
 Robert ! it wasn't only for myself,' and she clung to him as 
 though she were a child, confessing, explaining away, some 
 grievous fault hardly to be forgiven. ' I was agonised by the 
 thought that I was not my own I and my child were Christ's. 
 Could I risk what was His ? Other men and women had died, 
 had given up all for His sake. Is there no one now strong
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 373 
 
 enough to suffer torment, to kill even love itself rather than 
 deny Him rather than crucify Him afresh ? ' 
 
 She paused, struggling for breath. The terrible excitement 
 of that bygone moment had seized upon her again and com- 
 municated itself to him. 
 
 ' And then and then,' she said sobbing, ' I don't know how 
 it was. One moment I was sitting up looking straight before 
 me, without a tear, thinking of what was the least I must do, 
 even even if you and I stayed together of all the hard com- 
 pacts and conditions I must make judging you all the while 
 from a long, long distance, and feeling as though I had buried 
 the old self sacrificed the old heart for ever ! And the next 
 I was lying on the ground crying for you, Robert, crying for 
 you ! Your face had come back to me as you lay there in the 
 early morning light. I thought how I had kissed you how 
 pale and gray and thin you looked. Oh, how I loathed myself ! 
 That I should think it could be God's will that I should leave 
 you, or torture you, my poor husband ! I had not only been 
 wicked towards you I had offended Christ. I could think of 
 nothing as I lay there again and again but " Little children, 
 love one another ; little children, love one another." Oh, my 
 beloved,' and she looked up with the solemnest, tenderest 
 smile breaking on the marred tear-stained face, ' I will never 
 give up hope, I will pray for you night and day. God will 
 bring you back. You cannot lose yourself so. No, no ! His 
 grace is stronger than our wills. But I will not preach to you 
 I will not persecute you I will only live beside you in your 
 heart and love you always. Oh, how could I how could I 
 have such thoughts ! ' 
 
 And again she broke off, weeping, as if to the tender torn 
 heart the only crime that could not be forgiven was its own 
 offence against love. As for him he was beyond speech. If 
 he had ever lost his vision of God, his wife's love would that 
 moment have given it back to him. 
 
 ' Robert,' she said presently, urged on by the sacred yearning 
 to heal, to atone, 'I will not complain I will not ask you to 
 wait. I take your word for it that it is best not, that it would 
 do no good. The only hope is in time and prayer. I must 
 suffer, dear, I must be weak sometimes ; but oh, I am so sorry 
 for you ! Kiss me, forgive me, Robert ; I will be your faithful 
 wife unto our lives' end.' 
 
 He kissed her, and in that kiss, so sad, so pitiful, so clinging, 
 their new life was born. 
 
 CHAPTER XXX 
 
 BUT the problem of these two lives was not solved by a burst 
 of feeling. Without that determining impulse of love and pity
 
 374 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 in Catherine's heart the salvation of an exquisite bond might 
 indeed have been impossible. But in spite of it the laws of 
 character had still to work themselves inexorably out on either 
 side. 
 
 The whole gist of the matter for Elsmere lay really in this 
 question : Hidden in Catherine's nature, was there, or was there 
 not, the true stuff of fanaticism ? Madame Guyon left her infant 
 children to the mercies of chance, while she followed the voice 
 of God to the holy war with heresy. Under similar conditions 
 Catherine Elsmere might have planned the same. Could she 
 ever have carried it out ? 
 
 And yet the question is still ill stated. For the influences of 
 our modern time on religious action are so blunting and dulling, 
 because in truth the religious motive itself is being constantly 
 modified, whether the religious person knows it or not. Is it 
 possible now for a good woman with a heart, in Catherine 
 Elsmere's position, to maintain herself against love, and all 
 those subtle forces to which such a change as Elsmere's opens 
 the house doors, without either hardening, or greatly yielding ? 
 Let Catherine's further story give some sort of an answer. 
 
 Poor soul ! As they sat together in the study, after he had 
 brought her home, Robert, with averted eyes, went through the 
 plans he had already thought into shape. Catherine listened, 
 saying almost nothing. But never, never had she loved this 
 life of theirs so well as now that she was called on, at barely a 
 week's notice, to give it up for ever ! For Robert's scheme, in 
 which her reason fully acquiesced, was to keep to their plan of 
 going to Switzerland, he having first, of course, settled all things 
 with the bishop, and having placed his living in the hands of 
 Mowbray Elsmere. When they left the rectory, in a week or 
 ten days' time, he proposed, in fact, his voice almost inaudible 
 as he did so, that Catherine should leave it for good. 
 
 ' Everybody had better suppose,' he said choking, ' that we 
 are coming back. Of course we need say nothing. Armitstead 
 will be here for next week certainly. Then afterwards I can 
 come down and manage everything. I shall get it over in a day 
 if I can, and see nobody. I cannot say good-bye, nor can you.' 
 
 ' And next Sunday, Robert ? ' she asked him, after a pause. 
 
 ' I shall write to Armitstead this afternoon and ask him, if 
 he possibly can, to come to-morrow afternoon, instead of Mon- 
 day, and take the service.' 
 
 Catherine's hands clasped each other still more closely. So 
 then she had heard her husband's voice for the last time in the 
 public ministry of the Church, in prayer, in exhortation, in 
 benediction ! One of the most sacred traditions of her life was 
 struck from her at a blow. 
 
 It was long before either of them spoke again. Then she 
 ventured another question. 
 
 ' And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert 
 of of our future 1 '
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 375 
 
 ' Shall we try London for a little ? ' he answered in a queer 
 strained voice, leaning against the window, and looking out, 
 that he might not see her. 'I should find work among the 
 poor so would you and I could go on with my book. And 
 your mother and sister will probably be there part of the 
 winter.' 
 
 She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future 
 it seemed to them both, beside the wide and honourable range 
 of his clergyman's life as he and she had developed it. But she 
 did not dwell long on that. Her thoughts were suddenly in- 
 vaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in which she had 
 recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of fifteen, from 
 one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas to 
 a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago, ruined, 
 the victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his 
 teeth in fierce and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a 
 shelter, and was to see her through her ' trouble ' ; the girl, a 
 frail half- witted creature, who could find no words even to 
 bewail herself, clinging to her the while with the dumbest, 
 pitifulest tenacity. 
 
 How could she leave that girl ? It was as if all the fibres of 
 life were being violently wrenched from all their natural con- 
 nections. 
 
 ' Robert ! ' she cried at last with a start. ' Had you forgotten 
 the Institute to-morrow ? ' 
 
 'No no,' he said with the saddest smile. 'No, I had not 
 forgotten it. Don't go, Catherine don't go. I must. But why 
 should you go through it ? ' 
 
 ' But there are all those flags and wreaths,' she said, getting 
 up in pained bewilderment. ' I must go and look after them.' 
 
 He caught her in his arms. 
 
 ' Oh, my wife, my wife, forgive me ! ' It was a groan of 
 misery. She put up her hands and pressed his hair back from 
 his temples. 
 
 ' I love you, Robert,' she said simply, her face colourless, but 
 perfectly calm. 
 
 Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, 
 he went into the workroom and found her surrounded with 
 flags, and a vast litter of paper roses and evergreens, which she 
 and the new agent's daughters who had come up to help her 
 were putting together for the decorations of the morrow. Mary 
 was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big pink rose 
 stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to smile 
 and talk as usual, her lap full of evergreens, and her politeness 
 exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to 
 Robert one of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He 
 fled from it out into the village driven by a restless longing for 
 change and movement. 
 
 Here he found a large gathering round the new Institute. 
 There were carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front,
 
 376 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 and close by, an admiring circle of children and old men, hudd- 
 ling in the shade of a great chestnut. 
 
 Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and super- 
 intending, stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting 
 friendliness of those about him, or worried by their blunt 
 comments on his looks. He could not bear more than a glance 
 into the new rooms apportioned to the Naturalists' Club. There 
 against the wall stood the new glass cases he had wrung out of 
 the squire, with various new collections lying near, ready to be 
 arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections 
 stood out bravely in the added space and light ; the walls were 
 hung here and there with a wonderful set of geographical 
 pictures he had carried off from a London exhibition, and fed 
 his boys on for weeks ; the floors were freshly matted ; the new 
 pine fittings gave out their pleasant cleanly scent ; the white 
 paint of doors and windows shone in the August sun. The 
 building had been given by the squire. The fittings and furni- 
 ture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had 
 planned for it all ! only to see the fruits of two years' effort 
 out of doors, and personal frugality at home, handed over to 
 some possibly unsympathetic stranger. The heart beat pain- 
 fully against the iron bars of fate, rebelling against the power 
 of a mental process so to affect a man's whole practical and social 
 life! 
 
 He went out at last by the back of the Institute, where a 
 little bit of garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to 
 a lane. 
 
 At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge 
 made by the builders' carts, he saw a man standing, who turned 
 away down the lane, however, as soon as the rector's figure 
 emerged into view. 
 
 Robert had recognised the slouching gait and unwieldy form 
 of Henslowe. There were at this moment all kinds of gruesome 
 stories afloat in the village about the ex-agent. It was said 
 that he was breaking up fast ; it was known that he was ex- 
 tensively in debt ; and the village shopkeepers had already 
 held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best mode 
 of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of 
 cautious action towards his custom in future. The man, indeed, 
 was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, 
 maintaining all the while a snarling exasperating front to the 
 world, which was rapidly converting the careless half -malicious 
 pity wherewith the village had till now surveyed his fall into 
 that more active species of baiting which the human animal 
 is never very loth to try upon the limping specimens of his 
 race. 
 
 Henslowe stopped and turned as he heard the steps behind 
 him. Six months' self -murdering had left ghastly traces. He 
 was many degrees nearer the brute than he had been even when 
 Eobert made his ineffectual visit. But at this actual moment
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 377 
 
 Robert's practised eye for every English parish clergyman 
 becomes dismally expert in the pathology of drunkenness saw 
 that there was no fight in him. He was in one of the drunkard's 
 periods of collapse shivering, flabby, starting at every sound, 
 a misery to himself and a spectacle to others. 
 
 ' Mr. Henslowe ! ' cried Robert, still pursuing him, ' may I 
 speak to you a moment 1 ' 
 
 The ex-agent turned, his prominent bloodshot eyes glowering 
 at the speaker. But he had to catch at his stick for support, or 
 at the nervous shock of Robert's summons his legs would have 
 given way under him. 
 
 Robert came up with him and stood a second, fronting the 
 evil silence of the other, his boyish face deeply flushed. Perhaps 
 the grotesqueness of that former scene was in his mind. More- 
 over, the vestry meetings had furnished Henslowe with periodical 
 opportunities for venting his gall on the rector, and they had 
 never been neglected. But he plunged on boldly. 
 
 ' I am going away next week, Mr. Henslowe ; I shall be away 
 some considerable time. Before I go I should like to ask you 
 whether you do not think the feud between us had better cease. 
 Why will you persist in making an enemy of me ? If I did you 
 an injury it was neither wittingly nor willingly. I know you 
 have been ill. and I gather that that you are in trouble. If 
 I could stand between you and further mischief I would most 
 
 gladly. If help or or money ' He paused. He shrewdly 
 
 suspected, indeed, from the reports that reached him, that 
 Henslowe was on the brink of bankruptcy. 
 
 The rector had spoken with the utmost diffidence and deli- 
 cacy, but Henslowe found energy in return for an outburst of 
 quavering animosity, from which, however, physical weakness 
 had extracted all its sting. 
 
 ' I'll thank you to make your canting offers to some one else, 
 Mr. Elsmere. When I want your advice I'll ask it. Good day 
 to you.' And he turned away with as much of an attempt at 
 dignity as his shaking limbs would allow of. 
 
 'Listen, Mr. Henslowe,' said Robert firmly, walking beside 
 him ; ' you know I know that if this goes on, in a year's time 
 you will be in your grave, and your poor wife and children 
 struggling to keep themselves from the workhouse. You may 
 think that I have no right to preach to you that you are the 
 older man that it is an intrusion. But what is the good of 
 blinking facts that you must know all the world knows ? Come, 
 now, Mr. Henslowe, let us behave for a moment as though this 
 were our last meeting. Who knows? the chances of life are 
 many. Lay down your grudge against me, and let me speak to 
 you as one struggling human being to another. The fact that 
 you have, as you say, become less prosperous, in some sort 
 through me, seems to give me a right to make it a duty for me, 
 if you will to help you if I can. Let me send a good doctor to 
 see you. Let me implore you as a last chance to put yourself
 
 378 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 into his hands, and to obey him, and your wife ; and let me,' 
 the rector hesitated, ' let me make things pecuniarily easier for 
 Mrs. Henslowe till you have pulled yourself out of the hole in 
 which, by common report at least, you are now.' 
 
 Henslowe stared at him, divided between anger caused by 
 the sore stirring of his old self-importance, and a tumultuous 
 flood of self-pity, roused irresistibly in him by Robert's piercing 
 frankness, and aided by his own more or less maudlin condition. 
 The latter sensation quickly undermined the former ; he turned 
 his back on the recto.r and leant over the railings of the lane, 
 shaken by something it is hardly worth while to dignify by the 
 name of emotion. Robert stood by, a pale embodiment of mingled 
 judgment and compassion. He gave the man a few moments 
 to recover himself, and then, as Henslowe turned round again, 
 he silently and appealingly held out his hand the hand of the 
 good man, which it was an honour for such as Henslowe to 
 touch. Constrained by the moral force radiating from his look, 
 the other took it with a kind of helpless sullenness. 
 
 Then, seizing at once on the slight concession,- with that 
 complete lack of inconvenient self -consciousness, or hindering 
 indecision, which was one of the chief causes of his effect on 
 men and women, Robert began to sound the broken repulsive 
 creature as to his affairs. Bit by bit, compelled by a will and 
 nervous strength far superior to his own, Henslowe was led 
 into abrupt and blurted confidences which surprised no one so 
 much as himself. Robert's quick sense possessed itself of point 
 after point, seeing presently ways of escape and relief which 
 the besotted brain beside him had been quite incapable of de- 
 vising for itself. They walked on into the open country, and 
 what with the discipline of the rector's presence, the sobering 
 effect wrought by the shock to pride and habit, and the un- 
 wonted brain exercise of the conversation, the demon in Hens- 
 lowe had been for the moment most strangely tamed after half 
 an hour's talk. Actually some reminiscences of his old ways of 
 speech and thought, the ways of the once prosperous and self- 
 reliant man of business, had reappeared in him before the end 
 of it, called out by the subtle influence of a manner which 
 always attracted to the surface whatever decent element there 
 might be left in a man, and then instantly gave it a recognition 
 which was more redeeming than either counsel or denuncia- 
 tion. 
 
 By the time they parted Robert had arranged with his old 
 enemy that he should become his surety with a rich cousin in 
 Churton, who, always supposing there were no risk in the 
 matter, and that benevolence ran on all-fours with security of 
 investment, was prepared to shield the credit of the family by 
 the advance of a sufficient sum of money to rescue the ex-agent 
 from his most pressing difficulties. He had also wrung from 
 him the promise to see a specialist in London Robert writing 
 that evening to make the appointment.
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 379 
 
 How had it been done ? Neither Robert nor Henslowe ever 
 quite knew. Henslowe walked home in a bewilderment which 
 for once had nothing to dp with brandy, but was simply the 
 result of a moral shock acting on what was still human in the 
 man's debased consciousness, just as electricity acts on the 
 bodily frame. 
 
 Robert, on the other hand, saw him depart with a singular 
 lightening of mood. What he seemed to have achieved might 
 turn out to be the merest moonshine. At any rate, the incident 
 had appeased in him a kind of spiritual hunger the hunger to 
 escape a while from that incessant process of destructive analysis 
 with which the mind was still beset, into some use of energy, 
 more positive, human, and beneficent. 
 
 The following day was one long trial of endurance for Elsmere 
 and for Catherine. She pleaded to go, promising quietly to 
 keep out of his sight, and they started together a miserable 
 pair. 
 
 Crowds, heat, decorations, the grandees on the platform, and 
 conspicuous among them the squire's slouching frame and 
 striking head, side by side with a white and radiant Lady 
 Helen the outer success, the inner revolt and pain and the 
 constant seeking of his truant eyes for a face that hid itself as 
 much as possible in dark corners, but was in truth the one 
 thing sharply present to him these were the sort of impres- 
 sions that remained with Elsmere afterwards of this last meet- 
 ingwith his people. 
 
 He had made a speech, of which he never could remember a 
 word. As he sat down, there had been a slight flutter of sur- 
 prise in the sympathetic looks of those about him, as though 
 the tone of it had been somewhat unexpected and dispropor- 
 tionate to the occasion. Had he betrayed himself in any way 1 
 He looked for Catherine, but she was nowhere to be seen. Only 
 in his search he caught the squire's ironical glance, and won- 
 dered with quick shame what sort of nonsense he had been 
 talking. 
 
 Then a neighbouring clergyman, who had been his warm 
 supporter and admirer from the beginning, sprang up and 
 made a rambling panegyric on him and on his work, which 
 Elsmere writhed under. His work ! absurdity ! What could 
 be done in two years ? He saw it all as the merest nothing, a 
 ragged beginning which might do more harm than good. 
 
 But the cheering was incessant, the popular feeling intense. 
 There was old Milsom waving a feeble arm : John Allwood 
 gaunt, but radiant ; Mary Sharland, white still as the ribbons 
 on her bonnet, egging on her flushed and cheering husband: 
 and the club boys grinning and shouting, partly for love or 
 Elsmere, mostly because to the young human animal mere 
 noise is heaven. In front was an old hedger and ditcher, who 
 came round the parish periodically, and never failed to take 
 Elsmere's opinion as to ' a bit of prapperty ' he and two other
 
 380 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 brothers as ancient as himself had been quarrelling over for 
 twenty years, and were likely to go on quarrelling over, till all 
 three litigants had closed their eyes on a mortal scene which 
 had afforded them^ on the whole vast entertainment, though 
 little pelf. Next him was a bowed and twisted old tramp who 
 had been shepherd in the district in his youth, had then gone 
 through the Crimea and the Mutiny, and was now living about 
 the commons, welcome to feed here and sleep there for the sake 
 of his stories and his queer innocuous wit. Robert had had 
 many a gay argumentative walk with him, and he and his com- 
 panion had tramped miles to see the function, to rattle their 
 sticks on the floor in Elsmere's honour, and satiate their curious 
 gaze on the squire. 
 
 When all was over, Elsmere, with his wife on his arm, 
 mounted the hill to the rectory, leaving the green behind 
 them still crowded with folk. Once inside the shelter of their 
 own trees, husband and wife turned instinctively and caught 
 each other's hands. A low groan broke from Elsmere's lips ; 
 Catherine looked at him one moment, then fell weeping on his 
 breast. The first chapter of their common life was closed. 
 
 One thing more, however, of a private nature, remained for 
 Elsmere to do. Late in the afternoon he walked over to the Hall. 
 
 He found the squire in the inner library, among his German 
 books, his pipe in his mouth, his old smoking coat and slippers 
 bearing witness to the rapidity and joy with which he had shut 
 the world out again after the futilities of the morning. His 
 mood was more accessible than Elsmere had yet found it since 
 his return. 
 
 ' Well, have you done with all those tomfooleries, Elsmere 1 
 Precious eloquent speech you made ! When I see you and 
 
 feople like you throwing yourselves at the heads of the people, 
 always think of Scaliger's remark about the Basques : " They 
 say they understand one another / don't believe a word of it ! " 
 All that the lower class wants to understand, at any rate, is the 
 shortest way to the pockets of you and me ; all that you and 
 I need understand, according to me, is how to keep 'em off! 
 There you have the sum and substance of my political philo- 
 sophy.' 
 
 ' You remind me,' said Robert drily, sitting down on one of 
 the library stools, ' of some of those sentiments you expressed 
 so forcibly on the first evening of pur acquaintance.' 
 
 The squire received the shaft with equanimity. 
 
 ' I was not amiable, I remember, on that occasion,' he said 
 coolly, his thin, old man's fingers moving the while among the 
 shelves of books, ' nor on several subsequent ones. I had been 
 made a fool of, and you were not particularly adroit. But of 
 course you won't acknowledge it. Who ever yet got a parson 
 to confess himself ! ' 
 
 'Strangely enough, Mr. Wendover,' said Robert, fixing him
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 381 
 
 with a pair of deliberate feverish eyes, ' I am here at this moment 
 for that very purpose.' 
 
 ' Go on,' said the squire, turning, however, to meet the rector's 
 look, his gold spectacles falling forward over his long hooked 
 nose, his attitude one of sudden attention. ' Go on.' 
 
 All his grievances against Elsmere returned to him. He 
 stood aggressively waiting. 
 
 Robert paused a moment, and then said abruptly 
 
 ' Perhaps even you will agree, Mr. Wendover, that I had some 
 reason for sentiment this morning. Unless I read the lessons 
 to-morrow, which is possible, to-day has been my last public 
 appearance as rector of this parish ! ' 
 
 The squire looked at him dumfoundered. 
 
 ' And your reasons ? ' he said, with quick imperativeness. 
 
 Robert gave them. He admitted, as plainly and .bluntly as 
 he had done to Grey, the squire's own part in the matter ; but 
 here a note of antagonism, almost of defiance, crept even into 
 lus confession of wide and illimitable defeat. He was there, so 
 to speak, to hand over his sword. But to the squire, his sur- 
 render had all the pride of victory. 
 
 ' Why should you give up your living ? ' asked the squire 
 after several minutes' complete silence. 
 
 He too had sat down, and was now bending forward, his 
 sharp small eyes peering at his companion. 
 
 'Simply because I prefer to feel myself an honest man. 
 However, I have not acted without advice. Grey of St. An- 
 selm's you know him of course was a very close personal 
 friend of mine at Oxford. I have been to see him, and we 
 agreed it was the only thing to do.' 
 
 'Oh, Grey,' exclaimed the squire, with a movement of im- 
 patience. 'Grey of course wanted you to set up a church of 
 your own, or to join his ! He is like all idealists, he has the 
 usual foolish contempt for the compromise of institutions.' 
 
 ' Not at all,' said Robert calmly, ' you are mistaken he has 
 the most sacred respect for institutions. He only thinks it 
 well, and I agree with him, that with regard to a man's public 
 profession and practice he should recognise that two and two 
 make four.' 
 
 It was clear to him from the squire's tone and manner that 
 Mr. Wendover's instincts on the point were very much what 
 he had expected, 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.
 
 382 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 '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 busi- 
 ness of the practical man to live ! If I had your altruist emo- 
 tional 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 argu- 
 ments 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 cui'tain dropped behind him. Mr. Wendover stood a 
 minute looking after him ; then, with some vehement expletive
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 383 
 
 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 smirk- 
 ing 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
 
 384 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK iv 
 
 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 con- 
 scious 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 con- 
 sideration 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 in- 
 domitable 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 him- 
 self 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 his- 
 torical inductions 1 Not only sceptical to the core, but consti- 
 tutionally indifferent, the squire had always found enough to 
 make life amply worth living in the mere dissection of other 
 men's beliefs.
 
 CHAP, xxx CRISIS 385 
 
 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 warn- 
 ing, 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 delu- 
 sion 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 case- 
 ment window 1 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, beforo 
 he fell back in his chair ; a swoon, born of pitiful human terror 
 terror of things unseen creeping over heart and brain. 
 
 2C
 
 BOOK V 
 
 EOSE
 
 CHAPTEE 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 prepara- 
 tions 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 stand towered beside it ; chry- 
 santhemums were everywhere ; an invalid lady in a ' best cap ' 
 occupied the sofa ; and two girls were flitting about, clearly 
 making the last arrangements necessary for a ' musical after- 
 noon.' 
 
 The invalid was Mrs. Leyburn, the girls, of course, Rose and 
 Agnes. Rose at last was safely settled in her longed-for London, 
 and an artistic company, of the sort her soul loved, was coming 
 to tea with her. 
 
 Of Rose's summer at Burwood very little need be said. She 
 was conscious that she had not borne it very well. She had 
 been off-hand with Mrs. Thornburgh, and had enjoyed one or 
 two open skirmishes with Mrs. Seaton. Her whole temper had 
 been irritating and irritable she was perfectly aware of it. 
 Towards her sick mother, indeed, she had controlled herself ; 
 nor, for such a restless creature, had she made a bad nurse. 
 But Agnes had endured much, and found it all the harder be- 
 cause she was so totally in the dark as to the whys and where- 
 fores of her sister's moods. 
 
 Rose herself would have scornfully denied that any whys and 
 wherefores beyond her rooted dislike of Whindale existed. 
 Since her return from Berlin, and especially since that moment 
 when, as she was certain, Mr. Langham had avoided her and 
 Catherine at the National Gallery, she had been calmly certain 
 of her own heart-wholeness. Berlin had developed her pre- 
 cisely as she had desired that it might. The necessities of the 
 Bohemian student's life had trained her to a new independence 
 and shrewdness, and in her own opinion she was now a woman 
 of the world judging all things by pure reason. 
 
 Oh, of course, she understood him perfectly. In the first 
 place, at the time of their first meeting she had been a mere
 
 390 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK V 
 
 bread-and-butter miss, the easiest of preys for any one who 
 might wish to get a few hours' amusement and distraction out 
 of her temper and caprices. In the next place, even supposing 
 he had been ever inclined to fall in love with her, which her 
 new sardonic fairness of mind obliged her to regard as entirely 
 doubtful, he was a man to whom marriage was impossible. 
 How could any one expect such a superfine dreamer to turn 
 bread-winner for a wife and household ? Imagine Mr. Langham 
 interviewed by a rate-collector or troubled about coals ! As to 
 her simply she had misunderstood the laws of the game. It 
 was a little bitter to have to confess it ; a little bitter that he 
 should have seen it, and have felt reluctantly compelled to re- 
 call the facts to her. But, after all, most girls have some young 
 follies to blush over. 
 
 So far the little cynic would get, becoming rather more 
 scarlet, however, over the process of reflection than was quite 
 compatible with the ostentatious worldly wisdom of it. Then 
 a sudden inward restlessness would break through, and she 
 would spend a passionate hour pacing up and down, and hun- 
 gering for the moment when she might avenge upon herself and 
 him the week of silly friendship he had found it necessary as 
 her elder and monitor to cut short ! 
 
 In September came the news of Robert's resignation of his 
 living. Mother and daughters sat looking at each other over 
 the letter, stupefied. That this calamity, of all others, should 
 have fallen on Catherine, of all women ! Rose said very little, 
 and presently jumped up with shining excited eyes, and ran 
 out for a walk with Bob, leaving Agnes to console their tearful 
 and agitated mother. When she came in she went singing 
 about the house as usual. Agnes, who was moved by the news 
 out of all her ordinary sangfroid, was outraged by what seemed 
 to her Rose's callousness. She wrote a letter to Catherine, 
 which Catherine put among her treasures, so strangely unlike 
 it was to the quiet indifferent Agnes of every day. Rose spent 
 a morning over an attempt at a letter, which when it reached 
 its destination only wounded Catherine by its constraint and 
 convention. 
 
 And yet that same night when the child was alone, suddenly 
 some phrase of Catherine's letter recurred to her. She saw, as 
 only imaginative people see, with every detail visualised, her 
 sister's suffering, her sister's struggle that was to be. She 
 jumped into bed, and, stifling all sounds under the clothes, 
 cried herself to sleep, which did not prevent her next morning 
 from harbouring somewhere at the bottom of her, a wicked and 
 furtive satisfaction that Catherine might now learn there were 
 more opinions in the world than one. 
 
 As for the rest of the valley, Mrs. Leyburn soon passed 
 from bewailing to a plaintive indignation with Robert, which 
 was a relief to her daughters. It seemed to her a reflection 
 on 'Richard' that Robert should have behaved so. Church
 
 CHAP, xxxi ROSE 391 
 
 opinions had been good enough for ' Richard.' ' The young men 
 seem to think, my dears, their fathers were all fools ! ' 
 
 The vicar, good man, was sincerely distressed, but sincerely 
 confident, also, that in time Elsmere would find his way back 
 into the fold. In Mrs. Thornburgh's dismay there was a secret 
 superstitious pang. Perhaps she had better not have meddled. 
 Perhaps it was never well to meddle. One event bears many 
 readings, and the tragedy of Catherine Elsmere's life took shape 
 in the uneasy consciousness of the vicar's spouse as a more or 
 less sharp admonition against wilfulness in match-making. 
 
 Of course Rose had her way as to wintering in London. 
 They came up in the middle of October while the Elsmeres 
 were still abroad, and settled into a small house in Lerwick 
 Gardens, Campden Hill, which Catherine had secured for them 
 on her way tli rough town to the Continent. 
 
 As soon as Mrs. Leyburn had been made comfortable, Rose 
 set to work to look up her friends. She owed her acquaintance 
 in London hitherto mainly to Mr. and Mrs. Pierson, the young 
 barrister and his aesthetic wife whom she had originally met 
 and made friends with in a railway-carriage. Mr. Pierson was 
 bustling and shrewd ; not made of the finest clay, yet not at all 
 a bad fellow. His wife, the daughter of a famous Mrs. Leo 
 Hunter of a bygone generation, was small, untidy, and in all 
 matters of religious or political opinion 'emancipated' to an 
 extreme. She had also a strong vein of inherited social ambi- 
 tion, and she and her husband welcomed Rose with greater 
 effusion than ever, in proportion as she was more beautiful and 
 more indisputably gifted than ever. They placed themselves 
 and their house at the girl's service, partly out of genuine 
 admiration and good-nature, partly also because they divined 
 in her a profitable social appendage. 
 
 For the Piersons, socially, were still climbing, and had by 
 no means attained. Their world, so far, consisted too much of 
 the odds and ends of most other worlds. They were not satis- 
 fied with it, and the friendship of the girl -violinist, whose 
 vivacious beauty and artistic gift made a stir wherever she 
 went, was a very welcome addition to their resources. They 
 feted her in their own house ; they took her to the houses of 
 other people ; society smiled on Miss Leyburn's protectors more 
 than it had ever smiled on Mr. and Mrs. Pierson taken alone ; 
 and meanwhile Rose, flushed, excited, and totally unsuspicious, 
 thought the world a fairy tale, and lived from morning till 
 night in a perpetual din of music, compliments, and bravos, 
 which seemed to her life indeed life at last ! 
 
 With the beginning of November the Elsmeres returned, and 
 about the same time Rose began to project tea-parties of her 
 own, to which Mrs. Leyburn gave a flurried assent. When the 
 invitations were written, Rose sat staring at them a little, pen 
 in hand. 
 
 ' i wonder what Catherine will say to some of these people ! '
 
 392 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 she remarked in a dubious voice to Agnes. ' Some of them are 
 queer, I admit ; but, after all, those two superior persons will 
 have to get used to my friends some time, and they may as well 
 begin.' 
 
 'You cannot expect poor Cathie to come,' said Agnes with 
 sudden energy. 
 
 Rose's eyebrows went up. Agnes resented her ironical ex- 
 pression, and with a word or two of quite unusual sharpness 
 got up and went. 
 
 Rose, left alone, sprang up suddenly, and clasped her white 
 fingers above her head, with a long breath. 
 
 ' Where my heart used to be there is now justa black 
 cold cinder,' she remarked with sarcastic emphasis. 'I am 
 sure I used to be a nice girl once, but it is so long ago I can't 
 remember it ! ' 
 
 She stayed so a minute or more ; then two tears suddenly 
 broke and fell. She dashed them angrily away, and sat down 
 again to her note-writing. 
 
 Amongst the cards she had still to fill up was one of which 
 the envelope was addressed to the Hon. Hugh Flaxman, 90 St. 
 James's Place. Lady Charlotte, though she had afterwards again 
 left to'wn, had been in Martin Street at the end of October. 
 The Leyburns had lunched there, and had been introduced by 
 her to her nephew, and Lady Helen's brother, Mr. Flaxman. 
 The girls had found him agreeable ; he had called the week 
 afterwards when they were not at home ; and Rose now care- 
 lessly sent him a card, with the inward reflection that he was 
 much too great a man to come, and was probably enjoying him- 
 self at country houses, as every aristocrat should, in November. 
 
 The following day the two girls made their way over to 
 Bedford Square, where the Elsmeres had taken a house in order 
 to be near the British Museum. They pushed their way upstairs 
 through a medley of packing-cases, and a sickening smell of 
 paint. There was a sound of an opening door, and a gentleman 
 stepped out of the back room, which was to be Elsmere's study, 
 on to the landing. 
 
 It was Edward Langham. He and Rose stood and stared at 
 each other a moment. Then Rose in the coolest, lightest voice 
 introduced him to Agnes. Agnes, with one curious glance, 
 took in her sister's defiant smiling ease and the stranger's 
 embarrassment ; then she went on to find Catherine. The two 
 left behind exchanged a few banal questions and answers. 
 Langham had only allowed himself one look at the dazzling 
 face and eyes framed in fur cap and boa. Afterwards he stood 
 making a study of the ground, and answering her remarks in 
 his usual stumbling fashion. What was it had gone out of her 
 voice simply the soft callow sounds of first youth ? And what 
 a personage she had grown in these twelve months how for- 
 midably, consciously brilliant in look and dress and manner ! 
 
 Yes, he was still in town settled there, indeed, for some
 
 CHAP, xxxi ROSE 393 
 
 time. And she was there any special day on which Mrs. Ley- 
 burn received visitors ? He asked the question, of course, with 
 various hesitations and circumlocutions. 
 
 ' Oh dear, yes ! Will you come next Wednesday, for instance, 
 and inspect a musical menagerie ? The animals will go through 
 their performances from four till seven. And I can answer for 
 it that some of the specimens will be entirely new to you.' 
 
 The prospect offered could hardly have been more repellent 
 to him, but he got out an acceptance somehow. She nodded 
 lightly to him and passed on, and he went downstairs, his head 
 in a whirl. Where .had the crude pretty child of yester-year 
 departed to impulsive, conceited, readily offended, easily 
 touched, sensitive as to what all the world might think of her 
 and her performances ? The girl he had just left had counted 
 all her resources, tried the edge of all her weapons, and knew 
 her own place too well to ask for anybody else's appraisement. 
 What beauty good heavens ! what aplomb ! The rich husband 
 Elsmere talked of would hardly take much waiting for. 
 
 So cogitating, Langham took his way westward to his 
 Beaumont Street rooms. They were on the second floor, small, 
 dingy, choked with books. Ordinarily he shut the door behind 
 him with a sigh of content. This evening they seemed to him 
 intolerably confined and stuffy. He thought of going out to his 
 club and a concert, but did nothing, after all, but sit brooding 
 over the fire till midnight, alternately hugging and hating his 
 solitude. 
 
 And so we return to the Wednesday following this unex- 
 pected meeting. 
 
 The drawing-room at No. 27 was beginning to fill. Rose 
 stood at the door receiving the guests as they flowed in, while 
 Agnes in the background dispensed tea. She was discussing 
 with herself the probability of Langham 's appearance ' Whom 
 shall I introduce him to first ? ' she pondered, while she shook 
 hands. ' The poet 1 I see mamma is now struggling with him. 
 The 'cellist with the hair or the lady in Greek dress or the 
 esoteric Buddhist 1 What a fascinating selection ! I had really 
 no notion we should be quite so curious ! ' 
 
 'Mees Rose, they vait for you,' said a charming golden- 
 bearded young German, viola in hand, bowing before her. He 
 and his kind were most of them in love with her already, and 
 all the more so because she knew so well how to keep them at a 
 distance. 
 
 She went off, beckoning to Agnes to take her place, and the 
 quartette began. The young German aforesaid played the viola, 
 while the 'cello was divinely played by a Hungarian, of whose 
 outer man it need only be said that in wild profusion of much- 
 tortured hair, in Hebraism of feature, and swarthy smoothness 
 of cheek, he belonged to that type which Nature would seem to 
 have already used to excess in the production of the continental
 
 394 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 musician. Rose herself was violinist, and the instruments 
 dashed into the opening allegro with a precision and an entrain 
 that took the room by storm. 
 
 In the middle of it, Langham pushed his way into the crowd 
 round the drawing-room door. Through the heads about him, 
 he could see her standing a little in advance of the others, her 
 head turned to one side, really in the natural attitude of violin- 
 playing, but, as it seemed to him, in a kind of ravishment of 
 listening cheeks flushed, eyes shining, and the right arm and 
 high-curved wrist managing the bow with a grace born of know- 
 ledge and fine training. 
 
 ' Very much improved, eh ? ' said an English professional to a 
 German neighbour, lifting his eyebrows interrogatively. 
 
 The other nodded with the business-like air of one who knows. 
 'Joachim, they say, war daruber entzuckt, and did his best vid 
 
 her, and now D has got her ' naming a famous violinist 
 
 'she vill make fast brogress. He vill schtamp upon her 
 treecks ! ' 
 
 ' But will she ever be more than a very clever amateur ? Too 
 pretty, eh ? ' And the questioner nudged his companion, 
 dropping his voice. 
 
 Langham would have given worlds to get on into the room, 
 over the prostrate body of the speaker by preference, but the 
 laws of mass and weight had him at their mercy, and he was 
 rooted to the spot. 
 
 The other shrugged his shoulders. ' Veil, vid a bretty woman 
 iiberhaupt it dosn't mean business ! It's zoziety the dukes 
 and the duchesses that ruins all the yong talents.' 
 
 This whispered conversation went on during the andante. 
 With the scherzo the two hirsute faces broke into broad smiles. 
 The artist behind each woke up, and Langham heard no more, 
 except guttural sounds of delight and quick notes of technical 
 criticism. 
 
 How that Scherzo danced and coquetted, and how the Presto 
 flew as though all the winds were behind it, chasing its mad 
 eddies of notes through listening space ! At the end, amid a 
 wild storm of applause, she laid down her violin, and, proudly 
 smiling, her breast still heaving with excitement and exertion, 
 received the praises of those crowding round her. The group 
 round the door was precipitated forward, and Langham with it. 
 She saw him in a moment. Her white brow contracted, and 
 she gave him a quick but hardly smiling glance of recognition 
 through the crowd. He thought there was no chance of getting 
 at her, and moved aside amid the general hubbub to look at a 
 picture. 
 
 'Mr. Langham, how do you do ?' 
 
 He turned sharply and found her beside him. She had come 
 to him with malice in her heart malice born of smart and long 
 smouldering pain ; but as she caught his look, the look of the 
 nervous short-sighted scholar and recluse, as her glance swept
 
 CHAP, xxxi ROSE 395 
 
 over the delicate refinement of the face, a sudden softness 
 quivered in her own. The game was so defenceless ! 
 
 ' You will find nobody here you know,' she said abruptly, a 
 little under her breath. ' I am morally certain you never saw 
 a single person in the room before ! Shall I introduce you ? ' 
 
 ' Delighted, of course. But don't disturb yourself about me, 
 Miss Leyburn. I come out of my hole so seldom, everything 
 amuses me but especially looking and listening.' 
 
 ' Which means,' she said, with frank audacity, ' that you dis- 
 like new people ! ' 
 
 His eye kindled at once. ' Say rather that it means a prefer- 
 ence for the people that are not new ! There is such a thing 
 as concentrating one's attention. I came to hear you play, Miss 
 Leyburn ! ' 
 
 'Well?' 
 
 She glanced at him from under her long lashes, one hand 
 playing with the rings on the other. He thought, suddenly, 
 with a sting of regret, of the confiding child who had flushed 
 under his praise that Sunday evening at Murewell. 
 
 ' Superb ! ' he said, but half -mechanically. ' I had no notion 
 a winter's work would have done so much for you. Was Berlin 
 as stimulating as you expected ? When I heard you had gone, 
 I said to myself " Well, at least, now, there is one completely 
 happy person in Europe ! " ' 
 
 ' Did you ? How easily we all dogmatise about each other 1 ' 
 she said scornfully. Her manner was by no means simple. He 
 did not feel himself at all at ease with her. His very embarrass- 
 ment, however, drove him into rashness, as often happens. 
 
 ' I thought I had enough to go upon ! ' he said in another 
 tone ; and his black eyes, sparkling as though a film had 
 dropped from them, supplied the reference his words forbore. 
 
 She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up of 
 the whole figure. 
 
 'Will you come and be introduced?' she asked him coldly. 
 He bowed as coldly and followed her. Wholesome resentment 
 of her manner was denied him. He Jiad asked for her friend- 
 ship, and had then gone away and forgotten her. Clearly what 
 she meant him to see now was that they were strangers again. 
 Well, she was amply in her right. He suspected that his 
 allusion to their first talk over the fire had not been unwelcome 
 to her, as an opportunity. 
 
 And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest in 
 spite of himself she might beguile him once more into those old 
 lapses of will and common sense ! Coxcomb ! 
 
 He made a few spasmodic efforts at conversation with the 
 lady to whom she had introduced him, then awkwardly dis- 
 n milled himself and went to stand in a corner and study his 
 neighbours. 
 
 Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in 
 the most correct professional costume long hair, velvet coat,
 
 396 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 eyeglass and all. His extravagance, however, was of the most 
 conventional type. Only his vanity had a touch of the sublime. 
 Langham, who possessed a sort of fine-ear gift for catching 
 conversation, heard him saying to an open-eyed ingenue beside 
 him, 
 
 ' Oh, my literary baggage is small as yet. I have only done, 
 perhaps, three things that will live.' 
 
 ' Oh, Mr. Wood ! ' said the maiden, mildly protesting against 
 so much modesty. 
 
 He smiled, thrusting his hand into the breast of the velvet 
 coat. ' But then,' he said, in a tone of the purest candour, ' at 
 my age I don't think Shelley had done more ! ' 
 
 Langham, who, like all shy men, was liable to occasional 
 explosions, was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing, and 
 had to retire from the neighbourhood of the bard, who looked 
 round him, disturbed and slightly frowning. 
 
 At last he discovered a point of view in the back room 
 whence he could watch the humours of the crowd without 
 coming too closely in contact with them. What a miscellaneous 
 collection it was ! He began to be irritably jealous for Rose's 
 place in the world. She ought to be more adequately sur- 
 rounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn what were the 
 Elsmeres about 1 He rebelled against the thought of her living 
 perpetually among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, 
 queen of the second-rate. 
 
 It provoked him that she should be amusing herself so well. 
 Her laughter, every now and then, came ringing into the back 
 room. And presently there was a general hubbub. . Langham 
 craned his neck forward, and saw a struggle going on over a 
 roll of music, between Rose and the long-haired, long-nosed 
 violoncellist. Evidently she did not want to play some 
 particular piece, and wished to put it out of sight. Whereupon 
 the Hungarian, who had been clamouring for it, rushed to its 
 rescue, and there was a mock fight over it. At last, amid the 
 applause of the room, Rose was beaten, and her conqueror, 
 flourishing the music on high, executed a kind of pas seul of 
 triumph. 
 
 ' Victoria ! ' he cried. ' Now denn for de conditions of peace. 
 Mees Rose, vill you kindly tune up ? You are as moch beaten 
 as the French at Sedan.' 
 
 ' Not a stone of my fortresses, not an inch of my territory ! ' 
 said Rose, with fine emphasis, crossing her white wrists before 
 her. 
 
 The Hungarian looked at her, the wild poetic strain in him 
 which was the strain of race asserting itself. 
 
 ' But if de victor bows,' he said, dropping on one knee before 
 her. ' If force lay down his spoils at de feet of beauty ? ' 
 
 The circle round them applauded hotly, the touch of 
 theatricality finding immediate response. Langham was 
 remorselessly conscious of the man's absurd chevelure and ill-
 
 CHAP, xxxi ROSE 397 
 
 fitting clothes. But Rose herself had evidently nothing but 
 relish for the scene. Proudly smiling, she held out her hand for 
 her property, and as soon as she had it safe, she whisked it into 
 the open drawer of a cabinet standing near, and drawing out 
 the key, held it up a moment in her taper fingers, and then, 
 depositing it in a little velvet bag hanging at her girdle, she 
 closed the snap upon it with a little vindictive wave of triumph. 
 Every movement was graceful, rapid, effective. 
 
 Half a dozen German throats broke into guttural protest. 
 Amid the storm of laughter and remonstrance, the door 
 suddenly opened. The fluttered parlour-maid mumbled a long 
 name, and, with a port of soldierly uprightness, there advanced 
 behind her a large fair-haired woman, followed by a gentleman, 
 and in the distance by another figure. 
 
 Rose drew back a moment astounded, one hand on the piano, 
 her dress sweeping round her. An awkward silence fell on the 
 chattering circle of musicians. 
 
 ' Good heavens ! ' said Langham to himself, ' Lady Charlotte 
 Wynnstay ! ' 
 
 'How do you do, Miss LeyburnT said one of the most 
 piercing of voices. ' Are you surprised to see me ? You didn't 
 ask me perhaps you don t want me. But I have come, you see, 
 partly because my nephew was coming,' and she pointed to the 
 gentleman behind her, ' partly because I meant to punish you 
 for not having come to see me last Thursday. Why didn't you 1 ' 
 
 'Because we thought you were still away,' said Rose, who 
 had by this time recovered her self-possession. 'But if you 
 meant to punish me, Lady Charlotte, you have done it badly. 
 I am delighted to see you. May I introduce my sister ? Agnes, 
 will you find Lady Charlotte Wynnstay a chair by mamma ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, you wish, I see, to dispose of me at once,' said the other 
 imperturbably. ' What is happening ? Is it music ? ' 
 
 ' Aunt Charlotte, that is most disingenuous on your part. I 
 gave you ample warning.' 
 
 Rose turned a smiling face towards the speaker. It was Mr. 
 Flaxman, Lady Charlotte's companion. 
 
 ' You need not have drawn the picture too black, Mr. Flax- 
 man. There is an escape. If Lady Charlotte will only let my 
 sister take her into the next room, she will find herself well out 
 of the clutches of the music. Oh, Robert ! Here you are at 
 last! Lady Charlotte, you remember my brother-in-law? 
 Robert, will you get Lady Charlotte some tea ? ' 
 
 ' / am not going to be banished,' said Mr. Flaxman, looking 
 down upon her, his well-bred, slightly worn face aglow with 
 animation and pleasure. 
 
 'Then you will be deafened,' said Rose, laughing, as she 
 escaped from him a moment, to arrange for a song from a tall 
 formidable maiden, built after the fashion of Mr. Gilbert's 
 contralto heroines, with a voice which bore out the ample 
 promise of her frame.
 
 398 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 'Your sister is a terribly self-possessed young person, Mr. 
 Elsmere,' said Lady Charlotte, as Robert piloted her across the 
 room. 
 
 'Does that imply praise or blame on your part, Lady 
 Charlotte ? ' asked Robert, smiling. 
 
 'Neither at present. I don't know Miss Leyburn well 
 enough. I merely state a fact. No tea, Mr. Elsmere. I have 
 had three teas already, and I am not like the American woman 
 who could always worry down another cup.' 
 
 She was introduced to Mrs. Leyburn ; but the plaintive 
 invalid was immediately seized with terror of her voice and 
 appearance, and was infinitely grateful to Robert for removing 
 her as promptly as possible to a chair on the border of the two 
 rooms where she could talk or listen as she pleased. For a few 
 moments she listened to Fraulein Adelmann s veiled unmanage- 
 able contralto ; then she turned magisterially to Robert stand- 
 ing behind her. 
 
 'The art of singing has gone out,' she declared, 'since the 
 Germans have been allowed to meddle in it. By the way, Mr. 
 Elsmere, how do you manage to be here? Are you taking a 
 holiday ? ' 
 
 Robert looked at her with a start. 
 
 ' I have left Murewell, Lady Charlotte.' 
 
 ' Left Murewell ! ' she said in astonishment, turning round to 
 look at him, her eyeglass in her eye. ' Why has Helen told me 
 nothing about it 1 Have you got another living ? ' 
 
 ' No. My wife and I are settling in London. We only told 
 Lady Helen of our intentions a few weeks ago.' 
 
 To which it may be added that Lady Helen, touched and 
 dismayed by Elsmere's letter to her, had not been very eager to 
 hand over the woes of her friends to her aunt's cool and 
 irresponsible comments. 
 
 Lady Charlotte deliberately looked at him a minute longer 
 through her glass. Then she let it fall. 
 
 ' You don't mean to tell me any more, I can see, Mr. Elsmere. 
 But you will allow me to be astonished ? ' 
 
 'Certainly,' he said, smiling sadly, and immediately after- 
 wards relapsing into silence. 
 
 ' Have you heard of the squire lately ? ' he asked her after a 
 pause. 
 
 ' Not from him. We are excellent friends when we meet, but 
 he doesn't consider me worth writing to. His sister little idiot 
 writes to me every now and then. But she has not vouch- 
 safed me a letter since the summer. I should say from the last 
 accounts that he was breaking.' 
 
 ' He had a mysterious attack of illness just before I left,' said 
 Robert gravely. ' It made one anxious.' 
 
 ' Oh, it is the old story. All the Wendovers have died of weak 
 hearts or queer brains generally of both together. I imagine 
 you had some experience of the squire's queerness at one time,
 
 CHAP, xxxi ROSE 399 
 
 Mr. Elsmere. I can't say you and he seemed to be on particu- 
 larly good terms on the only occasion I ever had the pleasure of 
 meeting you at Murewell.' 
 
 She looked up at him, smiling grimly. She had a curiously 
 exact memory for the unpleasant scenes of life. 
 
 ' Oh, you remember that unlucky evening ! ' said Robert, red- 
 dening a little. 'We soon got over that. We became great 
 friends.' 
 
 Again, however, Lady Charlotte was struck by the quiet 
 melancholy of his tone. How strangely the look of youth- 
 which had been so attractive in him the year before had ebbed 
 from the man's face from complexion, eyes, expression ! She 
 stared at him, full of a brusque tormenting curiosity as to the 
 how and why. 
 
 ' I hope there is some one among you strong enough to manage 
 Miss Rose,' she said presently, with an abrupt change of subject. 
 ' That little sister-in-law of yours is going to be the rage.' 
 
 ' Heaven forbid ! ' cried Robert fervently. 
 
 ' Heaven will do nothing of the kind. She is twice as pretty 
 as she was last year ; I am told she plays twice as well. She 
 had always the sort of manner that provoked people one moment 
 and charmed them the next. And, to judge by my few words 
 with her just now, I should say she had developed it finely. 
 Well, now, Mr. Elsmere, who is going to take care of her ? ' 
 
 ' I suppose we shall all have a try at it, Lady Charlotte.' 
 
 ' Her mother doesn't look to me a person of nerve enough,' 
 said Lady Charlotte coolly. ' She is a girl certain absolutely 
 certain to have adventures, and you may as well be prepared 
 for them.' 
 
 ' I can only trust she will disappoint your expectations, Lady 
 Charlotte,' said Robert, with a slightly sarcastic emphasis. 
 
 'Elsmere, who is that man talking to Miss Ley burn?' asked 
 Langham as the two friends stood side by side, a little later, 
 watching the spectacle. 
 
 ' A certain Mr. Flaxman, brother to a pretty little neighbour 
 of ours in Surrey Lady Helen Varley and nephew to Lady 
 Charlotte. I have not seen him here before ; but I think the 
 girls like him.' 
 
 ' Is he the Flaxman who got the mathematical prize at Berlin 
 last year ? ' 
 
 'Yes, I believe so. A striking person altogether. He is 
 enormously rich, Lady Helen tells me, in spite of an elder 
 brother. All the money in his mother's family has come to him, 
 and he is the heir to Lord Daniel's great Derbyshire property. 
 Twelve years ago I used to hear him talked about incessantly 
 by the Cambridge men one met. "Citizen Flaxman" they 
 called him, for his opinions' sake. He would ask his scout to 
 dinner, and insist on dining with his own servants, and shaking 
 hands witli his friends' butlers. The scouts and the butlers put
 
 400 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 an end to that, and altogether, I imagine, the world disappointed 
 him. He has a story, poor fellow, too a young wife, who died 
 with her first baby ten years ago. The world supposes him 
 never to have got over it, which makes him all the more inter- 
 esting. A distinguished face, don't you think 1 the good type 
 of English aristocrat.' 
 
 Langham assented. But his attention was fixed on the group 
 in which Rose's bright hair was conspicuous ; and when Robert 
 left him and went to amuse Mrs. Leyburn, he still stood rooted 
 to the same spot watching. Rose was leaning against the piano, 
 one hand behind her, her whole attitude full of a young, easy, 
 self-confident grace. Mr. Flaxman was standing beside her, and 
 they were deep in talk serious talk apparently, to judge by her 
 quiet manner and the charmed attentive interest of his look. 
 Occasionally, however, there was a sally on her part, and an 
 answering flash of laughter on his ; but the stream of conversa- 
 tion closed immediately over the interruption, and flowed on as 
 evenly as before. 
 
 Unconsciously Langham retreated farther and farther into 
 the comparative darkness of the inner room. He felt himself 
 singularly insignificant and out of place, and he made no more 
 efforts to talk. Rose played a violin solo, and played it with 
 astonishing delicacy and fire. When it was over Langham saw 
 her turn from the applauding circle crowding in upon her and 
 throw a smiling interrogative look over her shoulder at Mr. 
 Flaxman. Mr. Flaxman bent over her, and as he spoke Lang- 
 ham caught her flush, and the excited sparkle of her eyes. Was 
 this the ' some one in the stream ' ? No doubt ! no doubt ! 
 
 When the party broke up Langham found himself borne to- 
 wards the outer room, and before he knew where he was going 
 he was standing beside her. 
 
 ' Are you here still ? ' she said to him, startled, as he held out 
 his hand. He replied by some comments on the music, a little 
 lumbering and infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She hardly 
 listened, but presently she looked up nervously, compelled as it 
 were by the great melancholy eyes above her. 
 
 ' We are not always in this turmoil, Mr. Langham. Perhaps 
 some other day you will come and make friends witli my 
 mother ? ' 
 
 CHAPTER XXXH 
 
 NATURALLY, it was during their two months of autumn travel 
 that Elsmere and Catherine first realised in detail what Elsmere's 
 act was to mean to them, as husband and wife, in the future. 
 Each left England with the most tender and heroic resolves. 
 And no one who knows anything of life will need to be told that 
 even for these two finely-natured people such resolves were in 
 finitely easier to make than to carry out.
 
 CHAP, xxxn ROSE 401 
 
 ' i will not preach to you I will not persecute you ! ' Catherine 
 had said to her husband at the moment of her first shock and 
 anguish. And she did her utmost, poor thing, to keep her word ! 
 All through the innumerable bitternesses which accompanied 
 Elsmere's withdrawal from Murewell the letters which followed 
 them, the remonstrances of public and private friends, the para- 
 graphs which found their way, do what they would, into the 
 newspapers the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain 
 poor and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and 
 Robert, and whose bewildered lamentations came to them 
 through young Armitstead through all this she held her peace ; 
 she did her best to soften Robert's grief ; she never once re- 
 proached him with her own. 
 
 But at the same time the inevitable separation of their in- 
 most hopes and beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had im- 
 mensely strengthened that puritan independent fibre in her 
 which her youth had developed, and which her happy marriage 
 had only temporarily masked, not weakened. Never had 
 Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the 
 husband, who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious 
 life, had given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a 
 kind of nervous instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased 
 rigidity in her. Often when she was alone or at night she 
 was seized with a lonely, an awful sense of responsibility. Oh ! 
 let her guard her faith, not only for her own sake, her child's, 
 her Lord's, but for his that it might be given to her patience 
 at last to lead him back. 
 
 And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard 
 it was to set up certain barriers of silence. She feared that 
 fiery persuasive quality in Kobert she had so often seen at work 
 on other people. With him conviction was life it was the man 
 himself, to an extraordinary degree. How was she to resist the 
 pressure of those new ardours with which his mind was filling 
 she who loved him ! except by building, at any rate for the 
 time, an enclosure of silence round her Christian belief s ? It 
 was in some ways a pathetic repetition of the situation between 
 Robert and the squire in the early days of their friendship, but 
 in Catherine's mind there was no troubling presence of- new 
 knowledge conspiring from within with the forces without. At 
 this moment of her life she was more passionately convinced 
 than ever that the only knowledge truly worth having in this 
 world was the knowledge of God's mercies in Christ. 
 
 So gradually with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain 
 parts of herself from Robert's ken ; she avoided certain subjects, 
 or anything that might lead to them ; she ignored the religious 
 and philosophical books he was constantly reading she prayed 
 and thought alone always for him, of him but still resolutely 
 alone. It was impossible, however, that so great a change in 
 their life could be effected without a perpetual sense of breaking 
 links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds and griefs on both 
 
 2D
 
 402 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 sides. There came a moment when, as he sat alone one evening 
 in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly 
 awoke to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and 
 illusions, their relation to each other was altering, dwindling, 
 impoverishing : the terror of that summer night at Murewell 
 was being dismally justified. 
 
 His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual 
 discovery, ' sailing the seas where there was never sand ' the 
 vast shadowy seas of speculative thought. All his life, reserve 
 to those nearest to him had been pain and grief to him. He 
 was one of those people, as we know, who throw off readily ; to 
 whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable: who suffer 
 physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside 
 them. And now, at every turn, in their talk, their reading, in 
 many of the smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere 
 began to feel the presence of this cold and rigid something. 
 He was ever conscious of self-defence on her side, of pained 
 drawing back on his. And with every succeeding effort of his 
 at self-repression, it seemed to him as though fresh nails were 
 driven into the coffin of that old free habit of perfect confidence 
 which had made the heaven of their life since they had been 
 man and wife. 
 
 He sat on for long, through the September evening, ponder- 
 ing, wrestling. Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of 
 his own act, and of her antecedents, to which he must submit 
 himself, as to any mutilation or loss of power in the body ? The 
 young lover and husband rebelled the believer rebelled 
 against the admission. Probably if his change had left him 
 anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have 
 been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness 
 should bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual con- 
 fusion, which inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction 
 of a man's platform of action, he had never been more sure of 
 God, or the Divine aims of the world, than now ; never more 
 open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine world, to those passion- 
 ate moments of religious trust which are man's eternal defiance 
 to the iron silences about him. Originally, as we know, he had 
 shrunk from the thought of change in her corresponding to his 
 own ; now that his own foothold was strengthening, his longing 
 for a new union was overpowering that old dread. The pros- 
 elytising instinct may be never quite morally defensible, even 
 as between husband and wife. Nevertheless, in all strong, con- 
 vinced, and ardent souls it exists, and must be reckoned with. 
 
 At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse 
 which neutralised for the moment his nervous dread of hurting 
 her. Some little incident of their day together was rankling, 
 and it was borne in upon him that almost any violent protest 
 on her part would have been preferable to this constant soft 
 evasion of hers, which was gradually, imperceptibly dividing 
 heart from heart.
 
 CHAi'. xxxn ROSE 403 
 
 They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the 
 huge newly -built hotels which during the last twenty years 
 have invaded all the high places of Switzerland. The August 
 which had been so hot in England had been rainy and broken 
 in Switzerland. But it had been followed by a warm and 
 mellow September, and the favourite hotels below a certain 
 height were still full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les 
 Avants, this scantily furnished garret, out of which some 
 servants had been hurried to make room for them, was all that 
 could be found. They, however, liked it for its space and its 
 view. They looked sideways from their windows on to the 
 upper end of the lake, three thousand feet below them. Opposite, 
 across the blue water, rose a grandiose rampart of mountains, 
 the stage on which from morn till night the sun went through a 
 long transformation scene of beauty. The water was marked 
 every now and then by passing boats and steamers tiny specks 
 which served to measure the vastness of all around them. To 
 right and left, spui'S of green mountains shut out alike the 
 lower lake and the icy splendours of the ' Valais depths pro- 
 found.' What made the charm of the narrow prospect was, 
 first, the sense it produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily 
 above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the 
 magical effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist 
 would blot out the valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the 
 watcher face -to face across the fathomless abyss with the 
 majestic mountain mass, and its attendant retinue of clouds, as 
 though they and he were alone in the universe. 
 
 It was a peaceful September night. From the open window 
 beside him Ilobert could see a world of high moonlight, limited 
 and invaded on all sides by sharp black masses of shade. A 
 few rare lights glimmered on the spreading alp below, and every 
 now and then a breath of music came to them wafted from a 
 military band playing a mile or two away. They had been 
 climbing most of the afternoon, and Catherine was lying down, 
 her brown hair loose about her, the thin oval of her face and 
 clear line of brow just visible in the dim candlelight. 
 
 Suddenly he stretched out his hand for his Greek Testament, 
 which was always near him, though there had been no common 
 reading since that bitter day of his confession to her. The 
 mark still lay in the well-worn volume at the point reached in 
 their last reading at Murewell. He opened upon it, and began 
 the eleventh chapter of St. John. 
 
 Catherine trembled when she saw him take up the book. 
 He began without preface, treating the passage before him in 
 his usual way, that is to say, taking verse after verse in the 
 Greek, translating and commenting. She never spoke all 
 through, and at last he closed the little Testament, and bent 
 towards her, his look full of feeling. 
 
 ' Catherine ! can't you let me will you never let me tell you^ 
 now, how that story how the old things affect me, from the
 
 404 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 new point of view ? You always stop me when I try. I believe 
 you think of me as having thrown it all away. Would it not 
 comfort you sometimes, if you knew that although much of the 
 Gospels, this very raising of Lazarus, for instance, seem to me 
 no longer true in the historical sense, still they are always full 
 to me of an ideal, a poetical truth? Lazarus may not have 
 died and come to life, may never have existed ; but still to me, 
 now as always, love for Jesus of Nazareth is " resurrection " and 
 "life"?' 
 
 He spoke with the most painful diffidence, the most wistful 
 tenderness. 
 
 There was a pause. Then Catherine said, in a rigid con- 
 strained voice, 
 
 ' If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, as reality, I 
 cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.' 
 
 The next minute she rose, and, going to the little wooden 
 dressing-table, she began to brush out and plait for the night 
 her straight silky veil of hair. As she passed him Robert saw 
 her face pale and set. 
 
 He sat quiet another moment or two, and then he went 
 towards her and took her in his arms. 
 
 ' Catherine,' he said to her, his lips trembling, ' am I never to 
 speak my mind to you any more 1 Do you mean always to hold 
 me at arm's length to refuse always to hear what I have to 
 say in defence of the change which has cost us both so much ? ' 
 
 She hesitated, trying hard to restrain herself. But it was of 
 no use. She broke into tears quiet but most bitter tears. 
 
 ' Robert, I cannot ! Oh ! you must see I cannot. It is not 
 because I am hard, but because I am weak. How can I stand 
 up against you? I dare not I dare not. If you were not 
 yourself not my husband 
 
 Her voice dropped. Robert guessed that at the bottom of 
 her resistance there was an intolerable fear of what love might 
 do with her if she once gave it an opening. He felt himself 
 cruel, brutal, and yet an urgent sense of all that was at stake 
 drove him on. 
 
 ' I would not press or worry you, God knows ! ' he said, almost 
 piteously, kissing her forehead as she lay against him. 'But 
 remember, Catherine, I cannot put these things aside. I once 
 thought I could that I could fall back on my historical work, 
 and leave religious matters alone as far as criticism was con- 
 cerned. But I cannot. They fill my mind more and more. I 
 feel more and more impelled to search them out, and to put my 
 conclusions about them into shape. And all the time this is 
 going on, are you and I to remain strangers to one another in 
 all that concerns our truest life are we, Catherine 1 ' 
 
 He spoke in a low voice of intense feeling. She turned her 
 face and pressed her lips to his hand. Both had the scene in 
 the wood-path after her flight and return in their minds, and 
 both were filled with a despairing sense of the difficulty of
 
 CHAP, xxxii ROSE 405 
 
 living, not through great crises, but through the detail of 
 every day. 
 
 ' Could you not work at other things ? ' she whispered. 
 
 He was silent, looking straight before him into the moonlit 
 shimmer and white spectral hazes of the valley, his arms still 
 round her. 
 
 ' No ! ' he burst out at last ; ' not till I have satisfied myself. 
 I feel it burning within me, like a command from God, to work 
 out the problem, to make it clearer to myself and to others,' 
 he added deliberately. 
 
 Her heart sank within her. The last words called up before 
 her a dismal future of controversy and publicity, in which at 
 every step she would be condemning her husband. 
 
 'And all this time, all these years, perhaps,' he went on 
 before, in her perplexity, she could find words, 'is my wife 
 never going to let me speak freely to her 1 Am I to act, think, 
 judge, without her knowledge ? Is she to know less of me than 
 a friend, less even than the public for whom I write or speak ? ' 
 
 It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every moment 
 they stood there together it was being impressed upon him that 
 in fact this was what she meant, what she had contemplated 
 from the beginning. 
 
 ' Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,' she cried, again 
 clinging to him. ' Oh, think for me ! You know what I feel ; 
 that I dare not risk what is not mine ! ' 
 
 He kissed her again, and then moved away from her to the 
 window. It began to be plain to him that his effort was merely 
 futile, and had better not have been made. But his heart was 
 very sore. 
 
 'Do you ever ask yourself,' he said presently, looking 
 steadily into the night no, I don't think you can, Catherine 
 what part the reasoning faculty, that faculty which marks us 
 out from the animal, was meant to play in life ? Did God give 
 it to us simply that you might trample upon it and ignore it, 
 both in yourself and me ? ' 
 
 She had dropped into a chair, and sat with clasped hands, 
 her hair falling about her white dressing-gown, and framing the 
 nobly -featured face blanched by the moonlight. She did not 
 attempt a reply, but the melancholy of an invincible resolution, 
 which was, so to speak, not her own doing, but rather was like 
 a necessity imposed upon her from outside, breathed through 
 her silence. 
 
 He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the 
 gesture reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in 
 the Murewell library the same delicate austere beauty, the 
 same tenderness, the same underlying reserve. He took her 
 outstretched hands and held them against his breast. His 
 hotly-beating heart told him that he was perfectly right, and 
 that to accept the barriers she was setting up would impoverish 
 all their future life together. But he could not struggle with
 
 406 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a prac- 
 tical trial. Moreover, he felt strangely as he stood there the 
 danger of rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of the 
 religious temper, the dread of which had once before risen 
 spectre-like in his heart. 
 
 So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the 
 charm, all the delightfulness, of which under the circumstances 
 she was mistress. They wandered up the Khone valley, through 
 the St. Gothard, and spent a fortnight between Como and 
 Lugano. During these days her one thought was to revive 
 and refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself to 
 the various heroic futilities by which she would try as part of 
 her nursing mission to make the future look less empty and 
 their distress less real. Of course under all this delicate give 
 and take both suffered ; both felt that the promise of their 
 marriage had failed them, and that they had come dismally 
 down to a second best. But after all they were young, and the 
 autumn was beautiful and though they hurt each other, they 
 were alone together and constantly, passionately, interested in 
 each other. Italy, too, softened all things even Catherine's 
 English tone and temper. As long as the delicious luxury of 
 the Italian autumn, with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, 
 was still round them ; as long as they were still among the 
 cities of the Lombard plain that battle-ground and highway 
 of nations, which roused all Robert's historical enthusiasm, and 
 set him reading, discussing, thinking, in his old impetuous 
 way, about something else than minute problems of Christian 
 evidence, the new-born friction between them was necessarily 
 reduced to a minimum. 
 
 But with their return home, with their plunge into London 
 life, the difficulties of the situation began to define them- 
 selves more sharply. In after years, one of Catherine's dreariest 
 memories was the memory of their first instalment in the Bed- 
 ford Square house. Robert's anxiety to make it pleasant and 
 homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the modern 
 passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of 
 what was aesthetically correct. But during their furnishing 
 days he was never tired of wandering about in search of pretty 
 things a rug, a screen, an engraving which might brighten 
 the rooms in which Catherine was to live. He would put every- 
 thing in its place with a restless eagerness, and then Catherine 
 would be called in, and would play her part bravely. She 
 would smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when 
 Robert had gone, she would move slowly to the window and 
 look out at the great mass of the British Museum frowning 
 beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a sick longing in 
 her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the village, 
 the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common. Oh ! this 
 huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless
 
 CHAP, xxxn ROSE 407 
 
 wealth how it oppressed and bewildered her ! Its mere grime 
 and squalor, its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual 
 trial to the countrywoman brought up amid the dash of moun- 
 tain streams and the scents of mountain pastures. She drooped 
 physically for a time, as did the cliild. 
 
 But morally? With Catherine everything really depended 
 on the moral state. She could have followed Robert to a 
 London living with a joy and hope which would have completely 
 deadened all these repulsions of the senses now so active in her. 
 But without this inner glow, in the presence of the profound 
 spiritual difference circumstance had developed between her 
 and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her 
 religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity, 
 failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night 
 it seemed to her that the day had been one long and dreary 
 struggle to make something out of nothing ; and in the morning 
 the night, too, seemed to have been alive with conflict All Thy 
 waves and Thy storms have gone over me / 
 
 Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do 
 to soften such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encour- 
 aged her to find work among the poor ; he tried in the tenderest 
 ways to interest her in the great spectacle of London life which 
 was already, in spite of yearning and regret, beginning to fasci- 
 nate and absorb himself. But their standards were now so 
 different that she was constantly shrinking from what attracted 
 him, or painfully judging what was to him merely curious and 
 interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her 
 intellectual limitations, though never consciously would he have 
 allowed himself to admit them, and she was more and more 
 bewildered by what constantly seemed to her a breaking up of 
 principle, a relaxation of moral fibre. 
 
 And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert instinc- 
 tively felt that for him to oner his services in charitable work 
 to the narrow Evangelical, whose church Catherine had joined, 
 would have been merely to invite rebuff. So that even in the 
 love and care of the unfortunate they were separated. For he 
 had not yet found a sphere of work, and, if he had, Catherine's 
 invincible impulse in these matters was always to attach herself 
 to the authorities and powers that be. He could only acquiesce 
 when she suggested applying to Mr. Clarendon for some charit- 
 able occupation for herself. 
 
 After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the 
 vicar at his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden 
 pause for recollection with which he received her name, the tone 
 of compassion which crept into his talk with her, the pitying 
 look and grasp of the hand with which he dismissed her. Then, 
 as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she had seen a copy, 
 some weeks old, of the JRecord lying on the good man's table, 
 the very copy which contained Robert's name among the list of 
 men who during the last ten years had thrown up the Anglican
 
 408 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 ministry. The delicate face flushed miserably from brow to 
 chin, Pitied for being Robert's wife ! Oh, monstrous ! in- 
 credible ! 
 
 Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and 
 sorenesses of the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In 
 the first place such incessant activity of mind as his is in itself 
 both tonic and narcotic. It was constantly generating in him 
 fresh purposes and hopes, constantly deadening regret, and 
 pushing the old things out of sight. He was full of many pro- 
 jects, literary and social, but they were all in truth the fruits of 
 one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the 
 reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. 
 Abstract thought, as Mr. Grey saw, had had comparatively little 
 to do with Elsmere's relinquishment of the Church of England. 
 But as soon as the Christian bases of faith were overthrown, 
 that faith had naturally to find for itself other supports and 
 attachments. For faith itself in God and a spiritual order 
 had been so wrought into the nature by years of reverent and 
 adoring living that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere, as 
 with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity 
 and faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reason- 
 ing at all, but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experi- 
 ence. Then the intellect had broken in, and destroyed or trans- 
 formed the belief in Christianity. But after the crash, faith 
 emerged as strong as ever, only craving and eager to make a 
 fresh peace, a fresh compact with the reason. 
 
 Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few 
 moments of real intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, 
 ' My interest in philosophy springs solely from the chance it 
 offers me of knowing something more of God ! ' Driven by the 
 same thirst he too threw himself into the same quest, pushing 
 his way laboriously through the philosophical borderlands of 
 science, through the ethical speculation of the day, through the 
 history of man's moral and religious past. And while on the 
 one hand the intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger 
 support to the faith which was the man, on the other the sphere 
 in him of a patient ignorance which abstains from all attempts 
 at knowing what man cannot know, and substitutes trust for 
 either knowledge or despair, was perpetually widening. 'I 
 take my stand on conscience and the moral life ! ' was the up- 
 shot of it all. ' In them I find my God ! As for all these various 
 problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me, my 
 pessimist friend, I, too, am bewildered ; I, too, have no explana- 
 tion to offer. But I trust and wait. In spite of them beyond 
 them I have abundantly enough for faith for hope for 
 action ! ' 
 
 We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his 
 written at this time to that young Armitstead who had taken 
 his place at Murewell, and was still there till Mowbray Elsmere 
 should appoint a new man. Armitstead had been a college
 
 CHAP, xxxu ROSE 409 
 
 friend of Elsmere's. He was a High Churchman of a singularly 
 gentle and delicate type, and the manner in which he had 
 received Elsmere's story on the day of his arrival at Murewell 
 had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same 
 time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford 
 had been to him the object of much hero-worship, and, since 
 Oxford, an example of pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected 
 young Armitstead, and he began a correspondence with Robert 
 which was in many ways a relief to both. In Switzerland and 
 Italy, when his wife's gentle inexorable silence became too op- 
 pressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in letters to 
 Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease 
 with his return to London. To the squire during the same 
 period Elsmere also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on 
 religious matters. 
 
 On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favourite 
 Christian dilemma Christianity or nothing. Inside Chris- 
 tianity, light and certainty ; outside it, chaos. ' If it were not 
 for the Gospels and the Church I should be a Positivist to- 
 morrow. Your Theism is a mere arbitrary hypothesis, at the 
 mercy of any rival philosophical theory. How, regarding our 
 position as precarious, you should come to regard your own as 
 stable, is to me incomprehensible ! ' 
 
 ' What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism 
 and Christianity,' wrote Elsmere in reply, 'is that as an ex- 
 planation of things Theism can never be disproved. At the 
 worst it must always remain in the position of an alternative 
 hypothesis, which the hostile man of science cannot destroy, 
 though he is under no obligation to adopt it. Broadly speak- 
 ing, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the inference 
 to be drawn from them. 
 
 'Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, 
 the Theistic inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have 
 its place, always command respect. The man of science may 
 not adopt it, but by no advance of science that I, at any rate, 
 can foresee, can it be driven out of the field. 
 
 ' Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds 
 are not philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not 
 upon all fact, but upon a special group of facts. It is, and will 
 always remain, a great literary and historical problem, a ques- 
 tion of documents and testimony. Hence, the Christian explana- 
 tion is vulnerable in a way in which the Theistic explanation 
 can never be vulnerable. The contention, at any rate, of persons 
 in my position is : That to the man who has had the special 
 training required, -and in whom this training 'has not been 
 neutralised by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can 
 be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story 
 rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the 
 Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of 
 Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or that the mediaeval belief in
 
 410 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 witchcraft was the product of physical ignorance and super 
 stition.' 
 
 ' You say,' he wrote again, in another connection, to Armit- 
 stead from Milan, 'you say you think my later letters have 
 been far too aggressive and positive. I, too, am astonished at 
 myself. I do not know my own mood, it is so clear, so sharp, 
 so combative. Is it the spectacle of Italy, I wonder of a 
 country practically without religion the spectacle in fact of 
 Latin Europe as a whole, and the practical Atheism in which it 
 is ingulfed f My dear friend, the problem of the world at this 
 moment is how to find a religion ? some great conception 
 which shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of 
 welding societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. 
 Surely Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere 
 less obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but 
 egregiously, notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk 
 complacently of the decline of Buddhism. But what have we 
 to say of the decline of Christianity 1 And yet this last is 
 infinitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as it affects 
 a more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not 
 one of those who would seek to minimise the results of this 
 decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that 
 Positivism or " evolutional morality " will ever satisfy the race. 
 
 ' In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before 
 us, both in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a 
 war of classes, unsof tened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith ? 
 It looks like it. What does the artisan class, what does the town 
 democracy throughout Europe, care any longer for Christian 
 checks or Christian sanctions as they have been taught to under- 
 stand them ? Superstition, in certain parts of rural Europe, there 
 is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence and therefore move- 
 ment, you get at once either indifference to, or a passionate 
 break with, Christianity. And consider what it means, what 
 it will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are 
 to be our masters ! The world has never seen anything like it ; 
 such spiritual anarchy and poverty combined with such material 
 power and resource. Every society Christian and non-Chris- 
 tian has always till now had its ideal, of greater or less ethical 
 value, its appeal to something beyond man. Has Christianity 
 brought us to this : that the Christian nations are to be the 
 first in the world's history to try the experiment of a life with- 
 out faith that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in 
 thinking a life worthy only of the brute ? 
 
 ' Oh forgive me ! These things must hurt you they would 
 have hurt me in old days but they burn within me, and you 
 bid me speak out. What if it be God Himself who is driving 
 His painful lesson home to me, to you, to the world ? What 
 does it mean, this gradual growth of what we call infidelity, of 
 criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death of the 
 old traditions on the other 1 Sin, you answer, the enmity of tJie
 
 CHAP, xxxn ROSE 411 
 
 human mind against God, the momentary tn*iumph of Satan. 
 And so you acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's present defeat, 
 looking for vengeance and requital hereafter. Well, I am not 
 so ready to believe in man's capacity to rebel against his Maker ! 
 Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent process of Divine 
 education, God's steady ineluctable command "to put away 
 childish things," the pressure of His spirit on ours towards new 
 ways of worship and new forms of love ! ' 
 
 And after a while, it was with these ' new ways of worship 
 and new forms of love ' that the mind began to be perpetually 
 occupied. The break with the old things was no sooner com- 
 plete than the eager soul, incapable then, as always, of resting 
 in negation or opposition, pressed passionately forward to a 
 new synthesis, not only speculative, but practical. Before it 
 rose perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith 
 another church or company of the faithful, which was to 
 become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation 
 and anarchy caused by the crashing of the old ! How many 
 men and women must have gone through the same strait as 
 itself how many must be watching with it through the dark- 
 ness for the rising of a new City of God ! 
 
 One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in 
 Parliament Square, on his way towards Westminster Bridge 
 and the Embankment. The beauty of a sunset sky behind the 
 Abbey arrested him, and he stood leaning over the railings 
 beside the Peel statue to look. 
 
 The day before he had passed the same spot with a German 
 friend. His companion a man of influence and mark in his 
 own country, who had been brought up, however, in England, 
 and knew it well had stopped before the Abbey and had said 
 to him with emphasis : ' I never find myself in this particular 
 spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence. 
 Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are 
 at the centre of human things. I am more thrilled by West- 
 minster than Rome ; your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol 
 of a nationality to which the modern world owes obligations it 
 can never repay. You are rooted deep in the past ; you have 
 also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching before you. 
 Among European nations at this moment you alone have free- 
 dom in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a 
 year of life to know what you will have made of your freedom 
 and your religion two hundred years hence ! ' 
 
 As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, 
 wrapped in the bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the 
 towers rose out of the mist, gray and black against the red 
 bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons circled round them, as care- 
 less and free in flight as though they were alone with the towers 
 and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of people ; the 
 omnibuses rolled to and fro ; the lamps were just lit ; lines of
 
 412 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the 
 street here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl 
 below, the quiet of the Abbey and the infinite red distances of 
 sky gave a peculiar pathos and significance. 
 
 Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly 
 away towards the Embankment. Carrying the poetry and 
 grandeur of England's past with him, he turned his face east- 
 ward to the great new-made London on the other side of St. 
 Paul's, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth century, 
 and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to 
 one of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems 
 once more to restore to us the power of choice, of distributing 
 a Yes or a No among the great solicitations which meet the 
 human spirit on its path from silence to silence. The thought 
 of his friend's reverence, and of his own personal debt towards 
 the country to whose long travail of centuries he owed all his 
 own joys and faculties, was hot within him. 
 
 ' Here and here did England help me how can I help England, say! ' 
 
 Ah ! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great 
 church ! He already knew something of it. A Liberal clergy- 
 man there, settled in the very blackest, busiest heart of it, had 
 already made him welcome on Mr. Grey's introduction. He had 
 gone with this good man on several occasions through some 
 little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and peace- 
 ful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled 
 grays of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good 
 deal, the quick mind caught at once by the differences, some 
 tragic, some merely curious and stimulating, between the 
 monotonous life of his own rural folk, and the mad rush, the 
 voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and disappear- 
 ances, the sudden ingulfments, of working London. 
 
 Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among 
 the East End churches. There, rather than among the streets 
 and courts outside, as it had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of 
 the city. Such emptiness, such desertion, such a hopeless breach 
 between the great craving need outside and the boon offered it 
 within ! Here and there, indeed, a patch of bright coloured 
 success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive tendency of 
 man towards the organised excitement of religious ritual, visible 
 in all nations and civilisations, had been appealed to with more 
 energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank 
 failure, or rather obvious want of success as the devoted men 
 now beating the void there were themselves the first to admit, 
 with pain and patient submission to the inscrutable Will of 
 God. 
 
 But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, 
 whether God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually 
 making to his brother man on His behalf ? He was behind it 
 once, and it had efficacy, had power. But now what if all
 
 CHAP, xxxii ROSE 413 
 
 these processes of so-called destruction and decay were but the 
 mere workings of that divine plastic force which is for ever 
 moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable 
 things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his 
 fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, 
 not the props, but the hindrances, of man 1 
 
 And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what 
 should be the individual's part in this transition England ? 
 Surely, at the least, a part of plain sincerity of act and speech 
 a correspondence as perfect as could be reached between the 
 inner faith and the outer word and deed. So much, at the 
 least, was clearly required of him ! 
 
 ' Do not imagine,' he said to himself, as though with a fierce 
 dread of possible self-delusion, ' that it is in you to play any 
 great, any commanding pai't. Shun the thought of it, if it were 
 possible ! But let me do what is given me to do ! Here, in this 
 human wilderness, may I spend whatever of time or energy or 
 faculty may be mine, in the faithful attempt to help forward 
 the new House of Faith that is to be, though my utmost efforts 
 should but succeed in laying some obscure stone in still unseen 
 foundations ! Let me try and hand on to some other human 
 soul, or souls, before I die, the truth which has freed, and which 
 is now sustaining, my own heart. Can any man do more ? Is 
 not every man who feels any certainty in him whatever bound 
 to do as much ? What matter if the wise folk scoff, if even at 
 times, and in a certain sense, one seems to one's self ridiculous 
 absurdly lonely and powerless ! All great changes are preceded 
 by numbers 01 sporadic, and as the bystander thinks, impotent 
 efforts. But while the individual effort sinks, drowned perhaps 
 in mockery, the general movement quickens, gathers force we 
 know not how, and 
 
 ' While the tired wave vainly breaking, 
 
 Seems here no painful inch to gain, 
 Far back through creeks and inlets making, 
 
 Comes silent, flooding in the main ! ' 
 
 Darkness sank over the river ; all the gray and purple 
 distance with its dim edge of spires and domes against the sky, 
 all the vague intervening blacknesses of street, or bridge, or 
 railway station were starred and patterned with lights. The 
 vastness, the beauty of the city filled him with a sense of 
 mysterious attraction, and as he walked on with his face up- 
 lifted to it, it was as though he took his life in his hand and 
 flung it afresh into the human gulf. 
 
 ' What does it matter if one's work be raw and uncomely ! 
 All that lies outside the great organised traditions of an age 
 must always look so. Let me bear my witness bravely, not 
 spending life in speech, but not undervaluing speech above 
 all, not being ashamed or afraid of it, because other wise people 
 may prefer a policy of silence. A man has but the one puny
 
 414 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 life, the one tiny spark of faith. Better be venturesome with 
 both for God's sake, than over-cautious, over-thrifty. And to 
 his own Master he standeth or falleth ! ' 
 
 Plans of work of all kinds, literary and practical, thoughts 
 of preaching in some bare hidden room to men and women 
 orphaned and stranded like himself, began to crowd upon him. 
 The old clerical instinct in him winced at some of them. Robert 
 had nothing of the sectary about him by nature ; he was always 
 too deeply and easily affected by the great historic existences 
 about him. But when the Oxford man or the ex-official of one 
 of the most venerable and decorous of societies protested, the 
 believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put the protest by. 
 
 And so the dream gathered substance and stayed with him, 
 till at last he found himself at his own door. As he closed it 
 behind him, Catherine came out into the pretty old hall from 
 the dining-room. 
 
 ' Robert, have you walked all the way ? ' 
 
 'Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful 
 evening ! ' 
 
 He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs 
 together. She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly 
 aware that these months were to him months of incessant 
 travail of spirit, and she caught at this moment the old strenu- 
 ous look of eye and brow she knew so well. A year ago, and 
 every thought of his mind had been open to her and now she 
 herself had shut them out but her heart sank within her. 
 
 She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over 
 her. But inwardly all the ardour of his mood collapsed at the 
 touch of her. For the protests of a world in arms can be with- 
 stood with joy, but the protest that steals into your heart, that 
 takes love's garb and uses love's ways there is the difficulty ! 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIII 
 
 BUT Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realising 
 any fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the 
 Broad Church vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He 
 undertook some rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on 
 elementary science to boys and men. But after a while he 
 began to feel his position false and unsatisfactory. In truth, 
 his opinions were in the main identical with those of the vicar 
 under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a Broad 
 Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and 
 thought it absolutely necessary to ' keep things going,' and by 
 a policy of prudent silence and gradual expansion from within, 
 to save the great ' plant' of the Establishment from falling 
 wholesale into the hands of the High Churchmen. In conse- 
 quence he was involved, as Robert held, in endless contradictions
 
 CHAP, xxxin ROSE 415 
 
 and practical falsities of speech and action. His large church 
 was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons. 
 Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not 
 preach, more than was absolutely necessary, what he did not 
 believe. He was hard-working and kind-hearted, but the per- 
 petual divorce between thought and action, which his position 
 made inevitable, was constantly blunting and weakening all he 
 did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of power, simply 
 for lack of an elementary frankness. 
 
 But if these became Robert's views as to Vernon, Vernon's 
 feeling towards Elsmere after six weeks' acquaintance was not 
 less decided. He was constitutionally timid, and he probably 
 divined in his new helper a man of no ordinary calibre, whose 
 influence might very well turn out some day to be of the ' in- 
 calculably diffusive kind. He grew uncomfortable, begged 
 Elsmere to beware of any ' direct religious teaching,' talked in 
 warm praise of a 'policy of omissions,' and in equally warm 
 denunciation of ' anything like a policy of attack.' In short, it 
 became plain that two men so much alike, and yet so different, 
 could not long co-operate. 
 
 However, just as the fact was being brought home to Elsmere, 
 a friendly chance intervened. 
 
 Hugh Flaxman, the Levburns' new acquaintance and Lady 
 Helen's brother, had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight ; and 
 a meeting or two, now at Lady Charlotte's, now at the Leyburns', 
 had led both men far on the way to a friendship. Of Hugh 
 Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all that need be 
 recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman's house, overlooking St. 
 James's Park, Robert first met a man who was to give him the 
 opening for which he was looking. 
 
 Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast parties a la Rogers, and 
 on the first occasion when Robert could be induced to attend 
 one of these functions, he saw opposite to him what he sup- 
 posed to be a lad of twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose 
 sallies of fun and invincible good humour attracted him 
 greatly. 
 
 Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humour and pugnacity, 
 'lockes crull as they were layde in presse,' the same look of 
 ' wonderly ' activity too, in spite of his short stature and dainty 
 make, as Chaucer lends his squire the type was so fresh and 
 pleasing that Robert was more and more held by it, especially 
 when he discovered to his bewilderment that the supposed 
 stripling must be from his talk a man quite as old as himself, 
 an official besides, filling what was clearly some important place 
 in the world. He took his full share in the politics and litera- 
 ture started at the table, and presently, when conversation fell 
 on the proposed municipality for London, said things to which 
 the whole party listened. Robert's curiosity was aroused, and 
 after breakfast he questioned his host and was promptly intro- 
 duced to ' Mr. Murray Edwardes.'
 
 416 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 Whereupon it turned out that this baby -faced sage was 
 filling a post, in the work of which perhaps few people in 
 London could have taken so much interest as Robert Elsmere. 
 
 Fifty years before, a wealthy merchant who had been one of 
 the chief pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and 
 died. His great warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside 
 districts of the city, and in his will he endeavoured to do some- 
 thing according to his lights for the place in which he had 
 amassed his money. He left a fairly large bequest wherewith 
 to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found certain 
 Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of 
 the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For 
 a long time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank 
 as one of the idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. 
 Unitarianism of the old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed 
 that exists, and certainly it has never been the creed of the poor. 
 In old days it required the presence of a certain arid stratum 
 of the middle classes to live and thrive at all. This stratum 
 
 was not to be found in R , which rejoiced instead in the 
 
 most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the 
 mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power 
 of grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square 
 Socialist. 
 
 Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking 
 of the dry bones of religious England which we call the Tracta- 
 
 rian movement. For many years the new force left R quite 
 
 undisturbed. The parish church droned away, the Unitarian 
 minister preached decorously to empty benches, knowing no- 
 thing of the agitations outside. At last, however, towards the 
 end of the old minister's life, a powerful church of the new type, 
 staffed by friends and pupils of Pusey, rose in the centre of 
 
 R , and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more 
 
 snuffed out than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally 
 with the parish church. As generally happened, however, in 
 those days, the proceedings at this new and splendid St. Wil- 
 frid's were not long in stirring up the Protestantism of the 
 British rough, the said Protestantism being always one of the 
 finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is 
 master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war hectic 
 clergy heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant 
 Litanies on the one side, mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and 
 blatant Protestant orators on the other. 
 
 The war went on practically for years, and while it was still 
 raging the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the 
 authorities concerned chose in his place a young fellow, the son 
 of a Bristol minister, a Cambridge man besides, as chance would 
 have it, of brilliant attainments, and unusually commended 
 from many quarters, even including some Church ones of the 
 Liberal kind. This curly -haired youth, as he was then in reality, 
 and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to be
 
 CHAP, xxxin ROSE 417 
 
 up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment 
 of his entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere 
 brutal opposition to the new church, and in contrast with the 
 sheer indifference of three-fourths of the district, there was a 
 small party consisting of an aristocracy of the artisans, whose 
 protest against the Puseyite doings was of a much quieter 
 sterner sort, and amongst whom the uproar had mainly roused 
 a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon this 
 element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it re- 
 sponded. He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure 
 and generous living ; he lectured, taught, brought down workers 
 from the West End, and before he had been five years in harness 
 
 had not only made himself a power in R , but was beginning 
 
 to be heard of and watched with no small interest by many 
 outsiders. 
 
 This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. 
 Before they had talked twenty minutes each was fascinated by 
 the other. They said good-bye to their host, and wandered 
 out together into St. James's Park, where the trees were white 
 with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the fog. 
 Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his 
 ministry to attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitar- 
 ianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had 
 never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long 
 ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once 
 fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That 
 common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had 
 weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, 
 it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. 
 The young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasive- 
 ness, even unction ; and there was something in his tone of 
 mind which was like a fresh wind blowing over the fevered 
 places of the other's heart. 
 
 They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own 
 work, and the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian 
 body, Elsmere saying little, asking much. 
 
 At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright 
 decision. 
 
 'You cannot work with the Church!' he said 'it is im- 
 possible. You will only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain 
 what you could do infinitely more good, as things stand now, 
 by pouring out. Come to us ! I will put you in the way. You 
 shall be hampered by no pledges of any sort. Come and take 
 the direction of some of my workers. We have all got our 
 hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would 
 be invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England 
 just now for men of your way of thinking and mine. Come ! 
 Who knows what we may be putting our hands to what fruit 
 may grow from the smallest seed 1 ' 
 
 The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robert 
 
 2 E
 
 418 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 gathered that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large 
 intoxicating dream of a reorganised Christendom, a new wide- 
 spreading shelter of faith for discouraged browbeaten man, as 
 in his own. ' I will !' he said briefly, after a pause, his own look 
 kindling ' it is the opening I have been pining for. I will give 
 you all I can, and bless you for the chance.' 
 
 That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of 
 various engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for ' Fader,' 
 had just been carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs 
 kicking, off to bed. Catherine was straightening the room, 
 which had been thrown into confusion by the child's romps. 
 
 It was with an effort for he knew it would be a shock to her 
 that he began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. 
 Flaxman's, and his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had 
 made it a rule with himself to tell her everything that he was 
 doing or meant to do. She would not let him tell her what he 
 was thinking. But as much openness as there could be between 
 them, there should be. 
 
 Catherine listened still moving about the while the thin 
 beautiful lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was 
 hard to her, very hard ; the people among whom she had been 
 brought up, her father especially, would have held out the hand 
 of fellowship to any body of Christian people, but not to the 
 Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling divided them from any 
 orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them and the Unitarian 
 had been dug very deep by various forces forces of thought 
 originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time. 
 
 ' He is going to work with them now,' she thought bitterly ; 
 'soon he will be one of them perhaps a Unitarian minister 
 himself.' 
 
 And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find 
 nothing but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embar- 
 rassed silences, wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too 
 fell silent, feeling once more the sting of a now habitual 
 discomfort. 
 
 Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. 
 She laid her head against his knee, saying nothing, but gather- 
 ing his hand closely in both her own. 
 
 Poor woman's heart ! One moment in rebellion, the next a 
 suppliant. He bent down quickly and kissed her. 
 
 ' Would you like,' he said presently, after both had sat silent 
 a while in the firelight, ' would you care to go to Madame de 
 Netteville's to-night ? ' 
 
 ' By all means, said Catherine with a sort of eagerness. ' It 
 was Friday she asked us for, wasn't it ? We will be quick over 
 dinner, and I will go and dress.' 
 
 In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the 
 squire in his bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they 
 were to have walked. Mr. Wendover had drily recommended
 
 CHAP, xxxin ROSE 419 
 
 Elsmere to cultivate Madame de Netteville. He sat propped up 
 in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical, and this remark of his 
 was almost the only reference he would allow to the Elsmere 
 move. 
 
 'You had better go there,' he said huskily, 'it will do you 
 good. She gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, 
 which Lady Charlotte can't. Too many fools at Lady Char- 
 lotte's ; she waters the wine too much.' 
 
 And he had persisted with the subject using it, as Elsmere 
 thought, as a means of warding off other conversation. He 
 'would not ask; Elsmere's plans, and he would not allow a word 
 about himself. 
 
 There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled 
 with signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last 
 ailment which evidently troubled the doctor most. But, behind 
 the physical breakdown, there was to Robert's sense something 
 else, a spiritual something, infinitely forlorn and piteous, which 
 revealed itself wholly against the elder man's will, and filled the 
 younger with a dumb helpless rush of sympathy. Since his de- 
 parture Robert had made the keeping up of his correspondence 
 with the squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night chiefly 
 anxious to go to Madame de Netteville's that he might write an 
 account of it to Murewell. 
 
 Still the squire's talk, and hib own glimpse of her at Mure- 
 well, had made him curious to see more of the woman herself. 
 The squire's ways of describing her were always half approving, 
 half sarcastic. Robert sometimes imagined that he himself had 
 been at one time more under her spell than he cared to confess. 
 If so, it must have been when she was still in Paris, the young 
 English widow of a man of old French family, rich, fascinating, 
 distinguished, and the centre of a small salon, admission to 
 which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris. 
 
 Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her 
 headquarters in London, and it was to her house in Hans Place 
 that the squire wrote to her about the Elsmeres. She owed 
 Roger Wendover debts of various kinds, and she had an en- 
 couraging memory of the young clergyman on the terrace at 
 Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the 
 intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings. 
 
 ' I have never seen the wife,' she meditated, as her delicate 
 jewelled hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of 
 the Elsmeres' lodgings. ' But if she is the ordinary country 
 clergyman's spouse, the squire of course will have given the 
 young man a hint.' 
 
 But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim 
 humour towards Catherine, whom he had always vaguely dis- 
 liked, the squire said not one word about his wife to Robert in 
 the course of their talk of Madame de Netteville. 
 
 Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do 
 Robert credit. She put on one of the gowns she had taken to
 
 420 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 Murewell when she married. It was black, simply made, 
 and had been a favourite with both of them in the old sur- 
 roundings. 
 
 So they drove off to Madame de Netteville's. Catherine's 
 heart was beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting 
 stairs of the luxurious little house. All these new social experi- 
 ences were a trial to her. But she had the vaguest, most unsus- 
 picious ideas of what she was to see in this particular house. 
 
 A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most 
 English rooms, it was barely though richly furnished. A Persian 
 carpet, of a self-coloured grayish blue, threw the gilt French' 
 chairs and the various figures sitting upon them into delicate 
 relief. The walls were painted white, and had a few French 
 mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine French 
 portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames. 
 The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and 
 seemed to be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly 
 have read or written in the room, but you could see a beautiful 
 woman in a beautiful dress there, and you could talk there, 
 either tete-a-tete, or to the assembled company, to perfection, so 
 cunningly was it all devised. 
 
 When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people 
 present ten gentlemen and two ladies. One of the ladies, 
 Madame de Netteville, was lying back in the corner of a velvet 
 divan placed against the wall, a screen between her and a 
 splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the room. The other, 
 a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck abnor- 
 mally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men was 
 talking indiscriminately to both. 
 
 As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was 
 a general stir of surprise. The men looked round ; Madame de 
 Netteville half rose with a puzzled look. It was more than a 
 month since she had dropped her invitation. Then a flash, not 
 altogether of pleasure, passed over her face, and she said a few 
 hasty words to the woman near her, advancing the moment 
 afterwards to give her hand to Catherine. 
 
 ' This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so 
 soon. I had imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to 
 give me the pleasure of seeing you.' 
 
 But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in every- 
 thing, were not cordial, for all their smile. 
 
 Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her exces- 
 sive manner, and by the woman's look of conscious sarcastic 
 strength, _ struggling through all the outer softness of beauty 
 and exquisite dress. 
 
 'Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am 
 afraid, as that afternoon on which we met last. Let me intro- 
 duce you to Count Wielandt Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will 
 you come over here, beside Lady Aubrey Willert.' 
 
 Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, who
 
 CHAP, xxxin ROSE 421 
 
 seemed to him to look at him very much as he himself might 
 have scrutinised an inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey 
 made an imperceptible movement of the head as Catherine was 
 presented to her, and Madame de Netteville, smiling and biting 
 her lip a little, fell back into her seat. 
 
 There was a faint odour of smoke in the room. As Catherine 
 sat down, a young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end 
 of a cigarette into the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. 
 Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette case which lay 
 beside her hand. 
 
 Everybody there had the air more or less of an habitue of the 
 house ; and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres 
 found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the 
 part of Madame de Netteville, to take any share in it. 
 
 ' Well, I believe the story about Desforets is true,' said the 
 fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, 
 lolling back in his chair. 
 
 Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in 
 the English rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her. 
 
 ' If you get it from the Ferret, my dear Evershed,' said the 
 ex-Tory minister, Lord Rupert, ' you may put it down as a safe 
 lie. As for me, I believe she has a much shrewder eye to the 
 main chance.' 
 
 ' What do you mean ? ' said the other, raising astonished eye- 
 brows. 
 
 'Well, it doesn't pay, you know, to write yourself down a 
 fiend not quite.' 
 
 ' What you think it will affect her audiences ? Well, that 
 is a good joke ! ' and the young man laughed immoderately, 
 joined by several of the other guests. 
 
 ' I don't imagine it will make any difference to you, my good 
 friend,' returned Lord Rupert imperturbably ; ' but the British 
 public haven't got your nerve. They may take it awkwardly 
 I don't say they will when a woman who has turned her own 
 young sister out of doors at night, in St. Petersburg, so that 
 ultimately as a consequence the girl dies, comes to ask them to 
 clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.' 
 
 ' What has one to do with an actress's private life, my dear 
 Lord Rupert ? ' asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping 
 with a smooth clearness into the conversation, her eyes darting 
 light from under straight black brows. 
 
 ' What indeed ! ' said the young man who had begun the con- 
 versation with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching out 
 his hand for another cigarette, and drawing it back with a look 
 under his drooped eyelids a look of cold impertinent scrutiny 
 at Catherine Elsmere. 
 
 ' Ah ! well I don't want to be obtrusively moral Heaven 
 forbid ! But there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to 
 such an extent that you injure your pocket. Desforets is doing 
 it doing it actually in Paris too.'
 
 422 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 There was a ripple of laughter. 
 
 'Paris and illusions mon Dieu !' groaned young Evershed, 
 when he had done laughing, laying meditative hands on his 
 knees and gazing into the fire. 
 
 ' I tell you I have seen it,' said Lord Rupert, waxing com- 
 bative, and slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. 
 ' The last time I went to see Desf orets in Paris the theatre was 
 crammed, and the house theatrically speaking ice. They re- 
 ceived her in dead silence they gave her not one single recall 
 and they only gave her a clap, that I can remember, at those 
 two or three points in the play where clap they positively must 
 or burst. They go to see her but they loathe her and they 
 let her know it.' 
 
 ' Bah ! ' said his opponent, ' it is only because they are tired of 
 her. Her vagaries don't amuse them any longer they know 
 them by heart. And by George ! she has some pretty rivals too, 
 now ! ' he added reflectively, 'not to speak of the Bernhardt.' 
 
 ' Well, the Parisians can be shocked,' said Count Wielandt in 
 excellent English, bending forward so as to get a good view of 
 his hostess. ' They are just now especially shocked by the con- 
 dition of English morals ! ' 
 
 The twinkle in his eye was irresistible. The men, under- 
 standing his reference to the avidity with which certain English 
 aristocratic scandals had been lately seized upon by the- French 
 papers, laughed out so did Lady Aubrey. Madame de Nette- 
 ville contented herself with a smile. 
 
 ' They profess to be shocked, too, by Kenan's last book,' said 
 the editor from the other side of the room. 
 
 ' Dear me ! ' said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fanning 
 herself lightly the while, her thin but extraordinarily graceful 
 head and neck thrown out against the golden brocade of the 
 cushion behind her. 
 
 ' Oh ! what so many of them feel in Kenan's case, of course,' 
 said Madame de Netteville, ' is that every book he writes now 
 gives a fresh opening to the enemy to blaspheme. Your eminent 
 freethinker can't afford just yet, in the present state of the world, 
 to make himself socially ridiculous. The cause suffers.' 
 
 ' Just my feeling,' said young Evershed calmly. ' Though I 
 mayn't care a rap about him personally, I prefer that a man on 
 my own front bench shouldn't make a public ass of himself if 
 he can help it not for his sake, of course, but for mine ! ' 
 
 Robert looked at Catherine. She sat upright by the side of 
 Lady Aubrey ; her face, of which the beauty to-night seemed 
 lost in rigidity, pale and stiff. With a contraction of heart he 
 plunged himself into the conversation. On his road home that 
 evening he had found an important foreign telegram posted up 
 at the small literary club to which he had belonged since Oxford 
 days. He made a remark about it now to Count Wielandt ; and 
 the diplomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his questioner, 
 recognised that the remark was a shrewd one.
 
 CHAP, xxxin ROSE 423 
 
 Presently the young man's frank intelligence had told. On 
 his way to and from the Holy Land three years before Robert 
 had seen something of the East, and it so happened that he 
 remembered the name of Count Wielandt as one of the foreign 
 secretaries of legation present at an official party given by the 
 English Ambassador at Constantinople, which he and his mother 
 had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a family con- 
 nection with the Ambassador. All that he could glean from 
 memory he made quick use of now. urged at first by the remorse- 
 ful wish to make this new world into which he had brought 
 Catherine less difficult than he knew it must have been during 
 the last quarter of an hour. 
 
 But alter a while he found himself leading the talk of a 
 section of the room, and getting excitement and pleasure out 
 of the talk itself. Ever since that Eastern journey he had kept 
 an eye on the subjects which had interested him then, reading 
 in his rapid voracious way all that came across him at Mure- 
 well, especially in the squire's foreign newspapers and reviews, 
 and storing it when read in a remarkable memory. 
 
 Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts 
 between her and Madame de Netteville, fell to watching her 
 husband with a start of strangeness and surprise. She had 
 scarcely seen him at Oxford among his equals ; and she had 
 very i-arely been present at his talks with the squire. In some 
 ways, and owing to the instinctive reserves set up between them 
 for so long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very imperfect. 
 His ease, his resource, among these men of the world, for whom 
 independent of all else she felt a countrywoman's dislike, 
 filled her with a kind of bewilderment. 
 
 ' Are you new to London ? ' Lady Aubrey asked her presently, 
 in that tone of absolute detachment from the person addressed 
 which certain women manage to perfection. She, too, had been 
 watching the husband, and the sight had impressed her with a 
 momentary curiosity to know what the stiff, handsome, dowdily- 
 dressed wife was made of. 
 
 ' We have been two months here,' said Catherine, her large 
 gray eyes taking in her companion's very bare shoulders, the 
 costly fantastic dress, and the diamonds flashing against the 
 white skin. 
 
 ' In what part ? ' 
 
 ' In Bedford Square.' 
 
 Lady Aubrey was silent. She had no ideas on the subject of 
 Bedford Square at command. 
 
 ' We are very central,' said Catherine, feeling desperately that 
 she was doing Robert no credit at all, and anxious to talk if only 
 something could be found to talk about. 
 
 ' Oh yes, you are near the theatres,' said the other indiffer- 
 ently. 
 
 This was hardly an aspect of the matter which had yet 
 occurred to Catherine. A flash of bitterness ran through her.
 
 424 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 Had they left their Murewell life to be ' near the theatres,' and 
 kept at arm's length by supercilious great ladies ? 
 
 ' We are very far from the Park,' she answered with an effort. 
 ' I wish we weren't, for my little girl's sake.' 
 
 ' Oh, you have a little girl ! How old ? ' 
 
 ' Sixteen months.' 
 
 'Too young to be a nuisance yet. Mine are just old enough 
 to be in everybody's way. Children are out of place in London. 
 I always want to leave mine in the country, but my husband 
 objects,' said Lady Aubrey coolly. There was a certain piquancy 
 in saying frank things to this stiff Madonna-faced woman. 
 
 Madame de Netteville, meanwhile, was keeping up a con- 
 versation in an undertone with young Evershed, who had come 
 to sit on a stool beside her, and was gazing up at her with eyes 
 of which the expression was perfectly understood by several 
 persons present. The handsome, dissipated, ill-conditioned 
 
 Smth had been her slave and shadow for the last two years, 
 is devotion now no longer amused her, and she was en- 
 deavouring to get rid of it and of him. But the process was a 
 difficult one, and took both time and finesse. 
 
 She kept her eye, notwithstanding, on the new-comers whom 
 the squire's introduction had brought to her that night. When 
 the Elsmeres rose to go, she said good-bye to Catherine with an 
 excessive politeness, under which her poor guest, conscious of 
 her own gaucherie during the evening, felt the touch of satire 
 she was perhaps meant to feel. But when Catherine was well 
 ahead Madame de Netteville gave Eobert one of her most 
 brilliant smiles. 
 
 ' Friday evening, Mr. Elsmere ; always Fridays. You will 
 remember ? ' 
 
 The naivete of Robert's social view, and the mobility of his 
 temper, made him easily responsive. He had just enjoyed half 
 an hour's brilliant talk with two or three of the keenest and 
 most accomplished men in Europe. Catherine had slipped out 
 of his sight meanwhile, and the impression of their entree had 
 been effaced. He made Madame de Netteville, therefore, a 
 cordial smiling reply before his tall slender form disappeared 
 after that of his wife. 
 
 ' Agreeable rather an acquisition ! ' said Madame de Nette- 
 ville to Lady Aubrey, with a light motion of the head towards 
 Robert's retreating figure. ' But the wife ! Good heavens ! I 
 owe Roger Wendover a grudge. I think he might have made 
 it plain to those good people that I don't want strange women 
 at my Friday evenings. 
 
 Lady Aubrey laughed. ' No doubt she is a genius, or a saint, 
 in mufti. She might be handsome too if some one would dress 
 her.' 
 
 Madame de Netteville shrugged her shoulders. ' Oh ! life 
 is not long enough to penetrate that kind of person,' she said. 
 
 Meanwhile the ' person ' was driving homeward very sad and
 
 CHAP, xxxin ROSE 425 
 
 ill at ease. She was vexed that she had not done better, and 
 yet she was wounded by Robert's enjoyment. The Puritan in 
 her blood was all aflame. As she sat looking into the motley 
 lamplit night, she could have 'testified' like any prophetess 
 of old. 
 
 Robert meanwhile, his hand slipped into hers, was thinking 
 of Wielandt's talk, and of some racy stories of Berlin celebrities 
 told by a young attach^ who had joined their group. His lips 
 were lightly smiling, his brow serene. 
 
 But as he helped her down from the cab, and they stood in 
 the hall together, he noticed the pale discomposure of her 
 looks. Instantly the familiar dread and pain returned upon 
 him. 
 
 ' Did you like it, Catherine ? ' he asked her, with something 
 like timidity, as they stood together by their bedroom fire. 
 
 She sank into a low chair and sat a moment staring at the 
 blaze. He was startled by her look of suffering, and, kneeling, 
 he put his arms tenderly round her. 
 
 ' Oh, Robert, Robert ! ' she cried, falling on his neck. 
 
 ' What is it ? ' he asked, kissing her hair. 
 
 ' I seem all at sea,' she said in a choked voice, her face hidden, 
 -' the old landmarks swallowed up ! I am always judging ana 
 condemning, always protesting. What am I that I should 
 judge ? But how how can I help it ? ' 
 
 She drew herself away from him, once more looking into the 
 fire with drawn brows. 
 
 'Darling, the world is full of difference. Men and women 
 take life in different ways. Don't be so sure yours is the only 
 right one.' 
 
 He spoke with a moved gentleness, taking her hand the 
 while. 
 
 ' " This is the way, walk ye in it ! " ' she said presently, with 
 strong, almost stern emphasis. 'Oh, those women, and that 
 talk! Hateful!' 
 
 He rose and looked down on her from the mantelpiece. 
 Within him was a movement of impatience, repressed almost at 
 once by the thought of that long night at Murewell, when he 
 had vowed to himself to ' make amends ' ! 
 
 And if that memory had not intervened she would still have 
 disarmed him wholly. 
 
 ' Listen ! ' she said to him suddenly, her eyes kindling with a 
 strange childish pleasure. 'Do you hear the wind, the west 
 wind 1 Do you remember how it used to shake the house, how- 
 it used to come sweeping through the trees in the wood-path ? 
 It must be trying the study window now, blowing the vine 
 against it.' 
 
 A yearning passion breathed through every feature. It 
 seemed to him she saw nothing before her. Her longing soul 
 was back in the old haunts, surrounded by the old loved forms 
 and sounds. It went to his heart. He tried to soothe her with
 
 426 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 the tenderest words remorseful love could find. But the con- 
 flict of feeling grief, rebellion, doubt, self -judgment would 
 not be soothed, and long after she had made him leave her and 
 he had fallen asleep, she knelt on, a white and rigid figure in 
 the dying firelight, the wind shaking the old house, the eternal 
 murmur of London booming outside. 
 
 CHAPTEK XXXIV 
 
 MEANWHILE, as if to complete the circle of pain with which 
 poor Catherine's life was compassed, it began to be plain to her 
 that, in spite of the hard and mocking tone Rose generally 
 adopted with regard to him, Edward Langham was constantly 
 at the house in Lerwick Gardens, and that it was impossible he 
 should be there so much unless in some way or other Rose 
 encouraged it. 
 
 The idea of such a marriage nay, of such a friendship was 
 naturally as repugnant as ever to her. It had been one of the 
 bitterest moments of a bitter time when, at their first meeting 
 after the crisis in her life, Langham, conscious of a sudden 
 movement of pity for a woman he disliked, had pressed the 
 hand she held put to him in a way which clearly showed her 
 what was in his mind, and had then passed on to chat and 
 smoke with Robert in the study, leaving her behind to realise 
 the gulf that lay between the present and that visit of his to 
 Murewell, when Robert and she had felt in unison towards him, 
 his opinions, and his conduct to Rose, as towards everything 
 else of importance in their life. 
 
 Now it seemed to her Robert must necessarily look at the 
 matter differently, and she could not make up her mind to talk 
 to him about it. In reality, his objections had never had the 
 same basis as hers, and he would have given her as strong a 
 support as ever, if she had asked for it. But she held her peace, 
 and he, absorbed in other things, took no notice. Besides, he 
 knew Langham too well. He had never been able to take 
 Catherine's alarms seriously. 
 
 An attentive onlooker, however ; would have admitted that 
 this time, at any rate, they had their justification. Why Lang- 
 ham was so much in the Leyburns' drawing-room during these 
 winter months was a question that several people asked him- 
 self not least. He had not only pretended to forget Rose 
 Leyburn during the eighteen months which had passed since 
 their first acquaintance at Murewell he had for all practical 
 purposes forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men 
 and women who are capable of passion on the great scale at all ; 
 and certainly, as we have tried to show, Langham was not 
 among them. He had had a passing moment of excitement at 
 Murewell, soon put down, and followed by a week of extremely
 
 CHAP, xxxiv ROSE 427 
 
 pleasant sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had ended 
 in reaction and self -abhorrence. He had left Murewell remorse- 
 ful, melancholy, and ill at ease, but conscious, certainly, of a 
 great relief that he and Rose Ley burn were not likely to meet 
 again for long. 
 
 Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such 
 matters absorb men who have become the slaves of their own 
 solitary habits, and in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh 
 zest for learning it had aroused in him, the beautiful unman- 
 ageable child who had disturbed his peace at Murewell was not 
 likely to be more, but less, remembered. When he stumbled 
 across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his determin- 
 ing impulse had oeen merely one of flight. 
 
 However, as he had written to Robert towards the beginning 
 of his London residence, there was no doubt that his migration 
 had made him for the time much more human, observant, and 
 accessible. Oxford had become to him a.n oppression and a 
 nightmare, and as soon as he had turned his oack on it his 
 mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his 
 modest part in the life of the capital ; happy in the obscurity 
 afforded him by the crowd ; rejoicing in the thought that his 
 life and his affairs were once more his own, and the academical 
 yoke had been slipped for ever. 
 
 It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that 
 his fresh sight of Rose found him. For the moment, he was 
 perhaps more susceptible than he ever could have been before 
 to her young perfections, her beauty, her brilliancy, her provok- 
 ing stimulating ways. Certainly, from that first afternoon on- 
 wards he became more and more restless to watch her, to be 
 near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In 
 general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so 
 much, she took small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to 
 regard, himself as a mere 'item' something systematically 
 overlooked and forgotten in the bustle of her days and nights. 
 He saw that she thought badly of him, that the friendship he 
 might have had was now proudly refused him, that their first 
 week together had left a deep impression of resentment and 
 hostility in her mind. And all the same he came ; and she 
 asked him ! And sometimes, after an hour when she had been 
 more difficult or more satirical than usual, ending notwithstand- 
 ing with a little change of tone, a careless ' You will find us 
 next Wednesday as usual ; So-and-so is coming to play,' Lang- 
 ham would walk home in a state of feeling he did not care to 
 analyse, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a good 
 deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, 
 but in the strangest slightest ways did she not make him sus- 
 pect every now and then that he was in some sort important to 
 her, that he sometimes preoccupied her against her will ; that 
 her will, indeed, sometimes escaped her, and failed to control 
 her manner to him ?
 
 428 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 It was. not only his relations to the beauty, however, his 
 interest in her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. 
 Elsmere's cold dislike and disapproval of his presence in 
 her mother's drawing-room, that accounted for Langham's 
 heightened mental temperature this winter. The existence 
 and the proceedings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very con- 
 siderable share in it. 
 
 'Tell me about Mr. Langham,' said Mr. Flaxman once to 
 Agnes Leyburn, in the early days of his acquaintance with the 
 family :' is he an old friend ? ' 
 
 ' Of Robert's,' replied Agnes, her cheerful impenetrable look 
 fixed upon the speaker. ' My sister met him once for a week in 
 the country at the Elsmeres'. My mother and I have been only 
 just introduced to him.' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little. 
 
 'Does he strike you as well what shall we say? un- 
 usual ? ' 
 
 His smile struck one out of her. 
 
 ' Even Robert might admit that,' she said demurely. 
 
 'Is Elsmere so attached to him ? I own I was provoked just 
 now by his tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evi- 
 dent physical and mental strain your brother-in-law had gone 
 through, and he said with a nonchalance I cannot convey : " Yes, 
 it is astonishing Elsmere should have ventured it. I confess I 
 often wonder whether it was worth while." "Why?" said I, 
 perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn't know wouldn't say. 
 But I gathered that, according to him, Elsmere is still swathed 
 in such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags 
 and patches he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort 
 of the change. It seemed to me the tone of the very cool 
 spectator, rather than the friend. However does your sister 
 like him?' 
 
 ' I don't know,' said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the 
 face. 
 
 Hugh Flaxman's fair complexion flushed a little. He got up 
 to go. 
 
 ' He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I 
 ever saw,' he remarked as he buttoned up his coat. ' Don't you 
 think so ? ' 
 
 'Yes,' said Agnes dubiously, 'if he didn't stoop, and if he 
 didn't in general look half -asleep.' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the 
 reason for the constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti- 
 social person at the Leyburns' house. Being himself a man of 
 very subtle and fastidious tastes, he could imagine that _ so 
 original a suitor, with such eyes, such an intellectual reputation 
 so well sustained by scantiness of speech and the most pictur- 
 esque capacity for silence, might have attractions for a roman- 
 tic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose 
 rarely talked to him, and was always ready to make him the
 
 CHAP, xxx rv ROSE 429 
 
 target of a sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to 
 him, and Mrs. Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. 
 Elsmere, too, seemed to dislike him, and yet there he was, week 
 after week. Flaxman could not make it out. 
 
 Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started 
 various topics with him University reform, politics, music. 
 In vain. In his most characteristic Oxford days Langham had 
 never assumed a more wholesale ignorance or all subjects in 
 heaven and earth, and never stuck more pertinaciously to the 
 flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked away at last 
 boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is 
 perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom. 
 
 However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of 
 these fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly 
 home in a state of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust 
 with energy into the pockets of his overcoat. 
 
 ' No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything 
 your own way so easily with me or with her 1 You may break 
 me, but you shall not play upon me. And as for her, I will see 
 it out I will see it out ! ' 
 
 And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all 
 about him, and a strange new force tingling in every vein. 
 
 Meanwhile, however, Mr. Flaxman was certainly having a 
 good deal of his own way. Since the moment when his aunt, 
 Lady Charlotte, had introduced him to Miss Leyburn watch- 
 ing him the while with a half -smile which soon broadened into 
 one of sly triumph Hugh Flaxman had persuaded himself that 
 country houses are intolerable even in the shooting season, and 
 that London is the only place of residence during the winter for 
 the man who aspires to govern his life on principles of reason. 
 Through his influence and that of his aunt, Rose and Agnes 
 Mrs. Leyburn never went out were being carried into all the 
 high life that London can supply in November and January. 
 Wealthy, high-born, and popular, he was gradually devoting his 
 advantages in the freest way to Rose's service. He was an 
 excellent musical amateur, and he was always proud to play 
 with her ; he had a fine country house, and the little rooms on 
 Campden Hill were almost always filled with flowers from his 
 gardens ; he had a famous musical library, and its treasures 
 were lavished on the girl violinist ; he had a singularly wide 
 circle of friends, and with his whimsical energy he was soon 
 inclined to make kindness to the two sisters the one test of a 
 friend's goodwill. 
 
 He was clearly touched by Rose ; and what was to prevent 
 his making an impression on her ? To her sex he had always 
 been singularly attractive. Like his sister, he had all sorts of 
 bright impulses and audacities flashing and darting about him. 
 He had a certain hauteur with men, and could play the aris- 
 tocrat when he pleased, for all his philosophical radicalism. But 
 with women he was the most delightful mixture of deference
 
 430 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK, v 
 
 and high spirits. He loved the grace of them, the daintiness of 
 their dress, the softness of their voices. He would have done 
 anything to please them, anything to save them pain. At 
 twenty -five, when he was still ' Citizen Flaxman ' to his college 
 friends, and in the first fervours of a poetic defiance of prejudice 
 and convention, he had married a gamekeeper's pretty daughter. 
 She had died with her child died, almost, poor thing ! of 
 happiness and excitement of the over-greatness of Heaven's 
 boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and death had tenderly 
 embalmed a sentiment to which life might possibly have been 
 less kind. Since then he had lived in music, letters, and society, 
 refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to enter politics, but 
 welcomed and considered, wherever he went, tall, good-looking, 
 distinguished, one of the most agreeable and courted of men, 
 and perhaps the richest parti in London. 
 
 Still, in spite of it aU, Langham held his ground Langham 
 would see it out ! And indeed Flaxman's footing with the 
 beauty was by no means clear least of all to himself. She 
 evidently liked him, but she bantered him a good deal; she 
 would not be the least subdued or dazzled by his birth and 
 wealth, or by those of his friends ; and if she allowed him to 
 provide her with pleasures, she would hardly ever take his 
 advice, or knowingly consult his tastes. 
 
 Meanwhile she tormented them both a good deal by the 
 artistic acquaintance she gathered about her. Mrs. Pierson's 
 world, as we have said, contained a good many dubious odds 
 and ends, and she had handed them all over to Rose. The Ley- 
 burns' growing intimacy with Mr. Flaxman and his circle, and 
 through them with the finer types of the artistic life, would 
 naturally and by degrees have carried them away somewhat 
 from this earlier circle if Rose would have allowed it. But she 
 clung persistently to its most unpromising specimens, partly 
 out of a natural generosity of feeling, but partly also for the 
 sake of that opposition her soul loved, her poor prickly soul, full 
 under all her gaiety and indifference of the most desperate doubt 
 and soreness, opposition to Catherine, opposition to Mr. Flax- 
 man, but, above all, opposition to Langham. 
 
 Flaxman could often avenge himself on her or rather on the 
 more obnoxious members of her following by dint of a faculty 
 for light and stinging repartee which would send her, flushed 
 and biting her lip, to have her laugh out in private. But 
 Langham for a long time was defenceless. Many of her friends 
 in his opinion were simply pathological curiosities their 
 vanity was so frenzied, their sensibilities so morbidly developed. 
 He felt a doctor's interest in them coupled with more than a 
 doctor's scepticism as to all they had to say about themselves. 
 But Rose would invite them, would assume a quasi- intimacy 
 with them ; and Langham as well as everybody else had to put 
 up with it. 
 
 Even the trodden worm, however And there came n
 
 CHAP, xxxiv ROSE 431 
 
 time when the concentration of a good many different lines of 
 feeling in Langham's mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp 
 and sudden openness. It began to seem to him that she was 
 specially bent often on tormenting him by these caprices of 
 hers, and he vowed to himself finally, with an outburst of irrita- 
 tion due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would assert 
 himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her 
 from her own follies. 
 
 One afternoon, at a crowded musical party, to which he had 
 come much against his will, and only in obedience to a compul- 
 sion he dared not analyse, she asked him in passing if he would 
 kindly find Mr. MacFadden, a bass singer, whose name stood 
 next on the programme, and who was not to be seen in the 
 drawing-room. 
 
 Langham searched the dining-room and the hall, and at last 
 found Mr. MacFadden a fair, flabby, unwholesome youth in 
 the little study or cloak-room, in a state of collapse, flanked by 
 whisky and water, and attended by two frightened maids, who 
 handed over their charge to Langham and fled. 
 
 Then it appeared that the great man had been offended by a 
 change in the programme, which hurt his vanity, had withdrawn 
 from the drawing-room on the brink of hysterics, had called for 
 spirits, which had been provided for him with great difficulty 
 by Mrs. Leyburn's maids, and was there drinking himself into 
 a state of rage and rampant dignity which would soon have 
 shown- itself in a melodramatic return to the drawing-room, 
 and a public refusal to sing at all in a house where art had 
 been outraged in his person. 
 
 Some of the old disciplinary instincts of the Oxford tutor 
 awoke in Langham at the sight of the creature, and, with a 
 prompt sternness which amazed himself, and nearly set Mac- 
 Fadden whimpering, he got rid of the man, shut the hall door 
 on him, and went back to the drawing-room. 
 
 ' Well ? ' said Rose in anxiety, coming up to him. 
 
 ' I have sent him away,' he said briefly, an eye of unusual 
 quickness and brightness looking down upon her; 'he was in 
 no condition to sing. He chose to be offended, apparently, 
 because he was put out of his turn, and has been giving the 
 servants trouble. 
 
 Rose flushed deeply, and drew herself up with a look half 
 trouble, half defiance, at Langham. 
 
 ' I trust you will not ask him again,' he said, with the same 
 decision. 'And if I might say so there are one or two people 
 still here whom I should like to see you exclude at the same time.' 
 
 They had withdrawn into the bow window out of earshot 
 of the rest of the room. Langham's look turned significantly 
 towards a group near the piano. It contained one or two men 
 whom he regarded as belonging to a low type ; men who, if it 
 suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or invent 
 malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and whose
 
 432 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK \ 
 
 standards and instincts represented a coarser world than Rose 
 in reality knew anything about. 
 
 Her eyes followed his. 
 
 ' I know,' she said petulantly, ' that you dislike artists. They 
 are not your world. They are mine.' 
 
 ' I dislike artists ? What nonsense, too ! To me personally 
 these men's ways don't matter in the least. They go their road 
 and I mine. But I deeply resent any danger of discomfort and 
 annoyance to you ! ' 
 
 He still stood frowning, a glow of indignant energy showing 
 itself in his attitude, his glance. She could not know that he 
 was at that moment vividly realising the drunken scene that 
 might have taken place in her presence if he had not succeeded 
 in getting that man safely out of the house. But she felt that 
 he was angry, and mostly angry with her, and there was some- 
 thing so piquant and unexpected in his anger ! 
 
 ' I am afraid,' she said, with a queer sudden submissiveness, 
 ' you have been going through something very disagreeable. I 
 am very sorry. Is it my fault 1 ' she added, with a whimsical 
 flash of eye, half fun, half serious. 
 
 He could hardly believe his ears. 
 
 ' Yes, it is your fault, I think ! ' he answered her, amazed at 
 his own boldness. ' Not that / was annoyed Heavens ! what 
 does that matter? but that you and your mother and sister 
 were very near an unpleasant scene. You will not take advice, 
 Miss Ley burn, you will take your own way in spite of what 
 any one else can say or hint to you, and some day you will expose 
 yourself to annoyance when there is no one near to protect 
 you ! ' 
 
 ' Well, if so, it won't be for want of a mentor,' she said, drop- 
 ping him a mock curtsey. But her lip trembled under its 
 smile, and her tone had not lost its gentleness. 
 
 At this moment Mr. Flaxman, who had gradually established 
 himself as the joint leader of these musical afternoons, came 
 forward to summon Rose to a quartette. He looked from one 
 to the other, a little surprise penetrating through his suavity 
 of manner. 
 
 ' Am I interrupting you ? ' 
 
 ' Not at all,' said Rose ; then, turning back to Langham, she 
 said in a hurried whisper : ' Don't say anything about the 
 wretched man ; it would make mamma nervous. He shan't 
 come here again.' 
 
 Mr. Flaxman waited till the whisper was over, and then led 
 her off, with a change of manner which she immediately per- 
 ceived, and which lasted for the rest of the evening. 
 
 Langham went home, and sat brooding over the fire. Her 
 voice had not been so kind, her look so womanly, for months. 
 Had she been reading Shirley, and would she have liked him 
 to play Louis Moore 1 He went into a fit of silent convulsive 
 laughter as the idea occurred to him.
 
 CHAP, xxxiv ROSE 433 
 
 Some secret instinct made him keep away from her for a 
 time. At last, one Friday afternoon, as he emerged from the 
 Museum, where he had been collating the MSS. of some obscure 
 Alexandrian, the old craving returned with added strength, 
 and he turned involuntarily westward. 
 
 An acquaintance of his, recently made in the course of work 
 at the Museum, a young Russian professor, ran after him, and 
 walked with him. Presently they passed a poster on the wall, 
 which contained in enormous letters the announcement 01 
 Madame Desforets's approaching visit to London, a list of plays, 
 and the dates of performances. 
 
 The young Russian suddenly stopped and stood pointing at 
 the advertisement, with shaking derisive finger, his eyes aflame, 
 the whole man quivering with what looked like antagonism and 
 hate. 
 
 Then he broke into a fierce flood of French. Langham 
 listened till they had passed Piccadilly, passed the Park, and 
 till the young savant turned southwards towards his Brompton 
 lodgings. 
 
 Then Langham slowly climbed Campden Hill, meditating. 
 His thoughts were an odd mixture of the things he had just 
 heard, and of a scene at Murewell long ago when a girl had 
 denounced him for ' calumny.' 
 
 At the door of Lerwick Gardens he was informed that Mrs. 
 Leyburn was upstairs with an attack of bronchitis. But the 
 servant thought the young ladies were at home. Would he 
 come in? He stood irresolute a moment, then went in on a 
 pretext of ' inquiry.' 
 
 The maid threw open the drawing-room door, and there was 
 Rose sitting well into the fire for it was a raw February after- 
 noon with a book. 
 
 She received him with all her old hard brightness. He was, 
 indeed, instantly sorry that he had made his way in. Tyrant ! 
 was she displeased because he had slipped his chain for rather 
 longer than usual ? 
 
 However, he sat down, delivered his book, and they talked 
 first about her mother's illness. They had been anxious, she 
 said, but the doctor, who had just taken his departure, had now 
 completely reassured them. 
 
 ' Then you will be able probably after all to put in an ap- 
 pearance at Lady Charlotte s this evening ? ' he asked her. 
 
 The omnivorous Lady Charlotte of course had made acquaint- 
 ance with him in the Leyburns' drawing-room, as she did with 
 everybody who crossed her path, and three days before he had 
 received a card from her for this evening. 
 
 ' Oh yes ! But I have had to miss a rehearsal this afternoon. 
 That concert at Searle House is becoming a great nuisance.' 
 
 ' It will be a brilliant affair, I suppose. Princes on one side 
 of you and Albani on the other. I see they have given you 
 the most conspicuous part as violinist.' 
 
 2F
 
 434 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 'Yes,' she said with a little satirical tightening of the lip. 
 1 Yes I suppose I ought to be much flattered.' 
 
 ' Of course,' he said, smiling, but embarrassed. ' To many 
 people you must be at this moment one of the most enviable 
 persons in the world. A delightful art and every opportunity 
 to make it tell ! ' 
 
 There was a pause. She looked into the fire. 
 
 ' I don't know whether it is a delightful art,' she said pre- 
 sently, stifling a little yawn. ' I believe I am getting very 
 tired of London. Sometimes I think I shouldn't be very sorry 
 to find myself suddenly spirited back to Burwood ! ' 
 
 Langham gave vent to some incredulous interjection. He 
 had apparently surprised her in a fit of ennui which was rare 
 with her. 
 
 ' Oh no, not yet ! ' she said suddenly, with a return of anima- 
 tion. ' Madame Desforets comes next week, and I am to see 
 her.' She drew herself up and turned a beaming face upon him. 
 Was there a shaft of mischief in her eye ? He could not tell. 
 The firelight was perplexing. 
 
 ' You are to see her 1 ' he said slowly. ' Is she coming 
 here?' 
 
 ' I hope so. Mrs. Pierson is to bring her. I want mamma to 
 have the amusement of seeing her. My artistic friends are a 
 kind of tonic to her they excite her so much. She regards 
 them as a sort of show much as you do, in fact, only in a more 
 charitable fashion.' 
 
 But he took no notice of what she was saying. 
 
 ' Madame Desforets is coming here 1 ' he sharply repeated, 
 bending forward, a curious accent in his tone. 
 
 ' Yes ! ' she replied, with apparent surprise. Then with a care- 
 less smile : ' Oh, I remember when we were at Murewell, you 
 were exercised that we should know her. Well, Mr. Langham, 
 I told you then that you were only echoing unworthy gossip. 
 I am in the same mind still. I have seen her, and you haven t. 
 To me she is the greatest actress in the world, and an ill-used 
 woman to boot ! ' 
 
 Her tone had warmed with every sentence. It struck him 
 that she had wilfully brought up the topic that it gave her 
 pleasure to quarrel with him. 
 
 He put down his hat deliberately, got up, and stood with his 
 back to the fire. She looked up at him curiously. But the dark 
 regular face was almost hidden from her. 
 
 ' It is strange,' he said slowly, ' very strange that you should 
 have told me this at this moment ! Miss Leyburn, a great deal 
 of the truth about Madame Desforets I could neither tell, nor 
 could you hear. There are charges against her proved in open 
 court, again and again, which I could not even mention in your 
 presence. But one thing I can speak of. Do you know the 
 story of the sister at St. Petersburg ? ' 
 
 'I know no stories against Madame Desforets,' said Rose
 
 CHAP, xxxiv ROSE 435 
 
 loftily, her quickened breath responding to the energy of his 
 tone. ' I have always chosen not to know them.' 
 
 ' The newspapers were full of this particular story just before 
 Christmas. I should have thought it must have reached you.' 
 
 ' I did not see it,' she replied stiffly ; ' and I cannot see what 
 good purpose is to be served by your repeating it to me, Mr. 
 Langham.' 
 
 Langham could have smiled at her petulance, if he had not 
 for once been determined and in earnest. 
 
 ' You will let me tell it, I hope ? ' he said quietly. ' I will tell 
 it so that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself 
 thought it incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, 
 it has just this afternoon been repeated to me by a man who 
 was an eyewitness of part of it.' 
 
 Rose was silent. Her attitude was hauteur itself, but she 
 made no further active opposition. 
 
 ' Three months ago,' he began, speaking with some difficulty, 
 but still with a suppressed force of feeling which amazed his 
 hearer, ' Madame Desforets was acting in St. Petersburg. She 
 had with her a large company, and amongst them her own 
 young sister, Elise Homey, a girl of eighteen. This girl had 
 been always kept away from Madame Desforets by her parents, 
 who had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest daugh- 
 ter's artistic success for the infamy of her life.' 
 
 Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to 
 speak. 
 
 ' Elise Romey, however, had developed a passion for the stage. 
 Her parents were respectable and you know young girls in 
 France are brought up strictly. She knew next to nothing of 
 her sister's escapades. But she knew that she was held to be 
 the greatest actress in Europe the photographs in the shops 
 told her that she was beautiful. She conceived a romantic 
 passion for the woman whom she had last seen when she was a 
 child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry affection, 
 partly by her own longing wish to become an actress, she 
 escaped from home and joined Madame Desforets in the South 
 of 1 ranee. Madame Desforets seems at first to have been 
 pleased to have her. The girl's adoration pleased her vanity. 
 Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing. I 
 believe,' and Langham gave a little dry laugh, 'they were 
 photographed together at Marseilles with their arms round each 
 other's necks, and the photograph had an immense success. 
 However, on the way to St. Petersburg, difficulties arose. Elise 
 was pretty, in a blonde childish way, and she caught the atten- 
 tion of the jeune premier of the company, a man the speaker 
 became somewhat embarrassed 'whom Madame Desforets 
 seems to have regarded as her particular property. There were 
 scenes at different towns on the journey. Elise became fright- 
 ened wanted to go home. But the elaer sister, having begun 
 tormenting her, seems to have determined to keep her hold on
 
 436 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 her, as a cat keeps and tortures a mouse mainly for the sake 
 of annoying the man of whom she was jealous. They arrived 
 at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. The girl was worn 
 out with travelling, unhappy, and ilL One night in Madame 
 Desforets's apartment there was a supper party, and after it a 
 horrible quarrel. No one exactly knows what happened. But 
 towards twelve o'clock that night Madame Desforets turned her 
 young sister in evening dress, a light shawl round her, out into 
 the snowy streets of St. Petersburg, barred the door behind her, 
 and revolver in hand dared the wretched man who had caused 
 the fracas to follow her.' 
 
 Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight 
 was not revealing. 
 
 Langham turned away from her towards the blaze, holding 
 out his hands to it mechanically. 
 
 'The poor child,' he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, 
 ' wandered about for some hours. It was a frightful night the 
 great capital was quite strange to her. She was insulted fled 
 this way and that grew benumbed with cold and terror, and 
 was found unconscious in the early morning under the archway 
 of a house some two miles from her sister's lodgings.' 
 
 There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering 
 breath. 
 
 ' I do not believe it ! ' she said passionately. ' I cannot 
 believe it ! ' 
 
 'It was amply proved at the time,' said Langham drily, 
 ' though of course Madame Desforets tried to put her own colour 
 on it. But I told you I had private information. On one of the 
 floors of the house where Elise Romey was picked up, lived a 
 young university professor. He is editing an important Greek 
 text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made 
 friends with him there. He walked home with me this after- 
 noon, saw the announcement of Madame Desfordts's coming, and 
 poured out the story. He and his wife nursed the unfortunate 
 girl with devotion. She lived just a week, and died of inflamma- 
 tion of the lungs. I never in my life heard anything so pitiful 
 as his description of her delirium, her terror, her appeals, her 
 shivering misery of cold.' 
 
 There was a pause. 
 
 ' She is not a woman,' he said presently, between his teeth. 
 ' She is a wild beast.' 
 
 Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the 
 flame which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round. 
 
 ' I have told you a shocking story,' he said hurriedly. ' Per- 
 haps I ought not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking 
 so lightly, so gaily, it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable 
 that that woman should ever sit here in this room talk to you 
 call you by your name laugh with you touch your hand ! 
 Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so far you shall not 
 do it ! '
 
 CHAP, xxxv ROSE 437 
 
 He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a pas- 
 sionate sense of physical repulsion to the notion of any contact 
 between her pure fair youth and something malodorous and 
 corrupt. And there was besides a wild unique excitement in 
 claiming for once to stay to control her. 
 
 Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw 
 the tears in her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl's 
 awful story. But through the tears something gleamed a Kind 
 of exultation the exultation which the magician feels when he 
 has called spirits from the vasty deep, and after long doubt and 
 difficult invocation they rise at last before his eyes. 
 
 'I will never see her again,' she said in a low wavering 
 voice, but t she too was hardly conscious of her own words. 
 Their looks were on each other ; the ruddy capricious light 
 touched her glowing cheeks, her straight-lined grace, her white 
 hand. Suddenly from the gulf of another's misery into which 
 they had both been looking there had sprung up, by the strange 
 contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication of feeling, 
 wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from 
 them like a golden mist. ' Be always thus ! ' her parted lips, her 
 liquid eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed to fail him ; 
 he was lost in bewilderment. 
 
 There were sounds outside Catherine's voice. He roused 
 himself with a supreme effort. 
 
 ' To-night at Lady Charlotte's ? ' 
 
 ' To-night,' she said, and held out her hand. 
 
 A sudden madness seized him he stooped his lips touched 
 it it was hastily drawn away, and the door opened. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXV 
 
 ' IN the first place, my dear aunt,' said Mr. Flaxman, throwing 
 himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte's drawing- 
 room fire, 'you may spare your admonitions, because it is 
 becoming more and more clear to me that, whatever my senti- 
 ments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a serious thought to me.' 
 
 He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His 
 tone and manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was 
 puzzled by him. 
 
 ' Stuff and nonsense ! ' replied the lady with her usual 
 emphasis ; ' I never flatter you, Hugh, and I don't mean to 
 begin now, but it would be mere folly not to recognise that you 
 have advantages which must tell on the mind of any girl in 
 Miss Leyburn's position.' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his 
 hands in his pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection 
 of his irreproachable trouser-knees. 
 
 ' I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,' he said, still
 
 438 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 stooping, ' but Miss Leyburn doesn't care twopence about my 
 advantages.' 
 
 ' Very proper of you to say so,' returned Lady Charlotte 
 sharply ; ' the remark, however, my good sir, does more credit 
 to your heart than your head.' 
 
 ' In the next place,' he went on undisturbed, ' why you should 
 have done your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn 
 and me together, if you meant in the end to oppose my marrying 
 her, I don't quite see.' 
 
 He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so 
 slightly. 
 
 'You know my weaknesses,' she said presently, with an 
 effrontery which delighted her nephew. ' She is my latest 
 novelty, she excites me, I can't do without her. As to you, I 
 can't remember that you wanted much encouragement, but, I 
 acknowledge, after all these years of resistance resistance to 
 my most legitimate efforts to dispose of you there was a certain 
 piquancy in seeing you caught at last ! 
 
 ' Upon my word ! ' he said, throwing back his head with a 
 not very cordial laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She 
 was sitting opposite to him, her powerful loosely-gloved hands 
 crossed over the rich velvet of her dress, her fair large face and 
 grayish hair surmounted by a mighty cap, as vigorous, shrewd, 
 and individual a type of English middle age as could be found. 
 The room behind her and the second and third drawing-rooms 
 were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a cigar 
 in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were 
 awaiting the arrival of the evening's guests upstairs. 
 
 Lady Charlotte's mind had been evidently much perturbed 
 by the conversation with her nephew of which we are merely 
 describing the latter half. She was labouring under an uncom- 
 fortable sense of being hoist with her own petard an uncom- 
 fortable memory of a certain warning of her husband's, delivered 
 at Murewell. 
 
 ' And now,' said Mr. Flaxman, ' having confessed in so many 
 words that you have done your best to bring me up to the fence, 
 will you kindly recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion 
 I should not jump it 1 ' 
 
 'Society, amusement, flirtation, are one thing,' she replied 
 with judicial imperativeness, 'marriage is another. In these 
 democratic days we must know everybody ; we should only 
 marry our equals.' 
 
 The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she 
 regretted them. Mr. Flaxman's expression changed. 
 
 ' I do not agree with you,' he said calmly, ' and you know I 
 do not. You could not, I imagine, have relied much upon that 
 argument.' 
 
 ' Good gracious, Hugh ! ' cried Lady Charlotte crossly ; ' you 
 talk as if I were really the old campaigner some people suppose 
 me to be. I have been amusing myself I have liked to see
 
 CHAP, xxxv ROSE 439 
 
 you amused. And it is only the last few weeks since you have 
 begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that I have come to 
 take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like, that I 
 have got you into the scrape now I want to get you out of it ! 
 I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses and 
 you know what the duke will say.' 
 
 ' The duke be translated ! ' said Flaxman coolly. ' Nothing 
 of what you have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, 
 has the smallest weight with me. But Providence has been 
 kinder to you and the duke than you deserve. Miss Leyburn 
 does not care for me, and she does care or I am very much 
 mistaken for somebody else.' 
 
 He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect 
 upon her. 
 
 'What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' 
 friend '( Ridiculous ! What attraction could a man of that 
 type have for a girl of hers ? ' 
 
 'I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,' 
 replied her nephew. 'However, he is not a nonentity. Far 
 from it ! Ten years ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he 
 was certainly one of the most distinguished of the young Oxford 
 tutors.' 
 
 ' Another instance of what university reputation is worth ! ' 
 said Lady Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the 
 case of a beauty whom she thought it beneath him to marry, 
 she was not pleased to see her nephew ousted by the force 
 majeure of a rival and that a rival whom she regarded as an 
 utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor 
 family, nor social brilliance to recommend him. 
 
 Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with 
 critical amused eyes. 
 
 'I should like to know,' he said presently, with a curious 
 slowness and suavity, ' I should greatly like to know why you 
 asked him here to-night ? ' 
 
 ' You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody a con- 
 vict, a crossing-sweeper if I happened to be half an hour in 
 the same room with him ! ' 
 
 Flaxman laughed. 
 
 'Well, it may be convenient to-night,' he said reflectively. 
 ' What are we to do some thought-reading ? ' 
 
 ' Yes. It isn't a crush. I have only asked about thirty or 
 forty people. Mr. Denman is to manage it.' 
 
 She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request 
 at the moment. 
 
 Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little 
 plan to his aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed. 
 
 ' I want to make a few notes,' he said drily, when it was 
 arranged ; ' I should be glad to satisfy myself.' 
 
 When the Misses Leyburn were announced, Rose, though the 
 younger, came in first. She always took the lead by a sort of
 
 440 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 natural right, and Agnes never dreamt of protesting. To-night 
 the sisters were in white. Some soft creamy stuft' was folded 
 and draped about Rose's slim shapely figure in such a way as to 
 bring out all its charming roundness and grace. Her neck and 
 arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously. Her red-gold 
 hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte's innumerable 
 candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a 
 Japanese fan of the same colour, gave just that touch of pur- 
 pose and art which the spectator seems to claim as the tribute 
 answering to his praise in the dress of a young girl. She moved 
 with perfect self-possession, distributing a few smiling looks to 
 the people she knew as she advanced towards Lady Charlotte. 
 Any one with a discerning eye could have seen that she was in 
 that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a statue to 
 which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the 
 sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening 
 there, planing away awkwardness, emphasising grace, disengag- 
 ing as it were, week by week, and month by month, all the 
 beauty of which the original conception was capable. And the 
 process is one attended always by a glow and sparkle, a kind of 
 effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes beauty more 
 beautiful and grace more graceful. 
 
 The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, 
 which had already begun to mark her entrance into a room, 
 surrounded Rose as she walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. 
 Flaxman, who had been standing absently silent, woke up 
 directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his aunt. 
 
 ' You failed us at rehearsal,' he said with smiling reproach ; 
 ' we were all at sixes and sevens.' 
 
 ' I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. 
 Lady Charlotte, Catherine couldn't come. Agnes and I are 
 alone in the world. Will you chaperon us ? ' 
 
 'I don't know whether I will accept the responsibility to- 
 night in that new gown,' replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting 
 up her eyeglass to look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the 
 scrutiny with a light smiling silence, even though she knew 
 Mr. Flaxman was looking top. 
 
 ' On the contrary,' she said, ' one always feels so particularly 
 good and prim in a new frock.' 
 
 ' Really ? I should have thought it one of Satan's likeliest 
 moments,' said Flaxman, laughing his eyes, however, the while 
 saying quite other things to her, as they finished their inspection 
 of her dress. 
 
 Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at 
 Rose's smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests. 
 
 ' I have made a muddle as usual,' she said to herself in dis- 
 gust, ' perhaps even a worse one than I thought ! ' 
 
 Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman's state of mind, however, 
 he never showed greater self-possession than on this particular 
 evening.
 
 OHA.P. xxxv ROSE 441 
 
 A few minutes after Rose's entry he introduced her for the 
 first time to his sister Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just 
 come up to town for the opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen 
 had come to-night to Martin Street, all ardour to see Hugh's 
 new adoration, and the girl whom all the world was beginning 
 to talk about both as a beauty and as an artist. She rushed 
 at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to anything so 
 light and airy as Lady Helen's movements, caught the girl's 
 hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised 
 admiration, said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive 
 things possible. Rose who with all her lithe shapeliness, 
 looked over-tall and even a trifle stiff beside the tiny bird-like 
 Lady Helen took the advances of Hugh Flaxman's sister with 
 a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked down at the small 
 radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh Flax- 
 man stood by, so far well pleased. 
 
 Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the even- 
 ing, to be introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who 
 was behind her sister, saw Rose's eyes wandering from Lady 
 Helen to the door, restlessly searching and then returning. 
 
 Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance 
 Agnes spied a well-known form emerging. 
 
 ' Mr. Langham ! But Rose never told me he was to be here 
 to-night, and how dreadful he looks ! ' 
 
 Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely 
 across the room. Rose had seen him at once ; and they had 
 greeted each other across the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, 
 trying to analyse what had struck her so. The face was always 
 melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was ghastly, and from 
 the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the jet-black hair 
 stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would have 
 remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose's attention was claimed 
 by the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman 
 had brought up. Mr. Denman was a fair -haired young Her- 
 cules, whose tremulous agitated manner contrasted oddly with 
 his athlete's looks. Among other magnetisms he was clearly 
 open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking to 
 Rose, staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy 
 lids, much longer than the girl thought fair. 
 
 ' Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new 
 force before ? ' he asked her, with a solemnity which sat oddly 
 on his commonplace bearded face. 
 
 ' Oh yes ! ' she said flippantly. ' We have tried it sometimes. 
 It is very good fun.' 
 
 He drew himself up. ' Not fun,' he said impressively, ' not 
 fun. Thought-reading wants seriousness ; the most tremendous 
 things depend upon it. If established it will revolutionise our 
 whole views of life. Even a Huxley could not deny that ! ' 
 
 She studied him with mocking eyes. ' Do you imagine this 
 party to-night looks very serious ? '
 
 442 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK V 
 
 His face fell. 
 
 ' One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he ad- 
 mitted, sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most pre- 
 posterous young man. Why was he not cricketing or shooting 
 or exploring, or using the muscles Nature had given him so 
 amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead of making a 
 business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's night 
 after night in hot drawing-rooms ? And when would he go away ? 
 
 ' Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him ; 
 ' the audience is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are ! ' 
 and he gave Langham a cool greeting. 'Have you seen any- 
 thing yet of these fashionable dealings with the devil ? ' 
 
 ' Nothing. Are you a believer ? ' 
 
 Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. ' I never refuse an experi- 
 ment of any kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. 
 'Come, Denman.' 
 
 And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside 
 Rose, while old Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling 
 over with gossip about the Queen's Speech, appropriated Lady 
 Helen, who was the darling of all elderly men. 
 
 They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a 
 new divine shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full 
 of her own young emotion, and of the effort to conceal it from 
 all the world, she noticed none of that change which had struck 
 Agnes. 
 
 And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's 
 silence ! An hour before this moment Langham had vowed 
 that nothing should take him to Lady Charlotte's that night. 
 And yet here he was, riveted to her side, alive like any normal 
 human being to every detail of her loveliness, shaken to his 
 inmost being by the intoxicating message of her look, of the 
 transformation which had passed in an instant over the teasing 
 difficult creature of the last few months. 
 
 At Murewell his chagrin had been not to feel, not to struggle, 
 to have been cheated out of experience. Well, here is the ex- 
 perience in good earnest ! And Langham is wrestling with it 
 for dear life. And how little the exquisite child beside him 
 knows of it, or of the man on whom she is spending her first 
 wilful passion ! She stands strangely exulting in her own 
 strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and eluded 
 her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside 
 her is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance. 
 
 The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder 
 and its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the 
 turn of card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other 
 forms of telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended 
 them all, his restless eye wandering every other minute to the 
 farther drawing-room in which the lights had been lowered, 
 catching there always the same patch of black and white, 
 Rose's dress and the dark form beside her.
 
 CHAP, xxxv ROSE 443 
 
 ' Are you convinced ? Do you believe ? ' said Rose, merrily 
 looking up at her companion. 
 
 'In telepathy? Well so far I have not got beyond the 
 delicacy and perfection of Mr. Denman's muscular sensation. 
 So much I am sure of ! ' 
 
 ' Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous ! ' she said gaily. ' We 
 know that some people have an extraordinary power over 
 others.' 
 
 ' Yes, that certainly we know ! ' he answered, his voice drop- 
 ping, an odd strained note in it. 'I grant you that.' 
 
 She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood to- 
 gether, conscious only of each other. 
 
 ' Now,' said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between 
 the two drawing-rooms, ' I have done all I can I am exhausted. 
 But let me beg of you all to go on with some experiments 
 amongst yourselves. Every fresh discovery of this power 
 in a new individual is a gain to science. I believe about one in 
 ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will arrange every- 
 thing, if any one will volunteer 1 ' 
 
 The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, sug- 
 gesting this and that. Presently Lady Charlotte's loud dicta- 
 torial voice made itself heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand 
 looking round the circle of her guests. 
 
 ' Somebody must venture we are losing time.' 
 
 Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall 
 and radiant on the sofa, her blue fan^ across her white knees. 
 'Miss Ley burn you are always public -spirited will you be 
 victimised for the good of science ? ' 
 
 The girl got up with a smile. 
 
 ' And Mr. Langham will you see what you can do with Miss 
 Leyburn ? Hugh we all choose her task, don't we then Mr. 
 Langham wills r 
 
 Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose 
 a wild fury with Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweep- 
 ing through him. But there was no time to demur ; that judicial 
 eye was on them ; the large figure and towering cap bent to- 
 wards him. Refusal was impossible. 
 
 ' Command me ! ' he said with a sudden straightening of the 
 form and a flush on the pale cheek. ' I am afraid Miss Leyburn 
 will find me a very bad partner.' 
 
 ' Well, now then ! ' said Flaxman ; ' Miss Leyburn, will you 
 please go down into the library while we settle what you are to 
 
 She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed 
 out unconscious of him rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the 
 ground. 
 
 ' Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do ? ' asked Lady Char- 
 lotte in the same loud emphatic tone. 
 
 ' If I might suggest something quite different from anything 
 that has been yet tried,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'suppose we re-
 
 444 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 quire Miss Leyburn to kiss the hand of the little marble 
 statue of Hope in the far drawing-room. What do you say, 
 Langham ? ' 
 
 ' What you please ! ' said Langham, moving up to him. A 
 glance passed between the two men. In Langham's there was 
 a hardly sane antagonism and resentment, in Flaxman's an 
 excited intelligence. 
 
 ' Now then, said Flaxman coolly, ' fix your mind steadily on 
 what Miss Leyburn is to do you must take her hand but 
 except in thought, you must carefully follow and not lead her. 
 Shall I call her ?' 
 
 Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of 
 being watched tricked. Why were he and she to be made a 
 spectacle for this man and his friends ! A mad irrational indig- 
 nation surged through him. 
 
 Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feel- 
 ing the air in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. 
 Flaxman and Mr. Denman prepared, note-book in hand, to watch 
 the experiment. Langham moved desperately forward. 
 
 But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though 
 by enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, 
 were blotted out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot 
 everything but her and this thing she was to do. He had her 
 in his grasp he was the man, the master and what enchanting 
 readiness to yield in the swaying pliant form ! In the distance 
 far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on tiptoe, one out- 
 stretched arm just visible from where he stood. 
 
 There was a moment's silent expectation. Every eye was 
 riveted on the two figures on the dark handsome man on the 
 blindfolded girl. 
 
 At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange 
 wavering motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly 
 parted lips : her bright colour was ebbing. She was conscious 
 of nothing but the grasp in which her hand was held otherwise 
 her mind seemed a blank. Her state during the next few seconds 
 was not unlike the state of some one under the partial influence 
 of an anaesthetic ; a benumbing grip was laid on all her facul- 
 ties ; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she 
 was going. 
 
 Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half 
 an hour or five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing 
 beside a small marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and 
 her lips had on them a slight sense of chill, as though they had 
 just been laid to something cold. 
 
 She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her 
 was Langham's face, a marvellous glow and animation in every 
 line of it. 
 
 ' Have I done it ? ' she asked in a tremulous whisper. 
 
 For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still 
 bewildered.
 
 CHAP, xxxv ROSE 445 
 
 He nodded, smiling. 
 
 ' I am so glad,' she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing 
 at him. There was the most adorable abandon in her whole look 
 and attitude. He could but just restrain himself from taking 
 her in his arms, and for one bright flashing instant each saw 
 nothing but the other. 
 
 The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the 
 little old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and 
 through which they had swept without heeding, was drawn back 
 with a rattle. 
 
 ' She has done it ! Hurrah ! ' cried Mr. Flaxman. ' What a 
 rush that last was, Miss Leyburn ! You left us all behind.' 
 
 Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her 
 eyes. A rush ? She had known nothing about it ! 
 
 Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report 
 to his aunt, who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the ex- 
 periment from the main drawing-room. His face was a curious 
 mixture of gravity and the keenest excitement. The gravity 
 was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a passionate 
 curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged certain instincts 
 of breeding and refinement which were now revenging them- 
 selves. 
 
 ' Did she do it exactly ? ' said Lady Helen eagerly. 
 
 ' Exactly,' he said, standing still 
 
 Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would 
 not see her look. 
 
 ' Lady Charlotte, where is my sister ? ' said Rose, coming up 
 from the back room, looking now nearly as white as her dress. 
 
 It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady 
 who lived on Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had 
 been obliged to go at the beginning of the last experiment. 
 Agnes, torn between her interest in what was going on and her 
 desire to get back to her mother, had at last hurriedly accepted 
 this Mrs. iSherwood's offer of a seat in her carriage, imagining 
 that her sister would want to stay a good deal later, and relying 
 on Lady Charlotte's promise that she should be safely put into a 
 hansom. 
 
 ' I must go,' said Rose, putting her hand to her head. ' How 
 tiring this is ! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman ? ' 
 
 ' Exactly three minutes,' he said, his gaze fixed upon her with 
 an expression that only Lady Helen noticed. 
 
 ' So little ! Good-night, Lady Charlotte ! ' and giving her 
 hand first to her hostess then to Mr. Flaxman's bewildered 
 sister, she moved away into the crowd. 
 
 'Hugh, of course you are going down with her 1 ?' exclaimed 
 Lady Charlotte under her breath. ' You must. I promised to 
 see her safely off the premises.' 
 
 He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look 
 made a step forward, but he caught her arm. 
 
 ' Don't spoil sport,' he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of
 
 446 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt 
 and sister. 
 
 They looked at him the one amazed, the other grimly ob- 
 servant and caught a slight significant motion of the head 
 towards Langham's distant figure. 
 
 ^ Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned 
 his back, Lady Helen's large astonished eyes followed him to the 
 door. 
 
 ' Oh, Hugh ! ' was all she could say as they came back to her 
 brother. 
 
 'Never mind, Nellie,' he whispered, touched by the bewil- 
 dered sympathy of her look ; ' I will tell you all about it to- 
 morrow. I have not been behaving well, and am not particularly 
 pleased with myself. But for her it is all right. Poor, pretty 
 little thing!' 
 
 And he walked away into the thick of the conversation. 
 
 Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for 
 their carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming 
 out of the cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale child-like 
 fatigue in her looks which set his heart beating faster than ever. 
 
 'Miss Ley burn, how are you going home?' 
 
 ' Will you ask for a hansom, please ? ' 
 
 ' Take my arm,' he said, and she clung ^to him through the 
 crush till they reached the door. 
 
 Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street 
 seemed blocked, a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and 
 shouting men with lanterns. Which of them suggested, ' Shall 
 we walk a few steps ? ' At any rate, here they were, out in the 
 wind and the darkness, every step carrying them farther away 
 from that moving patch of noise and light behind. 
 
 ' We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,' he said. ' Are you 
 warm ? ' 
 
 'Perfectly.' 
 
 A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the colour was 
 coming back. She held her cloak tightly round her, and her 
 little feet, fairly well shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty 
 pavement. 
 
 Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building 
 of which was being pushed on by electric light. The great 
 walls, ivory white in the glare, rose into the purply-blue of the 
 starry February sky, and as they passed within the power of 
 the lamps, each saw with noonday distinctness every line and 
 feature in the other's face. They swept on the night, with its 
 alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted 
 world about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of 
 daylight. Behind them in the distance was the sound of 
 hammers and workmen's voices ; before them the dim trees of 
 the park. Not a human being was in sight. London seemed 
 to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this wandering 
 of theirs.
 
 CHAP, xxxv ROSE 447 
 
 A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before 
 she could close it again, an arm was flung around her. She 
 could not speak or move, she stood passive, conscious only of 
 the strangeness of the wintry wind, and of this warm breast 
 against which her cheek was laid. 
 
 ' Oh, stay there ! ' a voice said close to her ear. ' Rest there 
 pale tired child pale tired little child ! ' 
 
 That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, 
 cherishing and protecting her from the cold not kissing her 
 till at length she looked up with bright eyes, shining through 
 happy tears. 
 
 ' Are you sure at last ? ' she said, strangely enough, speaking 
 out of the far depths of her own thought to his. 
 
 ' Sure ! ' he said, his expression changing. ' What can I be 
 sure of 1 I am sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that 
 I am poor, insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me 
 you will be miserably throwing yourself away ! ' 
 
 She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving 
 spells about him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved 
 hand through his arm, holding the fragile fingers close in his, 
 and they moved on. 
 
 'Do you know,' he repeated a tone of intense melancholy 
 replacing the tone of passion, ' how little I have to give you ? 
 
 ' I know,' she answered, her face turned shyly away from him, 
 her words coming from under the fur hoou which had fallen 
 forward a little. 'I know that that you are not rich, that 
 you distrust yourself, that ' 
 
 'Oh, hush,' he said, and his voice was full of pain. 'You 
 know so little ; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for 
 myself, in myself, till sometimes there seems to be hardly 
 anything left in me to love or be loved ; nothing but a brain, a 
 machine that exists only for certain selfish ends. My habits 
 are the tyrants of years ; and at Murewell, though I loved you 
 there, they were strong enough to carry me away from you. 
 There is something paralysing in me, which is always forbidding 
 me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical 
 disability the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of 
 effort. Can you bear with me '( Can you be poor ? Can you 
 live a life of monotony ? Oh, impossible ! ' he broke out, almost 
 putting her hand away from him. 'You, who ought to be a 
 queen of this world, for whom everything bright and brilliant is 
 waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It is a 
 crime an infamy that I should be speaking to you like this ! ' 
 
 Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She 
 was trembling and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged. 
 
 ' No, no,' she said wistfully ; ' not if you love me.' 
 
 He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, 
 of which the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn 
 and blanched by the life of thought. What possessed him was 
 not so much distrust of circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt,
 
 448 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 of himself, of this very passion beating within him. She saw 
 nothing, meanwhile, but the self-depreciation which she knew 
 so well in him, and against which her love in its rash ignorance 
 and generosity cried out. 
 
 ' You will not say you love me ! ' she cried, with hurrying 
 breath. ' But I know I know you do.' 
 
 Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more 
 turning away from him 'At least, if you don't, I am very 
 very unhappy.' 
 
 The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he 
 felt himself saved, like Faust, saved by the surpassing moral 
 beauty of one moment's impression. That she should need him, 
 that his life should matter to hers ! They were passing the 
 garden wall of a great house. In the deepest shadow of it, he 
 stooped suddenly and kissed her. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVI 
 
 LANGHAM parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. 
 She would not let him take her any farther. 
 
 ' I will say nothing,' she whispered to him, as he put her into 
 a passing hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, ' till 
 I see you again. To-morrow 1 ' 
 
 ' To-morrow morning,' he said, waving his hand to her, and 
 in another instant he was facing the north wind alone. 
 
 He walked on fast towards Beaumont Street, but by the 
 time he reached his destination midnight had struck. He made 
 his way into his room where the fire was still smouldering, and 
 striking a light, sank into his large reading chair, beside which 
 the volumes used in the afternoon lay littered on the floor. 
 
 He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and 
 hung shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What 
 had happened to him? In this room, in this chair, the self- 
 forgetting excitement of that walk, scarcely half an hour old, 
 seems to him already long passed incredible almost. 
 
 And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full 
 of a hundred new impressions. That fair head against his 
 breast, those soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah ! it 
 is the poor, silent, insignificant student that has conquered. It 
 is he, not the successful man of the world, that has held that 
 young and beautiful girl in his arms, and heard from her the 
 sweetest and humblest confession of love. Fate can have neither 
 wit nor conscience to have ordained it so ; but fate has so 
 ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal 
 note also that the satisfaction of it has already half departed. 
 
 So the great moment has come and gone ! The one supreme 
 experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly denied 
 him, is his. He has felt the torturing thrill of passion he has
 
 CHAP, xxxvi ROSE 449 
 
 evoked such an answer as all men might envy him, and fresh 
 from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty, the strange maimed soul 
 falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her response ! One 
 moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of gratitude and 
 tenderness ; the next is nothing what it promises to be ? and 
 has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost some 
 of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where 
 its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy 
 charm ? 
 
 The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would 
 rattle over the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step 
 would penetrate the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock 
 of sound into that silent upper room. Nothing caught Lang- 
 ham's ear. He was absorbed in the dialogue which was to 
 decide his life. 
 
 Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduc- 
 tion of himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and 
 ghastly argument. 
 
 'But I love her! I love her! A little courage a little 
 effort and I too can achieve what other men achieve. I have 
 gifts, great gifts. Mere contact with her, the mere necessities 
 of the situation, will drive me back to life, teach me how to live 
 normally, like other men. I have not forced her love it has been 
 a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it, if I cling to it, as the 
 man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope thrown to him ? ' 
 
 To which the pale spectre self said scornfully 
 
 ' Courage and effort may as well be dropped out of your 
 vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace 
 them by two others habit and character. Slave as you are of 
 habit, of the character you have woven for yourself out of years 
 of deliberate living what wild unreason to imagine that love 
 can unmake, can recreate ! What you are, you are to all 
 eternity. Bear your own burden, but for God's sake beguile no 
 other human creature into trusting you with theirs ! ' 
 
 ' But she loves me ! Impossible that I should crush and tear 
 so kind, so warm a heart ! Poor child poor child ! I have 
 played on her pity. I have won all she had to give. And now 
 to throw her girt back in her face oh monstrous oh inhuman ! ' 
 and the cold drops stood on his forehead. 
 
 But the other self was inexorable. ' You have acted as you 
 were bound to act as any man may be expected to act in 
 whom will and manhood and true human kindness are dying 
 out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the critical habit. 
 But at least do not add another crime to the first. What in 
 God's name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such 
 ambitions ? You are poor you must go back to Oxford you 
 must take up the work your soul loathes grow more soured, 
 more embittered maintain a useless degrading struggle, till 
 her youth is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself have 
 lost every shred of decency and dignity, even that decorous 
 
 2o
 
 450 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the 
 world ! Think of the little house the children the mouey 
 difficulties she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone, you 
 incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of 
 a dull rage with her, yourself, the world ! Bow the neck 
 submit refuse that long agony for yourself and her, while 
 there is still time. Kismet Kismet I ' 
 
 And spread out before Langham's shrinking soul there lay a 
 whole dismal Hogarthian series, image leading to image, 
 calamity to calamity, till in the last scene of all the maddened 
 inward sight perceived two figures, two gray and withered 
 figures, far apart, gazing at each other with cold and sunken 
 eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret. 
 
 The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, a 
 cold and bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which 
 remorse and terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last 
 stirring of manhood, had been alike powerless to save. 
 
 The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged 
 himself to a table and wrote. 
 
 Then for hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor 
 of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious 
 introspection. It was a base thing which he had done it was 
 also a strange thing psychologically ; and at intervals he tried 
 to understand it, to track it to its causes. 
 
 At nine o'clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found 
 a commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, 
 and sent him with a letter to Lerwick Gardens. 
 
 On his way back he passed a gunsmith's, and stood looking 
 fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, 
 shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of 
 Mmself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy become 
 farcical even. 
 
 ' I should only stand a month arguing with my finger on 
 the trigger.' 
 
 In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the 
 sight of him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do any- 
 thing for him. He gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, 
 where she heard him dragging books and boxes about as though 
 lie were packing. 
 
 A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window 
 of No. 27, looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which 
 stood outside. The ground and roofs were white, a promise of 
 sun was struggling through the fog. So far everything in these 
 unfrequented Campden Hill roads was clean, crisp, enlivening, 
 and the sparkle in Rose's mood answered to that of Nature. 
 
 Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs 
 with Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house 
 for a day or two, was in a chair by the fire reading some letters 
 forwarded to her from Bedford Square. 
 
 He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed.
 
 CHAP, xxxvi ROSE 451 
 
 With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagin- 
 ing his interview with Catherine, with her mother. Poor 
 Catherine ! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself 
 a good honest pang of remorse for much of her behaviour to 
 Catherine this winter ; how thorny she has been, how unkind 
 often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh 
 blow ! ' But afterwards, when she has got over it, when she 
 knows that it makes me happy, that nothing else would make 
 me happy, then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps 
 will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. I won't 
 be angry or hard over it poor Cathie ! ' 
 
 And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there wait- 
 ing idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself through 
 a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. He 
 had behaved somewhat oddly towards her of late ; she begins 
 now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte's house 
 the night before had been a very different matter from the 
 royally attended leave-takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, 
 which generally befell her there. Had he understood 1 With a 
 little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care if 
 it was so. ' I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I 
 was going to marry him.' 
 
 But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly 
 for herself. So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. 
 They will say she is dismally throwing herself away, and her 
 mother, no doubt influenced by the clamour, will take up very 
 much the same line. 
 
 What matter ! The girl's spirit seemed to rise against all the 
 world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice 
 of herself, a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful 
 determination to overcome it. That she was about to do the 
 last thing she could have been expected to do, gave her pleasure. 
 Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of surprise and 
 caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the artistic love for 
 the impossible and the difficult. 
 
 Besides success ! To make a man hope and love, and live 
 again that shall be her success. She leaned against the window, 
 her eyes filling, her heart very soft. 
 
 Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little 
 flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately 
 afterwards the dining-room door opened. 
 
 ' A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid. 
 
 Rose took it glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush 
 a surreptitious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a 
 wandering letter from Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her 
 prize to the window and opened it. 
 
 Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and 
 details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered 
 ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the 
 room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.
 
 452 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 ' Rose,' she said, looking up, ' was that some one brought you 
 a note ? ' 
 
 The girl turned with a start a letter fell to the ground. 
 She made a faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into 
 a chair. 
 
 'Rose darling !' cried Catherine, springing up, 'are you ill ?' 
 
 Rose looked at her with a perfectly colourless fixed face, 
 made a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the 
 breakfast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them. 
 
 Catherine stood over her aghast. ' My darling what is it ? 
 Come and lie down take this water.' 
 
 She put some close to her sister's hand, but Rose pushed it 
 away. ' Don't talk to me,' she said with difficulty. 
 
 Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, 
 her cheek resting against her sister s shoulder as a mute sign 
 of sympathy. What could be the matter? Presently her 
 gaze travelled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay 
 with the address uppermost, and she at once recognised Lang- 
 ham's handwriting. But before she could combine any rational 
 ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered 
 herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister's 
 arm. 
 
 ' I was startled,' she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 
 ' Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him I expected 
 him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That 
 letter is to inform me that he made a mistake and he is very 
 sorry ! So am I ! It is so so bewildering ! ' 
 
 She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering 
 with cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was 
 saying. The elder sister followed her, and throwing an arm 
 round her, pressed the slim irresponsive figure close. Her eyes 
 were bright with anger, her lips quivering. 
 
 'That he should dare/' she cried. 'Rose my poor little 
 Rose.' 
 
 ' Don't blame him ! ' said Rose, crouching down before the 
 fire, while Catherine fell into the armchair again. ' It doesn't 
 seem to count, from you you have always been so ready to 
 blame him ! ' 
 
 Her brow contracted ; she looked frowning into the fire, her 
 still colourless mouth working painfully. 
 
 Catherine was cut to the heart. ' Oh, Rose ! ' she said, hold- 
 ing out her hands, ' I will blame no one, dear. I seem hard 
 but I love you so. Oh, tell me you would have told me every- 
 thing once ! ' 
 
 There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted 
 a listless right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched 
 palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered 
 cry, she fell towards Catherine. 
 
 ' Catherine ! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him he kissed 
 me I could kill myself and him.'
 
 CHAP, xxxvi ROSE 453 
 
 Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity 
 of the hour that followed the little familiar morning sounds 
 in and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, 
 tradesmen calling, bells ringing, and here, at her feet, a spec- 
 tacle of moral and mental struggle which she only half under- 
 stood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of 
 feeling seemed to be present in Rose a sense of shock, of 
 wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation, and a strange inter- 
 vening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which 
 seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though 
 the elder questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, 
 Catherine could hardly piece the story together, nor could she 
 find the answer to the question filling her own indignant heart, 
 ' Does she love him ? ' 
 
 At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire 
 and stood, a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright 
 encroaching hair from eyes that were dry and feverish. 
 
 ' If I could only be angry downright angry,' she said, more 
 to herself than Catherine, it would do one good.' 
 
 ' Give others leave to be angry for you ! ' cried Catherine. 
 
 ' Don't ! ' said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 
 ' You don't know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet ? You 
 may read his letter ; you must you misjudge him you always 
 have. No, no' and she nervously crushed the letter in her 
 hand 'not yet. But you shall read it some time you and 
 Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is due 
 to him, perhaps due to me too,' and a hot flush transfigured her 
 paleness for an instant. ' Oh, my head ! Why does one's mind 
 affect one's body like this ? It shall not it is humiliating ! 
 "Miss Ley burn has been jilted and cannot see visitors," that 
 is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have finished that 
 document, will you kindly come and hear me practise my last 
 Raff I am going. Good-bye.' 
 
 She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to 
 catch hei', or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden 
 giddiness. 
 
 ' Miserable ! ' she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, ' I must 
 go and lie down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on 
 your peril, Catherine, not a word to any one but Robert. I 
 shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not to speak to me ! No, 
 don't come I will go alone.' 
 
 And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. 
 Inside her room, when she had locked the door, she stood a 
 moment upright with the letter in her hand, the blotted inco- 
 herent scrawl, where Langham had for once forgotten to be 
 literary, where every pitiable half -finished sentence pleaded 
 with her even in the first smart of her wrong for pardon, 
 for compassion, as towards something maimed and paralysed 
 from birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears 
 began to rain over her cheeks.
 
 454 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 ' I was not good enough I was not good enough God would 
 not let me ! ' 
 
 And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of 
 paper crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough 
 for what ? To save ? 
 
 How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, chang- 
 ing ! And the task is refused her. It is not so much the cry 
 of personal desire that shakes her as she kneels and weeps, 
 nor is it mere wounded woman's pride. It is a strange stern 
 sense of law. Had she been other than she is more loving, 
 less self-absorbed, loftier in motive he could not have loved 
 her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of character 
 stir within her. She feels herself judged, and with a righteous 
 judgment issuing inexorably from the facts of life and circum- 
 stance. 
 
 Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert, 
 who had come over early to see how the household fared. 
 
 Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonish- 
 ment and dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had 
 gone out of his mind for some time. He had been busy in his 
 East End work. Catherine had been silent. Over how many 
 matters they would once have discussed with open heart was 
 she silent now ? 
 
 ' I ought to have been warned,' he said with quick decision, 
 'if you knew this was going on. I am the only man among 
 you, and I understand Langham better than the rest of you. 
 I might have looked after the poor child a little.' 
 
 Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart 
 the more. However, what had she known? She had seen 
 nothing unusual of late, nothing to make her think a crisis was 
 approaching. Nay, she had nattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, 
 whom she liked, was gaining ground. 
 
 Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be 
 done. Could anything be done ? 
 
 ' I must go and see him,' he said presently. ' Yes, dearest, I 
 must. Impossible the thing should be left so ! I am his old 
 friend, almost her guardian. You say she is in great trouble 
 why, it may shadow her whole life ! No he must explain 
 things to us he is bound to he shall. It may be something 
 comparatively trivial in the way after all money or prospects or 
 something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you say ? 
 It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired 
 for her but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him 
 
 He turned to her appealing, remonstrating. Catherine 
 stood pale and rigid. Incredible that he should think it right 
 to intermeddle to take the smallest step towards reversing so 
 plain a declaration of God's will ! She could not sympathise 
 she would not consent. Robert watched her in painful indecision. 
 He knew that she thought him indifferent to her true reason
 
 CHAP, xxxvi ROSE 455 
 
 for finding some comfort even in her sister's trouble that he 
 seemed to her mindful only of the passing human misery, in- 
 different to the eternal risk. 
 
 They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched 
 up his hat. 
 
 ' I must go,' he said in a low voice ; ' it is right.' 
 
 And he went stepping, however, with the best intentions in 
 the world, into a blunder. 
 
 Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had 
 left her. Then some one came into the room some one with 
 pale looks and flashing eyes. It was Agnes. 
 
 ' She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,' said the 
 girl her whole, even, cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. 
 ' What are such creatures made for, Catherine why do they 
 exist?' 
 
 Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty 
 morning streets to Langham's lodgings. His mood was very 
 hot by the time he reached his destination, and he climbed the 
 staircase to Langham's room in some excitement. When he 
 tried to open the door after the answer to his knock bidding 
 him enter, he found something barring the way. ' Wait a little,' 
 said the voice inside, ' I will move the case.' 
 
 With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. 
 Seeing his visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre 
 astonishment. The room was littered with books and packing- 
 cases with which he had been busy. 
 
 ' Come in,' he said, not offering to shake hands. 
 
 Eobert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, 
 stood leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to 
 him. Langham paused opposite to him, Ms waving jet-black 
 hair falling forward over the marble pale face which had been 
 Robert's young ideal of manly beauty. 
 
 The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong 
 is old association that Robert's feeling towards his friend had 
 id ways remained in many respects the feeling of the under- 
 graduate towards the don. His sense of it now filled him witli 
 a curious awkwardness. 
 
 ' I know why you are come,' said Langham slowly, after a 
 scrutiny of his visitor. 
 
 ' I am here by a mere accident,' said the other, thinking 
 perfect frankness best. ' My wife was present when her sister 
 received your letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had 
 gone up to ask after them all, and came on to you, of course 
 on my own responsibility entirely ! Rose knows nothing of my 
 (joining nothing of what I have to say.' 
 
 He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man 
 before him. Whatever he had done during the past twenty- 
 four hours he had clearly had the grace to suffer in the doing 
 of it. 
 
 ' You can have nothing to say ! ' said Langham, leaning
 
 456 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 against the chimneypiece and facing him with black, darkly- 
 burning eyes. ' You know me.' 
 
 Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the 
 despair, all the bitterness hidden under the languid student's 
 exterior of every day, had, as it were, risen to the surface. He 
 stood at bay, against his friend, against himself. 
 
 ' No ! ' exclaimed Eobert stoutly, ' I do not know you in the 
 sense you mean. I do not know you as the man who could 
 beguile a girl on to a confession of love, and then tell her that 
 for you marriage was too great a burden to be faced ! ' 
 
 Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. 
 Robert repented him a little. Langham's strange individuality 
 always impressed him against his will. 
 
 ' I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,' he went 
 on, ' though I confess to being very hot ! I came to try and 
 find out for myself only, mind whether what prevents you 
 from following up what I understand happened last night is 
 really a matter of feeling, or a matter of outward circumstance. 
 If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling for Rose is not 
 what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion about 
 your conduct but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you 
 have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply 
 afraid of yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities 
 of practical married life, I cannot help begging you to talk the 
 matter over with me, and let us face it together. Whether Rose 
 would ever, under any circumstances, get over the shock of this 
 morning I have not the remotest idea. But ' and he hesitated 
 ' it seems the feeling you appealed to yesterday has been of long 
 growth. You know perfectly well what havoc a thing of this 
 kind may make in a girl's life. I don't say it will. But, at any 
 rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not hold my hand. 
 I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional ; but I am 
 your friend and her brother ; I brought you together, and I 
 ask you to take me into counsel If you had but done it 
 before ! ' 
 
 There was a moment's dead silence. 
 
 ' You cannot pretend to believe,' said Langham at last, with 
 the same sombre self-containedness, ' that a marriage with me 
 would be for your sister-in-law's happiness ? ' 
 
 ' I don't know what to believe ! ' cried Robert. ' No,' he 
 added frankly, ' no ; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at 
 Murewell I disliked the idea heartily ; I was glad to see you 
 separated ; a priwi, I never thought you suited to each other. 
 But reasoning that holds good when a thing is wholly in the 
 air looks very different when a man has committed himself and 
 another, as you have done.' 
 
 Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair 
 impatiently from his eyes and rose from his bending position 
 by the fire. 
 
 Elsinere, there is nothing to be said ! I have behaved as
 
 CHAP, xxxvi ROSE 457 
 
 vilely as you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I 
 should be an even greater fiend and weakling than you think 
 me if, in cold blood, I could let your sister run the risk of 
 marrying me. I could not trust myself you may think of the 
 statement as you like I should make her miserable. Last night 
 I had not parted from her an hour before I was utterly and 
 Irrevocably sure of it. My habits are my masters. I believe,' 
 he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond 
 Robert, ' I could even grow to hate what came between me and 
 them ! ' 
 
 Was it the last word of the man's life? It struck Robert 
 with a kind of shiver. 
 
 ' Pray heaven,' he said with a groan, getting up to go, ' you 
 may not have made her miserable already ! ' 
 
 'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham almost inaudibly, 
 turning away, Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and 
 scorching image in the subtle brain tissue. 
 
 ' I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly ; ' but when I 
 came in I found my wife who has no light tears weeping for 
 her sister.' 
 
 His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in 
 truth too pitiful and too intimate for speech. 
 
 Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask 
 again. 
 
 ' Good-bye ! ' said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal 
 sense of having got foolishly through a fool's errand. 'As I 
 said to you before, what Rose's feeling is at this moment I can- 
 not even guess. Very likely she would be the first to repudiate 
 half of what I have been saying. Aiid I see that you will not 
 talk to me you will not take me into your confidence and 
 speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend. And 
 and are you going ? What does this mean ? ' 
 
 He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases. 
 
 ' I am going back to Oxford,' said the other briefly. ' I can- 
 not stay in these rooms, in these streets.' 
 
 Robert was sore perplexed. What real nay, what terrible 
 suffering in the face and manner, and yet how futile, how 
 needless ! He felt himself wrestling with something intangible 
 and phantom-like, wholly unsubstantial, and yet endowed with 
 a ghastly indefinite power over human life. 
 
 'It is very hard, he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that 
 our old friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a 
 little ! You are always undervaluing yourself. Why not take 
 a friend into council sometimes when you sit in judgment on 
 yourself and your possibilities ? Your own perceptions are all 
 warped ! ' 
 
 Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the 
 most beautiful and one of the most irrelevant things he had 
 ever seen. 
 
 ' I will write to you, Elsmere,' he said, holding out his hand,
 
 458 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK v 
 
 'speech is impossible to me. I never had any words except 
 through my pen.' 
 
 Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left 
 alone. 
 
 But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the middle 
 of the day sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagina- 
 tion was at work again more feverishly than ever. He was tor- 
 tured by a fixed image of Rose, suffering and paling. 
 
 And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear 
 the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat 
 prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, 
 barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intel- 
 lectual that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical 
 interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his mental balance. 
 
 He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last 
 rehearsal at Searle House. Afterwards her custom was to come 
 back from St. James's Park to High Street, Kensington, and 
 walk up the hill to her own home. He knew it, for on two 
 occasions after these rehearsals he had been at Lerwick Gardens, 
 waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she go 
 this afternoon 1 A subtle instinct told him that she would. 
 
 It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Rose, stepping 
 out from the High Street station, crossed the "main road and 
 passed into the darkness of one of the streets leading up the 
 hill. She had forced herself to go, and she would go alone. 
 But as she toiled along she felt weary and bruised all over. 
 She carried with her a heart of lead a sense of utter soreness 
 a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only 
 thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of incon- 
 sequent memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at the rehearsal. 
 Had she looked so ill 1 She flushed hotly at the thought, and 
 then realised again, with a sense of childish comfort, the kind look 
 and voice, the delicate care shown in shielding her from any un- 
 necessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of the hand with which 
 he had put her into the cab that took her to the Underground. 
 
 Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she 
 saw a man standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was 
 Langham. 
 
 ' You ! ' she cried, stopping. 
 
 He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway of 
 a large detached house not far off, which threw a certain illumi- 
 nation over him, though it left her in shadow. He said nothing, 
 but he held out both his hands mutely. She fancied rather 
 than saw the pale emotion of his look. 
 
 ' What ? ' she said, after a pause. ' You think to-night is last 
 night ! You and I have nothing to say to each other, Mr. 
 Langham.' 
 
 'I have everything to say,' he answered, under his breath; 
 ' I have committed a crime a villainy.'
 
 CHAP, xxxvi ROSE 459 
 
 'And it is not pleasant to you?' she said, quivering. 'I am 
 sorry 1 cannot help you. But you are wrong it was no crime 
 it was necessary and profitable, like the doses of one's child- 
 hood ! Oh ! I might have guessed you would do this ! No, 
 Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an interesting decline. I 
 have just played my concerto very fairly. I shall not disgrace 
 myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at peace 
 I have learnt several things to-day that have been salutary 
 very salutary.' 
 
 She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him, 
 unresisting, helplessly silent. 
 
 ' Don't come any farther,' she said resolutely after a minute, 
 turning to face him. ' Let us be quits ! I was a temptingly 
 easy prey. I bear no malice. And do not let me break your 
 friendship with Eobert ; that began before this foolish business 
 it should outlast it. Very likely we shall be friends again, 
 like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine your wound 
 is very deep, and ' 
 
 But no ! Her lips closed ; not even for pride's sake, and 
 retort's sake, will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first 
 love. 
 
 She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see 
 nothing among her furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. 
 The whole personality seemed centred in the voice the half- 
 mocking vibrating voice. He took her hand and dropped it 
 instantly. 
 
 'You do not understand,' he said hopelessly feeling as 
 though every phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally 
 fatuous, equally shameful. 'Thank heaven, you never will 
 understand.' 
 
 ' I think I do,' she said with a change of tone, and paused. 
 He raised his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. 
 What was the expression in them ? It was yearning but not 
 the yearning of passion. ' If things had been different if one 
 could change the self if the past were nobler ! ' was that the 
 cry of them 1 A painful humility a boundless pity the rise 
 of some moral wave within her he could neither measure nor 
 explain these were some of the impressions which passed from 
 her to him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her 
 transformed on the farther side, with, as it were, a loftier 
 gesture, a nobler stature, than had ever yet been hers. 
 
 He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for 
 an instant to his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and 
 was gone. 
 
 He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his 
 books, his only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever 
 tampered with any other ? 
 
 ' It was not love not love ! ' he said to himself, with an accent 
 of infinite relief as he sank into his chair. ''Her smart will 
 heal'
 
 BOOK VI 
 
 NEW OPENINGS
 
 17 /FOO
 
 CHAPTEK XXXVII 
 
 TEN days after Langham's return to Oxford Elsmere received 
 a characteristic letter from him : asking whether their friend- 
 ship was to be considered as still existing or at an end. The 
 calm and even proud melancholy of the letter showed a con- 
 siderable subsidence of that state of half -frenzied irritation 
 and discomfort in which Elsmere had last seen him. The writer, 
 indeed, was clearly settling down into another period of pessi- 
 mistic quietism such as that which had followed upon his first 
 young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second 
 period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all 
 the vital forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, 
 half-angry, half -relenting, put down the letter, he felt the con- 
 viction that no fresh influence from outside would ever again be 
 allowed to penetrate the solitude of Langham's life. In com- 
 parison with the man who had just addressed him, the tutor of 
 his undergraduate recollections was a vigorous and sociable 
 human being. 
 
 The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible affec- 
 tionate letter in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings 
 of resentment, he said, he could not realise, now that the crisis 
 was past, that he cared less about his old friend. 'As far as we 
 two are concerned, let us forget it all. I could hardly say this, 
 you will easily imagine, if I thought that you had done serious 
 or irreparable harm. But both my wife and I agree now in 
 thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to her own 
 surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no 
 doubt, before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal 
 to her past. But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send 
 you our opinion for what it is worth, believing that it will and 
 must be welcome to you.' 
 
 Rose, however, was not so long in admitting it. One marked 
 result of that new vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the 
 shock of that February morning was a great softening towards 
 Catherine. Whatever might have been Catherine's intense 
 relief when Robert returned from his abortive mission, she 
 never afterwards let a disparaging word towards Langham 
 escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy
 
 464 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 itself, and Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, 
 and against the noisy world of flattery and excitement in which 
 she had been living, turned to Catherine as she had never done 
 since she was a tiny child. She would spend hours in a corner 
 of the Bedford Square drawing-room, pretending to read, or 
 play with little Mary, in reality recovering, like some bruised 
 and trodden plant, under the healing influence of thought and 
 silence. 
 
 One day, when they were alone in the firelight, she startled 
 Catherine by saying with one of her old odd smiles 
 
 ' Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays ? 
 It is a sort of hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a 
 precipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling 
 all her limbs. And, to her great astonishment, there is no bone 
 broken ! ' 
 
 And she held herself back from Catherine's knee lest her 
 sister should attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. 
 Nor would she allow an answer, drowning all that Catherine 
 might have said in a sudden rush after the child, who was 
 wandering round them in search of a playfellow. 
 
 In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Lang- 
 ham had been a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces 
 of character. He had crossed her path in a moment of discon- 
 tent, of aimless revolt and longing, when she was but fresh 
 emerged from the cramping conditions of her childhood and 
 trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities. His 
 intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his 
 very strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression 
 on the girl's immature romantic sense. His resistance had 
 increased the charm, and the interval of angry resentful separa- 
 tion had done nothing to weaken it. As to the months in 
 London, they had been one long duel between herself and him 
 a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncer- 
 tainty, but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained 
 a large proportion of the blows. Then, after a moment of 
 intoxicating victory, Langham's endangered habits and threat- 
 ened individuality had asserted themselves once for all. And 
 from the whole long struggle passion, exultation, and crushing 
 defeat it often seemed to her that she had gained neither joy 
 nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character, a soul ! 
 
 It may be easily imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a pe- 
 culiarly keen interest in Langham's disappearance. On the 
 afternoon of the Searle House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's 
 coming in a state of extraordinary irritation. He expected a 
 blushing fiancee, in a fool's paradise, asking by manner, if not 
 by word, for his congratulations, and taking a decent feminine 
 pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him. And 
 he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some 
 double-edged congratulations. 
 
 Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale
 
 CHAP, xxxvn NEW OPENINGS 465 
 
 tired girl, who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a 
 quiet corner and said hardly a word to anybody till her turn 
 came to play. 
 
 His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he 
 made his way up to her, and was her watchful unobtrusive 
 guardian for the rest of the afternoon. 
 
 He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl 
 of impatient conjecture. 
 
 ' As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she 
 had had an illness ! What on earth has that philandering ass 
 been about ? If he did not propose to her last night, he ought 
 to be shot and if he did, a fortiori, for clearly she is miserable. 
 But what a brave child ! How she played her part ! I wonder 
 whether she thinks that / saw nothing, like all the rest ! Poor 
 little cold hand ! ' 
 
 Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked 
 with him, and by dint of leading the conversation a little 
 discovered that Langham had left London. 
 
 Gone ! But not without a crisis that was evident. During 
 the din of preparations for the Searle House concert, and during 
 the meetings which it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the 
 house of some other connection of his for the concert was the 
 work of his friends, and given in the town house of his decrepit 
 great-uncle, Lord Daniel he had many opportunities of observ- 
 ing Rose. And he felt a soft indefinable change in her which 
 kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of sympathy and 
 curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost her 
 passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been 
 so marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. 
 She did everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But 
 all through she was to his fancy absent and distraite, pursuing 
 through the tumult of which she was often the central figure 
 some inner meditations of which neither he nor any one else 
 knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over the girl's light 
 self-satisfied temper ; some searching thrill of experience had 
 gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she was 
 quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody. 
 
 Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very 
 near the truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with 
 which he received his own conjectures amused himself. 
 
 ' To think,' he said to himself once with a long breath, ' that 
 that creature was never at a public school, and will go to his 
 death without any one of the tickings due to him ! ' 
 
 Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of 
 gratitude towards this same ' creature,' towards the man who 
 had released a prize he had had the tardy sense to see was not 
 meant for him. Free again to be loved, to be won ! There 
 was the fact of facts after all. 
 
 His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious 
 thought. Clearly at present the one thing to be done was to 
 
 2H
 
 466 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 keep his own ambitions carefully out of sight. He had the skill 
 to see that she was in a state of reaction, of moral and mental 
 fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask of her f riends was not 
 to be made to feel. 
 
 He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He 
 kept Lady Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation 
 on Hugh's behalf, Lady Helen had been dumfoundered by the 
 sudden emergence of Langham at Lady Charlotte's party for 
 their common discomfiture. Who was the man? why, what 
 did it all mean ? Hugh had the most provoking way of giving 
 you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love, 
 and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question 
 Avas probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else ! 
 Lady Helen made believe to be angry, and it was not till she 
 had reduced Hugh to a whimsical penitence and a full confession 
 of all he knew or suspected, that she consented, with as much 
 loftiness as the physique of an elf allowed her, to be his good 
 friend again, and to play those cards for him which at the 
 moment he could not play for himself. 
 
 So in the cheeriest daintiest way Rose was made much of 
 by both brother and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns arid 
 music and people, whisked Rose and Agnes off to this party and 
 that, brought fruit and flowers to Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty 
 deferential love to Catherine, and generally, to Mrs. Pierson's 
 disgust, became the girls' chief chaperon in a fast-filling London. 
 Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend or amuse 
 his sister's protegees always there, but never in the way. He 
 was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will ; 
 but all the time he preserved a delicate distance between him- 
 self and Rose, a bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone 
 towards her which made his companionship a perpetual tonic. 
 And, between them, he and Helen coerced Lady Charlotte. A 
 few inconvenient inquiries after Rose's health, a few unex- 
 plained stares and ' humphs ' and grunts, a few irrelevant dis- 
 quisitions on her nephew's merits of head and heart, were all she 
 was able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething 
 with a mass of sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant 
 to give expression anger with Rose for having been so blind 
 and so presumptuous as to prefer some one else to Hugh ; anger 
 with Hugh for his persistent disregard of her advice and the 
 duke's feelings ; and a burning desire to know the precise why 
 and wherefore of Langham's disappearance. She was too lofty 
 to become Rose's aunt without a struggle, but she was not too 
 lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs. 
 
 But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited 
 most by Rose's shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming 
 over, restless under her own smart, would fall to watching the 
 trial of the woman and the wife, and would often perforce forget 
 herself and her smaller woes in the pity of it. She stayed iu
 
 CHAP, xxxvii NEW OPENINGS 467 
 
 Bedford Square once for a week, and then for the first time she 
 realised the profound change which had passed over the Els- 
 meres 1 life. As much tenderness between husband and wife as 
 ever perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though 
 from an instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from 
 each other and from the world. But Robert went his way, 
 Catherine hers. Their spheres of work lay far apart ; their 
 interests were diverging fast ; and though Robert at any rate 
 was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh invading silences 
 were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the number 
 of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in 
 the East End under Murray Edwardes's auspices. He was 
 already known to certain circles as a seceder from the Church 
 who was likely to become both powerful and popular. Two 
 articles of his in the Nineteenth Century, on disputed points of 
 Biblical criticism, had distinctly made their mark, and several 
 of the veterans of philosophical debate had already taken 
 friendly and flattering notice of the new writer. Meanwhile 
 Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon's Sunday school, and 
 attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert's 
 energies became, the more she suffered, and the more the small 
 daily opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could 
 hardly bear to hear him talk about his work, and she never 
 opened the number of the Nineteenth Century which con- 
 tained his papers. Nor had he the heart to ask her to read 
 them. 
 
 Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appear- 
 ance in R , with a cordiality and a helpfulness of the most 
 
 self-effacing kind. Robert had begun with assuring his new 
 friend that he saw no chance, at any rate for the present, of his 
 formally joining the Unitarians. 
 
 ' I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet ! And 
 I own I look rather for a combination from many sides than 
 for the development of any now existing sect. But supposing,' 
 he added, smiling, ' supposing I do in time set up a congregation 
 and a service of my own, is there really room for you and me ? 
 Should I not be infringing on a work I respect a great deal too 
 much for anything of the sort ? ' 
 
 Edwardes laughed the notion to scorn. 
 
 The parish, as a whole, contained 20,000 persons. The exist- 
 ing churches, which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid's, were 
 miserably attended, provided accommodation at the outside for 
 3000. His own chapel held 400, and was about half full. 
 
 'You and I may drop our lives here,' he said, his pleasant 
 friendliness darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy 
 which London work seems to develop even in the most buoyant 
 of men, ' and only a few hundred persons, at the most, be ever 
 the wiser. Begin with us then make your own circle.' 
 
 And he forthwith carried off his visitor to the point from 
 which, as it seemed to him, Elsmere's work might start, viz. a
 
 468 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 lecture-room half a mile from his own chapel, where two helpers 
 of his had just established an independent venture. 
 
 Murray Edwardes had at the time an interesting and miscel- 
 laneous staff of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to reli- 
 gious opinions, but in general the men who volunteered under 
 him civil servants, a young doctor, a briefless barrister or two 
 were men who had drifted from received beliefs, and found a plea- 
 sure and freedom in working for and with him they could hardly 
 have found elsewhere. The two who had planted their outpost 
 in what seemed to them a particularly promising corner of the 
 district were men of whom Edwardes knew personally little. ' I 
 have really not much concern with what they do,' he explained 
 to Elsmere, ' except that they get a small share of our funds. 
 But I know they want help, and if they will take you in, I think 
 you will make something of it.' 
 
 After a tramp through the muddy winter streets, they came 
 upon a new block of warehouses, in the lower windows of which 
 some bills announced a night-school for boys and men. Here, 
 to judge from the commotion round the doors, a lively scene was 
 going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs were hammering at 
 the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the keyhole. Inside, 
 as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, by dint of good 
 humour and strong shoulders, had succeeded in shoving their 
 way through and shutting the door behind them, they found a 
 still more animated performance in progress. The schoolroom 
 was in almost total darkness ; the pupils, some twenty in 
 number, were racing about, like so many shadowy demons, pelt- 
 ing each other and their teachers with the ' dips ' which, as the 
 buildings were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been pro- 
 vided to light them through their three R's. In the middle stood 
 the two philanthropists they were in search of, freely bedaubed 
 with tallow, one employed in boxing a boy's ears, the other in 
 saving a huge inkbottle whereon some enterprising spirit had 
 rust laid hands by way of varying the rebel ammunition. Murray 
 Edwardes, who was in his element, went to the rescue at once, 
 helped by Robert. The boy-minister, as he looked, had been, in 
 fact, ' bow ' of the Cambridge eight, and possessed muscles which 
 men twice his size might have envied. In three minutes he had 
 put a couple of ringleaders into the street by the scruff of the 
 neck, relit a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest 
 of the rioters in hand. Elsmere backed him ably, and in a very 
 short time they had cleared the premises. 
 
 Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off 
 into a shout of laughter. 
 
 ' My dear Wardlaw, my condolences to your coat ! But I 
 don't believe if I were a rough myself I could resist "dips." 
 Let me introduce a friend Mr. Elsmere and if you will have 
 him, a recruit for your work. It seems to me another pair of 
 arms will hardly come amiss to you ! ' 
 
 The short red-haired man addressed shook hands with Elsmere,
 
 CHAP, xxxvin NEW OPENINGS 469 
 
 scrutinising him from under bushy eyebrows. He was panting 
 and beplastered with tallow, but the inner man was evidently 
 quite unruffled, and Elsmere liked the shrewd Scotch face and 
 gray eyes. 
 
 1 It isn't only a pair of arms we want,' he remarked drily, 'but a 
 bit of science behind them. Mr. Elsmere, I observed, can use his.' 
 
 Then he turned to a tall affected-looking youth with a large 
 nose and long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands upon 
 his sides, his eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the wreck 
 and disarray of the schoolroom. 
 
 ' Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you ? My 
 friend and helper Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, wont 
 you, a minute. They've left us the chairs, I perceive, and there's 
 a spark or two of fire. Do you smoke ? Will you light up ? ' 
 
 The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw 
 and Elsmere walked home together. It had been all arranged. 
 Mackay, a curious morbid fellow, who had thrown himself into 
 Unitarianism and charity mainly out of opposition to an or- 
 thodox and bourgeois family, and who had a great idea of his own 
 social powers, was somewhat grudging and ungracious through 
 it all. But Elsmere's proposals were much too good to be re- 
 fused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his 
 clergyman's experience, and as much money as might be wanted. 
 Wardlaw listened to him cautiously for an hour, took stock of 
 the whole man physically and morally, and finally said, as he 
 very quietly and deliberately knocked the ashes out of his 
 pipe, 
 
 ' All right, I'm your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, I 
 vote we make you captain of this venture.' 
 
 'Nothing of the sort,' said Elsmere. 'In London I am a 
 novice ; I come to learn, not to lead.' 
 
 Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mackay 
 faintly endorsed his companion's offer, and the party broke up. 
 
 That was in January. In two months from that time, by the 
 natural force of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his own 
 most sincere wish to avoid a premature leadership, had become 
 the head and heart of the Elgood Street undertaking, which had 
 already assumed much larger proportions. Wardlaw was giving 
 him silent approval and invaluable help, while young Mackay 
 was in the first uncomfortable stages of a hero-worship which 
 promised to be exceedingly good for him. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXVin 
 
 THERE were one or two curious points connected with the be- 
 ginnings of Elsmere's venture in North R , one of which 
 
 may just be noticed here. Wardlaw, his predecessor and 
 colleague, had speculatively little or nothing in common with
 
 470 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 Elsrnere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted and ortho- 
 dox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for 
 the philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging 
 to far stranger and remoter faiths. 
 
 By profession he was a barrister, with a small and struggling 
 practice. On this practice, however, he had married, and his 
 wife, who had been a doctor's daughter and a national school- 
 mistress, had the same ardours as himself. They lived in one of 
 the dismal little squares near the Goswell Road, and had two 
 children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to do, 
 tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might 
 have been seen any day wheeling their perambulator through 
 the dreary streets of a dreary region ; she was their Providence, 
 their deity, the representative to them of all tenderness and all 
 authority. But when her work with them was done, she would 
 throw herself into charity organisation cases, into efforts for 
 the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest acts 
 of ministry towards the sick, till her dowdy little figure and 
 her face, which but for the stress of London, of labour, and of 
 poverty, would have had a blunt fresh-coloured dairymaid's 
 charm, became symbols of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the 
 eyes of hundreds of straining men and women. 
 
 The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give 
 his evenings to teaching or committee work. They never- 
 allowed themselves to breathe even to each other that life 
 might have brighter things to show them than the neighbour- 
 hood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in 
 their devotion ; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like 
 other people ; but the more Robert knew of them the more pro- 
 found became his admiration for that potent spirit of social 
 help which in our generation Comtism has done so much to 
 develop, even among those of us who are but moderately influ- 
 enced by Comte's philosophy, and can make nothing of the 
 religion of Humanity. 
 
 Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere's work in 
 
 North R . In spite of Robert's efforts, and against his will, 
 
 the man of meaner gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by 
 that brilliant and persuasive something in Elsmere which a 
 kind genius had infused into him at birth. And we shall see 
 that in time Robert's energies took a direction which Wardlaw 
 could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning 
 Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired 
 of honouring. 
 
 In the first place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room 
 as a fresh centre for civilising effort had been extremely shrewd. 
 The district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, con- 
 tained a number of promising elements. 
 
 Close by the dingy street which sheltered their schoolroom 
 rose the great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival 
 on the north side of the river to Doulton's immense works on
 
 CHAP, xxxvni NEW OPENINGS 471 
 
 the south. The old winding streets near it, and the blocks of 
 workmen's dwellings recently erected under its shadow, were 
 largely occupied by the workers in its innumerable floors, and 
 among these workers was a large proportion of skilled artisans, 
 men often of a considerable amount of cultivation, earning high 
 wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great 
 many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes 
 had been largely instrumental in establishing within easy 
 distance of their houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and 
 accomplishment, and as the development of one faculty tends 
 on the whole to set others working, when Robert, after a few 
 weeks' work in the place, set up a popular historical lecture 
 once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and white 
 poster in the schoolroom windows, it was the potters who pro- 
 vided him with his first hearers. 
 
 The rest of the parish was divided between a population of 
 dock labourers, settled there to supply the needs 01 the great 
 dock which ran up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or 
 three huge breweries, and a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot 
 of Clerkenwell, who lived together in two or three streets, and 
 showed the same peculiarities of race and specialised training 
 to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from which they 
 had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these 
 well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, 
 and a mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went 
 on chiefly in the riverside streets at the other side of the parish 
 from Elgood Street, in the neighbourhood of St. Wilfrid's. 
 
 St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a 
 very successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. 
 From them at one end of the scale, and from the innumerable 
 clerks and superintendents who during the daytime crowded 
 the vast warehouses of which the district was full, its Lenten 
 congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly drawn. 
 
 The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally 
 and persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward mani- 
 festations went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk -like 
 clergy might preach and ' process ' in the open air as much as 
 they pleased. The populace, where it was not indifferent, was 
 friendly, and devoted living had borne its natural fruits. 
 
 A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to 
 Elsmere's mind after he had been working some six weeks in 
 the district the forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid's 
 was the very church where Newcome, first as senior curate and 
 then as vicar, had spent those ten wonderful years into which 
 Elsmere at MureweU had been never tired of inquiring. The 
 thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had 
 written to him announcing his resignation of his living im- 
 mediately after his interview with the bishop. The letter had 
 remained unanswered, and it was by now tolerably clear that 
 the silence of its recipient meant a withdrawal from all friendly
 
 472 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 relations with the writer. Elsmere's affectionate sensitive 
 nature took such things hardly, especially as he knew that 
 Newcome's life was becoming increasingly difficult and embit- 
 tered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine how 
 Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend's ' in- 
 fidel propaganda/ established on the very ground where he him- 
 self had all but died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over. 
 But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London 
 life which was not without its uses to character. Hitherto he 
 had always swum with the stream, cheered by the support of 
 all the great and prevailing English traditions. Here, he and 
 his few friends were fighting a solitary fight apart from the 
 organised system of English religion and English philanthropy. 
 All the elements of culture and religion already existing in the 
 place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid's passed 
 them with cold averted eyes ; the old and faineant rector of the 
 parish church very soon let it be known what he thought as 
 to the taste of Elsmere's intrusion on his parish, or as to the 
 eternal chances of those who might take either him or Edwardes 
 as guides in matters religious. His enmity did Elgood Street 
 no harm, and the pretensions of the Church, in this Babel of 
 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly no relation at 
 all to the facts. But every little incident in this new struggle 
 of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost 
 other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high 
 Utopian vision drove him on from day to day, bracing him to 
 act and judge, if need be, alone and for himself, approved only 
 by conscience and the inward voice. 
 
 ' Tasks in hours of insight willed 
 Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled ; ' 
 
 and it was that moment by the river which worked in him 
 through all the prosaic and perplexing details of this new 
 attempt to carry enthusiasm into life. 
 
 It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of 
 London the chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among 
 the upper working class. In London, at any rate, all that is 
 most prosperous and intelligent among the working class holds 
 itself aloof broadly speaking from all existing spiritual 
 agencies, whether of Church or Dissent. 
 
 Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically 
 no hold whatever ; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which 
 it has on similar material in the great towns of the North. 
 Towards religion in general the prevailing attitude is one of 
 indifference tinged with hostility. ' Eight hundred thousand 
 people in South London, of whom the enormous propor- 
 tion belong to the working class, and among them, Church 
 and Dissent nowhere Christianity not in possession.' Such is 
 the estimate of an Evangelical of our day ; and similar laments 
 come from all parts of the capital. The Londoner is on the
 
 xxvin NEW OPENINGS 473 
 
 whole more conceited, more prejudiced, more given over to 
 crude theorising, than his North-country brother, the mill-hand, 
 whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous and tolerably 
 constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline of inter- 
 course and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly speaking, 
 means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its 
 contradictions and absurdities ; he has no dread of losing what 
 he never valued ; his sense of antiquity, of history, is nu ; and 
 his life supplies him with excitement enough without the 
 stimulants of ' other -worldliness.' Religion has been on the 
 whole irrationally presented to him, and the result on his part 
 has been an irrational breach with the whole moral and religious 
 order of ideas. 
 
 But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek 
 cities which welcomed and spread Christianity carried within 
 them much the same elements as are supplied by certain sections 
 of the London working class elements of restlessness, of sensi- 
 bility, of passion. The mere intermingling of races, which a 
 modern capital shares with those old towns of Asia Minor, 
 predisposes the mind to a greater openness and receptiveness, 
 whether for good or evil. 
 
 As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despond- 
 ency produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isola- 
 tion had begun to wear off, Robert often found himself filled 
 with a strange flame and ardour of hope ! But his first steps 
 had nothing to do with religion. He made himself quickly felt 
 in the night-school, and as soon as he possibly could he hired 
 a large room at the back of their existing room, on the same 
 floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the 
 story-telling, which had been so great a success at Murewell. 
 The story- telling struck the neighbourhood as a great novelty. 
 At first only a few youths straggled in from the front room, 
 where dominoes and draughts and the illustrated papers held 
 seductive sway. The next night the number was increased, 
 and by the fourth or fifth evening the room was so well filled 
 both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that it seemed 
 well to appoint a special evening in the week for story-telling, 
 or the recreation room would have been deserted. 
 
 In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been twofold 
 the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the 
 imaginative power pure and simple. He ranged the whole 
 world for stories. Sometimes it would be merely some feature 
 of London life itself the history of a great fire, for instance, 
 and its hairbreadth escapes ; a collision in the river ; a string 
 of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be 
 made of the way in which the poor help one another. Some- 
 times it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties 
 of particular trades a colliery explosion and the daring of the 
 rescuers ; incidents from the life of the great Northern iron- 
 works, or from that of the Lancashire factories ; or stories of
 
 474 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 English country life and its humours, given sometimes in dialect 
 Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or Cumberland for which he had 
 a special gift. Or, again, he would take the sea and its terrors 
 the immortal story of the Birkenhead ; the deadly plunge of 
 the Captain; the records of the lifeboats, or the fascinating 
 story of the ships of science, exploring step by step, through 
 miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys 
 of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mont 
 Blanc might be buried without showing even his topmost 
 snowfield above the plain of waves. Then at other times it 
 would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction fairy tale and 
 legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter 
 Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas ; to be followed perhaps on 
 the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some 
 man of the people of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas 
 Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle. 
 
 One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, 
 hearing from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down 
 to hear his new acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's 
 escape from the Chateau d'lf . He started an hour earlier than 
 was necessary, and with an admirable impartiality he spent 
 that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing vespers. Flaxman had a 
 passion for intellectual or social novelty : and this passion was 
 beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At the same 
 time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious 
 conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it 
 often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good 
 Catholic or Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and 
 would outlast them. His taste drew him to the Church, so did 
 a love of opposition to current ' isms.' Bishops counted on him 
 for subscriptions, and High Church divines sent him their 
 pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, but it should 
 be added that with equal regularity he dropped the pamphlets 
 into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very decipherable 
 person in religious matters as Rose had already discovered. 
 
 The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid's 
 to the bare warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners 
 was striking enough. Here were no bowed figures, no recueille- 
 ment. In the blaze of crude light every eager eye was fixed 
 upon the slight elastic figure on the platform, each change in 
 the expressive face, each gesture of the long arms and thin 
 flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the attentive 
 silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a 
 band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their 
 neighbours had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, 
 and the room cried out for a repetition of the sentences which 
 had been lost in the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife 
 with his teeth, managed to cut the strings of the sack, a gasp of 
 relief ran through the crowd ; when at last he reached terra 
 firma there was a ringing cheer.
 
 CHAP, xxxviu NEW OPENINGS 475 
 
 ' What is he, d'ye know ? ' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his 
 neighbour, as .Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the 
 man jerking a grimy thumb in the story -teller's direction 
 meanwhile. 'Seems Mke a parson somehow. But he ain't a 
 parson. 
 
 'Not he,' said the other laconically. 'Knows better. Most 
 of 'em as comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of 
 goody-goody as an egg's full of meat. If he wur that sort you 
 wouldn't catch me here. Never heard him say anything in the 
 " dear brethren " sort of style, and I've been ere most o' these 
 evenings and to his lectures besides.' 
 
 'Perhaps he's one of your d d sly ones,' said the first 
 speaker dubiously. ' Means to shovel it in by and by.' 
 
 ' Well, I don't know as I couldn't stand it if he did,' returned 
 his companion. ' He'd let other fellers have their say, anyhow.' 
 
 Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young 
 man, a gasfitter to judge by the contents of the basket he 
 seemed to have brought in with him on his way from work 
 with eyes like live birds', and small emaciated features. During 
 the story Flaxman had noticed the man's thin begrimed hand, 
 as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling with 
 excitement. 
 
 Another project of Robert's, started as soon as he had felt 
 his way a little in the district, was the scientific Sunday school. 
 This was the direct result of a paragraph in Huxley's Lay 
 Sermons, where the hint of such a school was first thrown out. 
 However, since the introduction of science teaching into the 
 Board schools, the novelty and necessity of such a supplement 
 to a child's ordinary education is not what it was. Robert set 
 it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the streets 
 in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for 
 fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dread- 
 fuls. A little simple chemical and electrical experiment went 
 down greatly ; so did a botany class, to which Elsmere would 
 come armed with two stores of flowers, one to be picked to 
 pieces, the other to be distributed according to memory and 
 attention. A year before he had had a number of large coloured 
 plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a Kew 
 assistant. These he would often set up on a large screen, or 
 put up on the walls, till the dingy schoolroom became a bower 
 of superb blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple 
 and orange. And then still by the help of pictures he would 
 take his class on a tour through strange lands, talking to them 
 of China or Egypt or South America, till they followed him up 
 the Amazon, or into the pyramids or through the Pampas, or 
 into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as the children of 
 Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper. 
 
 Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, 
 while almost all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. He 
 knew it, and had laid his plans for such a result. Such work as
 
 476 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK VI 
 
 he had at heart has no chance with the lowest in the social 
 scale, in its beginnings. It must have something to work upon, 
 and must penetrate downwards. He only can receive who 
 already hath there is no profounder axiom. 
 
 And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brood- 
 ing, still waiting. At last the spark fell. 
 
 There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street, rose the 
 
 famous Workmen's Club of North R . It had been started 
 
 by a former Liberal clergyman of the parish, whose main 
 object, however, had been to train the workmen to manage it 
 for themselves. His training had been, in fact, too successful. 
 Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it had 
 come to be a centre of active, nay, bmtal, opposition to the 
 Church and faith which had originally fostered it. In organic 
 connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the most 
 notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday evening ; 
 and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, was a 
 little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coarsest free- 
 thinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books occupying the 
 lace of honour in the window and the Freethinker placard 
 aunting at the door. Inside there was still more highly 
 seasoned literature even than the Freethinker to be had. There 
 was in particular a small halfpenny paper which was under- 
 stood to be in some sense the special organ of the North R 
 Club ; which was at any rate published close by, and edited by 
 one of the workmen founders of the club. This unsavoury 
 sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised through 
 the parish as Lent drew on towards Passion week, and the 
 exertions of St. Wilfrid's and of the other churches, which were 
 being spurred on by the Ritualists' success, became more ap- 
 parent. Soon it seemed to Robert that every bit of hoarding 
 and every waste wall was filled with the announcement : 
 
 ' Read Faith and Fools. Enormous success. Our Comic Life 
 of Christ now nearly completed. Quite the best thing of its 
 kind going. Woodcut this week Transfiguration.' 
 
 His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Passion 
 week he left the night-school about ten o'clock. His way led 
 him past the club, which was brilliantly lit up, and evidently 
 in full activity. Round the door there was a knot of workmen 
 lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and the air was 
 pleasant. Several of them had copies of Faith and Fools, and 
 were showing the week's woodcut to those about them, with 
 chuckles and spirts of laughter. 
 
 Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and 
 stirred by a sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, and 
 asked for the paper. The woman handed it to him, and gave 
 him his change with a business-like sangfroid, which struck on 
 his tired nerves almost more painfully than the laughing 
 brutality of the men he had just passed. 
 
 Directly he found himself in another street he opened the
 
 CHAP, xxxvin NEW OPENINGS 477 
 
 paper under a lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the 
 Crucifixion, the scroll emanating from Mary Magdalene's mouth, 
 in particular, containing obscenities which cannot be quoted 
 here. 
 
 llobert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve 
 quivering. 
 
 'This is Wednesday in Passion week/ he said to himself. 
 ' The day after to-morrow is Good Friday ! ' 
 
 He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found 
 himself within the City, where the streets were long since empty 
 and silent. But he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts 
 were in the distant East, among the flat roofs and white walls 
 of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany, the steep streets and rocky 
 ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with the bodily eye, 
 and the fact had enormously quickened his historical perception. 
 The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum 
 and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later 
 Jerusalem preaching all these various images sprang into 
 throbbing poetic life within him. That anything in human 
 shape should be found capable of dragging this life and this 
 death through the mire of a hideous and befouling laughter ! 
 Who was responsible ? To what cause could one trace such a 
 temper of mind towards such an object present and militant 
 as that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life 
 throughout modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he 
 matures may be made to love Socrates or Buddha or Marcus 
 Aurelius. It would seem often as though he could not be made 
 to love Jesus ! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately discovers and 
 avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from 
 simplicity and verity? is it the last and most terrible illus- 
 tration of a great axiom : ' Faith has a judge in truth' ? 
 
 He went home and lay awake half the night pondering. If 
 he could but pour out liis heart ! But though Catherine, the 
 wife of his heart, of his youth, is there, close beside him, doubt 
 and struggle and perplexity are alike frozen on his lips. He 
 cannot speak without sympathy, and she will not hear except 
 under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more pain- 
 fully from exercising. 
 
 The next night was a story-telling night. He spent it in 
 telling the legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked 
 the audience to wait a moment, and there and then with the 
 tender imaginative Franciscan atmosphere, as it were, still 
 about them he delivered a short and vigorous protest in the 
 name of decency, good feeling, and common sense, against the 
 idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate neighbour- 
 hood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had 
 approached any religious matter directly. A knot of work- 
 men sitting together at the back of the room looked at each 
 other with a significant grimace or two. 
 
 When Robert ceased speaking one of them, an elderly watch-
 
 478 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 maker, got up and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing 
 moving but the thin lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. 
 Robert knew the man well. He was a Genevese by birth, 
 Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He com- 
 plained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise ; 
 that a good many of those present understood the remarks he 
 had just made as an attack upon an institution in which many 
 of them were deeply interested ; and that he invited Mr. 
 Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the matter, in a 
 place where he could be both heard and answered. 
 
 The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excite- 
 ment. Most of the men there were accustomed to disputation 
 of the sort which any Sunday visitor to Victoria Park may hear 
 going on there week after week. Elsmere had made a vivid 
 impression ; and the prospect of a fight with him had an un- 
 usual piquancy. 
 
 Robert sprang up. ' When you will,' he said. ' I am ready 
 to stand by what I have just said in the face of you all, if you 
 care to hear it.' 
 
 Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the 
 approval of the club committee, and Elsmere's audience separ- 
 ated in a glow of curiosity and expectation. 
 
 ' Didn't I tell ye ? ' the gasfitter s snarling friend said to him. 
 ' Scratch him and you find the parson. These upper-class folk, 
 when they come among us poor ones, always seem to me just 
 hunting for souls, as those Injuns he was talking about last 
 week hunt for scalps. They can't get to heaven without a 
 certain number of 'em slung about 'em.' 
 
 ' Wait a bit ! ' said the gasfitter, his quick dark eyes betray- 
 ing a certain raised inner temperature. 
 
 Next morning the North R Club was placarded with 
 
 announcements that on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., 
 would deli ver a lecture in the Debating Hall on ' The Claim of 
 Jesus upon Modern Life ' ; to be followed, as usual, by general 
 discussion. 
 
 CHAPTER XXXIX 
 
 IT was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to 
 church at St. Paul's, and Robert, though not without some in- 
 ward struggle, had accompanied her. Their midday meal was 
 over, and Robert had been devoting himself to Mary, who had 
 been tottering round the room in his vyake, clutching one finger 
 tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he had been coax- 
 ing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which 
 wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils round the cabinet 
 at the end of the room. It was Mary's weekly task to embrace 
 this horror, and the performance went by the name of ' kissing
 
 CHAP, xxxix NEW OPENINGS 479 
 
 the Jabberwock.' It had been triumphantly achieved, and, as 
 the reward of bravery, Mary was being carried round the room 
 on her father's shoulder, holding on mercilessly to his curls, her 
 shining blue eyes darting scorn at the defeated monster. 
 
 At last Robert deposited her on the rug beside a fascinating 
 farmyard which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, 
 not at the child, but at his wife. 
 
 ' Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago ! ' 
 
 She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, 
 the emotion of the eyes, contradicted it. 
 
 'I want courage, he went on 'courage to tell you some- 
 thing that may hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it. 
 
 Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful 
 to him. But she waited quietly for what he had to say. 
 
 ' You know, I think,' he said, looking away from her to the 
 gray Museum outside, ' that my work in R hasn't been reli- 
 gious as yet at all Oh, of course, I have said things here and 
 there, but I haven't delivered myself in any way. Now there 
 has come an opening.' 
 
 And he described to her while she shivered a little and 
 drew herself together the provocations which were leading 
 him into a tussle with the North R Club. 
 
 ' They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the 
 sort of men after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. 
 Among their fellows, they are the men who think. One longs 
 to help them to think to a little more purpose.' 
 
 'What have you to give them, Robert?' asked Catherine 
 after a pause, her eyes bent on the child's stocking she was 
 knitting. Her heart was full enough already, poor soul. Oh, 
 the bitterness of this Passion week ! He had been at her side 
 often in church 2 but through all his tender silence and consider- 
 ation she had divined the constant struggle in him between love 
 and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb 
 irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, 
 wrestle with herself as she would, there was constantly 
 emerging in her now a note of anger, not with Robert, but, 
 as it were, with those malign forces oi which he was the 
 prey. 
 
 'What have I to give them?' he repeated sadly. 'Very 
 little, Catherine, as it seems to me to-night. But come and 
 see.' 
 
 His tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In 
 reality he was in that state or depression which often precedes 
 a great effort. But she was startled by his suggestion. 
 
 'Come with you, Robert? To the meeting of a secularist 
 club!' 
 
 'Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage to 
 what both you and I hold dear. And the men are decent 
 fellows. There will be no disturbance.' 
 
 ' What are you going to do ? ' she asked in a low voice.
 
 480 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ' I have been trying to think it out,' he said with difficulty. 
 ' I want simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image 
 of Jesus of Nazareth which thought, and love, and reading 
 have left upon my own. I want to make them realise for them- 
 selves the historical character, so far as it can be realised to 
 make them see for themselves the real figure, as it went in 
 and out amongst men so far as our eyes can now discern it.' 
 
 The words came quicker towards the end, while the voice 
 sank took the vibrating characteristic note the wife knew so 
 well. 
 
 ' How can that help them ? ' she said abruptly. ' Your his- 
 torical Christ, Robert, will never win souls. If he was God, 
 every word you speak will insult him. If he was man, he was 
 not a good man ! ' 
 
 ' Come and see,' was all he said, holding out his hand to her. 
 It was in some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, the 
 inevitable renewal of an offer he felt bound to make, and she 
 felt bound to resist. 
 
 She let her knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The 
 baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a 
 woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. 
 Her broken incessant baby -talk, and the ringing kisses with 
 which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, 
 made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones of the 
 parents. 
 
 ' Don't ask me, Robert, don't ask me ! Do you want me to 
 come and sit thinking of last year's Easter Eve 1 ' 
 
 ' Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve,' he 
 said slowly. 
 
 'And now,' she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden 
 agitation of every feature, ' now you are not miserable ? You 
 are quite confident and sure ? You are going to devote your 
 life to attacking the few remnants of faith that still remain in 
 the world?' 
 
 Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this 
 accent of bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew 
 his hand, and there was a silence. 
 
 'I held once a wife in my arms,' he said presently with a 
 voice hardly audible, ' who said to me that she would never per- 
 secute her husband. But what is persecution if it is not the 
 determination not to understand 1 ' 
 
 She buried her face in her hands. ' I could not understand,' 
 she said sombrely. 
 
 'And rather than try,' he insisted, 'you will go on believing 
 that I am a man without faith, seeking only to destroy.' 
 
 ' I know you think you have faith, she answered, ' but how 
 can it seem faith to me ? " He that will not confess Me before 
 men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven." 
 Your unbelief seems to me more dangerous than these horrible 
 things which shock you. For you can make it attractive,
 
 CHAP, xxxix NEW OPENINGS 481 
 
 you can make it loved, as you once made the faith of Christ 
 loved.' 
 
 He was silent. She raised her face presently, whereon were 
 the traces of some of those quiet difficult tears which were 
 characteristic of her, and went softly out of the room. 
 
 He stood a while leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to 
 little Mary's clamour, and to her occasional clutches at his 
 knees, as she tried to raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A 
 sense as though of some fresh disaster was upon him. His heart 
 was sinking, sinking within him. And yet none knew better 
 than he that there was nothing fresh. It was merely that the 
 scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalatable truths 
 which the optimist is always much too ready to forget. 
 
 Heredity, the moulding force of circumstance, the iron hold 
 of the past upon the present a man like Elsmere realises the 
 working of these things in other men's lives with a singular 
 subtlety and clearness, and is for ever overlooking them, running 
 his head against them, in his own. 
 
 He turned and laid his arms on the chimneypiece, burying 
 his head on them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, 
 looking down, saw Mary peering up, her masses of dark hair 
 streaming back from the straining little face, the grave open 
 mouth, and alarmed eyes. 
 ' Fader, tiss ! fader, tiss ! ' she said imperatively. 
 
 He lifted her up and covered the little brown cheeks with 
 kisses. But the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh 
 dread the like of something he had often divined of late in 
 Catherine. Was she actually afraid now that he might feel 
 himself bound in future to take her child spiritually from her ? 
 The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him a fresh anguish ; 
 it seemed a measure of the distance they had travelled from 
 that old perfect unity. 
 
 'She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and 
 torturer,' he said to himself with measureless pain, ' and who 
 knows who can answer for himself ? Oh, the puzzle of 
 living ! ' 
 
 When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Catherine 
 said nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after a while 
 she opened his study door. 
 
 ' Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next 
 week, and let me put out the pictures ? ' 
 
 It was the first time she had made any such offer. He sprang 
 up with a flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip of paper 
 with a list. She took it without looking at him. But he caught 
 her in his arms, and for a moment in that embrace the soreness 
 of both hearts passed away. 
 
 But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this 
 critical occasion without auditors from his own immediate circle. 
 On the evening of Good Friday Flaxman had found his way to 
 
 2l
 
 482 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 Bedford Square, and, as Catherine was out, was shown into 
 Elsmere's study. 
 
 ' I have come,' he announced, ' to try and persuade you and 
 Mrs. Elsmere to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow. 
 My Easter party has come to grief, and it would be a real charity 
 on your part to come and resuscitate it. Do ! You look 
 abominably fagged, and as if some country would do you good.' 
 
 ' But I thought ' began Robert, taken aback. 
 
 'You thought,' repeated Flaxman coolly, 'that your two 
 sisters-in-law were going down there with Lady Helen, to meet 
 some musical folk. Well, they are not coming. Miss Leyburn 
 thinks your mother-in-law not very well to-day, and doesn't 
 like to come. And your younger sister prefers also to stay in 
 
 town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But ' And 
 
 he shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His 
 sisters-in-law were certainly inscrutable young women. This 
 Easter party at Greenlaws, Mr. Flaxman's country house, had 
 been planned, he knew, for weeks. And certainly nothing 
 could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine would 
 have been warned. 
 
 ' I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,' he said, 
 with some embarrassment. 
 
 ' Of course they are,' replied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He 
 stood opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets. 
 
 ' Will you have a confidence ? ' the bright eyes seemed to say. 
 ' I am quite ready. Claim it if you like.' 
 
 But Elsmere had no intention of claiming it. The position 
 of all Rose's kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not 
 easy. None of them had the least knowledge of Rose's mind. 
 Had she forgotten Langham ? Had she lost her heart afresh to 
 Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman's absorption in her was 
 clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of 
 an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, 
 moreover, his wealth and social position were elements in the 
 situation calculated to make people like the Elsmeres particularly 
 diffident and discreet. Impossible for them, much as they liked 
 him, to make any of the advances ! 
 
 No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to 
 take the responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took 
 up his visitor's invitation to themselves, and explained the 
 engagement for Easter Eve, which tied them to London. 
 
 ' Whew ! ' said Hugh Flaxman, ' but that will be a shindy 
 worth seeing. I must come ! ' 
 
 ' Nonsense ! ' said Robert, smiling. ' Go down to Greenlaws, 
 and go to church. That will be much more in your line.' 
 
 ' As for church,' said Flaxman meditatively, ' if I put off my 
 party altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further 
 advantage, that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I can, 
 with a blameless impartiality, spend the following day in St.
 
 CHAP, xxxix NEW OPENINGS 483 
 
 Andrew's, Well Street. Yes ! I telegraph to Helen she knows 
 my ways and I come down to protect you against an atheistical 
 mob to-morrow night ! ' 
 
 Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. 
 Flaxman's Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now 
 that the effervescence of his youth had subsided, the man 
 harboured and dallied with a dozen contradictory beliefs, were 
 at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere. They were so now, 
 just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which could not 
 be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence. 
 
 But Flaxman was determined. 
 
 ' No/ he said ; ' this one day we'll give to heresy. Don't 
 look so forbidding ! In the first place, you won't see me ; in 
 the next, if you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. 
 I am like the man in Sophocles always the possession of the 
 last speaker ! One day I am all for the church. A certain 
 number of chances in the hundred there still are, you will admit, 
 that she is in the right of it. And if so, why should I cut my- 
 self off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be got 
 outside her ? But the next day vive Elsmere and the Revolu- 
 tion ! If only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually ! But 
 I never yet came across a religious novelty that seemed to me 
 to have a leg of logic to stand on ! ' 
 
 He laid his hand on Robert's shoulder, his eyes twinkling 
 with a sudden energy. Robert made no answer. He stood 
 erect, frowning a little, his hands thrust far into the pockets of 
 his light gray coat. He was in no mood to disclose himself to 
 Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with extraordinary 
 intensity on quite another sort of antagonist, with whom the 
 mind was continuously grappling. 
 
 'Ah, well till to-morrow!' said Flaxman, with a smile, 
 shook hands, and went. 
 
 Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte's. 
 
 He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room 
 alone, one on either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was read- 
 ing the latest political biography with an apparent profundity 
 of attention ; Mr. Wynnstay was lounging and caressing the 
 cat. But both his aunt's absorption and Mr. Wynnstay's non- 
 chalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a domestic 
 breeze. 
 
 Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had come 
 to propose that she should accompany him the following evening 
 to hear Elsmere lecture. 
 
 ' I advise you to come,' he said. ' Elsmere will deliver his 
 soul, and the amount of soul he has to deliver in these dull days 
 is astounding. A dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I will go 
 down beforehand and see some one on the spot, in case there 
 should be difficulties about getting in. Perhaps Miss Ley burn, 
 too, might like to hear her brother-in-law J ' 
 
 Really, Hugh,' cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, 'I think
 
 484 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 you might take your snubbing with dignity. Her refusal this 
 morning to go to Greenlaws was brusqueness itself. To my 
 mind that young person gives herself airs ! ' And the Duke of 
 Sedbergh's sister drew herself up with a rustle of all her ample 
 frame. 
 
 ' Yes, I was snubbed,' said Flaxman, unperturbed ; { that, how- 
 ever, is no reason why she shouldn't find it attractive to go to- 
 morrow night.' 
 
 'And you will let her see that, just because you couldn't get 
 hold of her, you have given up your Easter party and left your 
 sister in the lurch ? ' 
 
 ' I never had excessive notions of dignity,' he replied com- 
 posedly. ' You may make up any story you please. The real 
 fact is that I want to hear Elsmere.' 
 
 ' You had better go, my dear ! ' said her husband sardonically. 
 'I cannot imagine anything more piquant than an atheistic 
 slum on Easter Eve.' 
 
 ' Nor can I ! ' she replied, her combativeness rousing at once. 
 ' Much obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my housekeeper's 
 dress, and be ready to leave here at half -past seven.' 
 
 Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxman knew that she 
 would be asked, and let it alone. 
 
 ' Will his wife be there 1 ' asked Lady Charlotte. 
 
 ' Who ? Elsmere's ? My dear aunt, when you happen to be 
 the orthodox wife of a rising heretic, your husband's opinions 
 are not exactly the spectacular performance they are to you and 
 me. I should think it most unlikely.' 
 
 ' Oh, she persecutes him, does she ? ' 
 
 ' She wouldn't be a woman if she didn't ! ' observed Mr. Wynn- 
 stay, sotto voce. The small dark man was lost in a great arm- 
 chair, his delicate painter's hands playing with the fur of a huge 
 Persian cat. Lady Charlotte threw him an eagle glance, and he 
 subsided for the moment. 
 
 Flaxman, however, was perfectly right. There had been a 
 breeze. It had been just announced to the master of the house 
 by his spouse that certain Socialist celebrities who might any 
 day be expected to make acquaintance with the police were 
 coming to dine at his table, to finger his spoons, and mix their 
 diatribes with his champagne, on the following Tuesday. Overt 
 rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew perfectly well 
 that when it came to the point he should smile more or less 
 affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon others of the 
 same sort before. But it had not yet come to the point, and his 
 intermediate state was explosive in the extreme. 
 
 Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Els- 
 meres. Dropping his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a 
 very delicate critical analysis of Catherine Elsmere's tempera- 
 ment and position, as in the course of several months his intimacy 
 with her husband had revealed them to him. He did it well, 
 with acuteness and philosophical relish. The situation presented
 
 CHAP, xxxix NEW OPENINGS 485 
 
 itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic phase of the 
 religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure to draw 
 it out in words. 
 
 Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew's crisp 
 phrases, but also gradually gaining a perception of the human 
 reality behind this word-play of Hugh's. That ' good heart ' of 
 hers was touched ; the large imperious face began to frown. 
 
 ' Dear me ! ' she said, with a little sigh. ' Don't go on, Hugh ! 
 I suppose it's because we all of us believe so little that the poor 
 thing s point of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, how- 
 ever/ she added, regaining her usual r6le of magisterial common- 
 sense, ' a woman, in my opinion, ought to go with her husband 
 in religious matters.' 
 
 'Provided, of course, she sets him at nought in all others,' 
 put in Mr. Wynnstay, rising and daintily depositing the cat. 
 ' Many men, however, my dear, might be willing to compromise 
 it differently. Granted a certain modicum of worldly conformity, 
 they would not be at all indisposed to a conscience clause.' 
 
 He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged 
 her shoulders with a look at her nephew in which there was an 
 irrepressible twinkle. Mr. Flaxman neither heard nor saw. 
 Life would have ceased to be worth having long ago had he ever 
 taken sides in the smallest degree in this manage. 
 
 Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with 
 himself and his manoeuvres. Very likely it was quite unwise of 
 liim to have devised another meeting between himself and Rose 
 Ley burn so soon. Certainly she had snubbed him there could 
 be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much perplexity as to the 
 reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting his r61e and 
 the whole lie of the situation, and if a man will be an idiot he 
 must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a move. 
 
 The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months 
 since Langham's disappearance. During that time Rose Ley- 
 burn had been, to Flaxman's mind, enchantingly dependent on 
 him. He had played his part so well, and the beautiful high- 
 spirited child had suited herself so naively to his acting ! Evi- 
 dently she had said to herself that his age, his former marriage, 
 his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness to her and her 
 sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make him her 
 friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other male 
 friend. And when once the situation had been so defined in her 
 mind, how the girl's true self had come out ! what delightful 
 moments that intimacy had contained for him ! 
 
 He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading 
 some Browning to her and Helen, in Helen's crowded belittered 
 drawing-room, which seemed all piano and photographs and 
 lilies of the valley. He never could exactly trace the connection 
 between the passage he had been reading and what happened. 
 Probably it was merely Browning's poignant passionate note 
 that had affected her. In spite of all her proud bright reserve,
 
 486 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 both he and Helen often felt through these weeks that just 
 below this surface there was a heart which quivered at the least 
 touch. 
 
 He finished the lines and laid down the book. Lady Helen 
 heard her three-year-old boy crying upstairs, and ran up to see 
 what was the matter. He and Rose were left alone in the 
 scented fire-lit room. And a jet of flame suddenly showed him 
 the girl's face turned away, convulsed with a momentary struggle 
 for self-control. She raised a hand an instant to her eyes, not 
 dreaming evidently that she could be seen in the dimness ; and 
 her gloves dropped from her lap. 
 
 He moved forward, stooped on one knee, and as she held out 
 her hand for the gloves, he kissed the hand very gently, detain- 
 ing it afterwards as a brother might. There was not a thought 
 of himself in his mind. Simply he could not bear that so bright 
 a creature should ever be sorry. It seemed to him intolerable, 
 against the nature of things. If he could have procured for her 
 at that moment a coerced and transformed Langham, a Lang- 
 ham fitted to make her happy, he could almost have done it ; 
 and, short of such radical consolation, the very least he could do 
 was to go on his knee to her, and comfort her in tender brotherly 
 fashion. 
 
 She did not say anything ; she let her hand stay a moment, 
 and then she got up, put on her veil, left a quiet message for 
 Lady Helen, and departed. But as he put her into a hansom her 
 whole manner to him was full of a shy shrinking sweetness. 
 And when Rose was shy and shrinking she was adorable. 
 
 Well, and now he had never again gone nearly so far as to 
 kiss her hand, and yet because of an indiscreet moment every- 
 thing was changed between them ; she had turned resentful, 
 stand-off, nay, as nearly rude as a girl under the restraints of 
 modern manners can manage to be. He almost laughed as he 
 recalled Helen's report of her interview with Rose that morning, 
 in which she had tried to persuade a young person outrageously 
 on her dignity to keep an engagement she had herself spontane- 
 ously made. 
 
 ' I am very sorry, Lady Helen,' Rose had said, her slim figure 
 drawn up so stiffly that the small Lady Helen felt herself totally 
 effaced beside her. 'But I had rather not leave London this 
 week. I think I will stay with mamma and Agnes.' 
 
 And nothing Lady Helen could say moved her, or modified 
 her formula of refusal. 
 
 ' What have you been doing, Hugh 1 ' his sister asked him, half 
 dismayed, half provoked. 
 
 Flaxman shrugged his shoulders and vowed he had been doing 
 nothing. But, in truth, he knew very well that the day before 
 he had overstepped the line. There had been a little scene be- 
 tween them, a quick passage of speech, a rash look and gesture 
 on his part, which had been quite unpremeditated, but which 
 had nevertheless transformed their relation. Rose had flushed
 
 CHAP, xxxix NEW OPENINGS 487 
 
 up, had said a few incoherent words, which he had understood 
 to be words of reproach, had left Lady Helen's as quickly as 
 possible, and next morning his Greenlaws party had fallen 
 through. 
 
 'Check, certainly,' said Flaxman to himself ruefully, as he 
 pondered these circumstances 'not mate, I hope, if one can 
 but find out how not to be a fool in future.' 
 
 And over his solitary fire he meditated far into the night. 
 
 Next day, at half -past seven in the evening, he entered 
 Lady Charlotte's drawing-room, gayer, brisker, more alert than 
 ever. 
 
 Rose started visibly at the sight of him, and shot a quick 
 glance at the unblushing Lady Charlotte. 
 
 ' I thought you were at Greenlaws,' she could not help saying 
 to him, as she coldly offered him her hand. Why had Lady 
 Charlotte never told her he was to escort them 1 Her irritation 
 rose anew. 
 
 ' What can one do,' he said lightly, ' if Elsmere will fix such a 
 performance for Easter Eve ? My party was at its last gasp too ; 
 it only wanted a telegram to Helen to give it its coup de grdce.' 
 
 Rose flushed up, but he turned on his heel at once, and began 
 to banter his aunt on the housekeeper's bonnet and veil in 
 which she had a little too obviously disguised herself. 
 
 And certainly, in the drive to the East End, Rose had no 
 reason to complain of importunity on his part. Most of the 
 way he was deep in talk with Lady Charlotte as to a certain 
 loan exhibition in the East End, to which he and a good many 
 of his friends were sending pictures ; apparently his time and 
 thoughts were entirely occupied with it. Rose, leaning back 
 silent in her corner, was presently seized with a little shock of 
 surprise that there should be so many interests and relations in 
 his life of which she knew nothing. He was talking now as the 
 man of possessions and influence. She saw a glimpse of him as 
 he was in his public aspect, and the kindness, the disinterested- 
 ness, the quiet sense, and the humour of his talk insensibly 
 affected her as she sat listening. The mental image of him 
 which had been dominant in her mind altered a little. Nay, 
 she grew a little hot over it. She asked herself scornfully 
 whether she were not as ready as any bread-and-butter miss of 
 her acquaintance to imagine every man she knew in love with 
 her. 
 
 Very likely he had meant what he said quite differently, and 
 she on ! humiliation had flown into a passion with him for 
 no reasonable cause. Supposing he had meant, two days ago, 
 that if they were to go on being friends she must let him be her 
 lover too, it would of course nave been unpardonable. How 
 could she let any one talk to her of love yet especially Mr. 
 Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure, what had hap- 
 pened to her ? He must despise her to have imagined it. His 
 outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulant
 
 488 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 resentment. Were all men self-seeking ? Did all men think 
 women shallow and fickle ? Could a man and a woman never 
 be honestly and simply friends ? If he had made love to her, he 
 could not possibly and there was the sting of it feel towards 
 her maiden dignity that romantic respect which she herself 
 cherished towards it. For it was incredible that any delicate- 
 minded girl should go through such a crisis as she had gone 
 through, and then fall calmly into another lover's arms a few 
 weeks later as though nothing had happened. 
 
 How we all attitudinise to ourselves ! The whole of life often 
 seems one long dramatic performance, in which one half of us is 
 for ever posing to the other half. 
 
 But had he really made love to her 1 had he meant what she 
 had assumed him to mean ? The girl lost herself in a torment 
 of memory and conjecture, and meanwhile Mr. Flaxman sat 
 opposite, talking away, and looking certainly as little love-sick 
 as any man can well look. As the lamps flashed into the carriage 
 her attention was often caught by his profile and finely-balanced 
 head, by the hand lying on his knee, or the little gestures, full 
 of life and freedom, with which he met some raid of Lady 
 Charlotte's on his opinions, or opened a corresponding one on 
 hers. There was certainly power in the man, a bright human 
 sort of power, which inevitably attracted her. And that he 
 was good too she had special grounds for knowing. 
 
 But what an aristocrat he was after all ! What an over- 
 prosperous exclusive set he belonged to ! She lashed herself 
 into anger as the other two chatted and sparred, with all these 
 names of wealthy cousins and relations, with their parks and 
 their pedigrees and their pictures ! The aunt and nephew were 
 debating how they could best bleed the family, in its various 
 branches, of the art treasures belonging to it for the benefit of 
 the East-Enders; therefore the names were inevitable. But 
 Rose curled her delicate lip over them. And was it the best 
 breeding, she wondered, to leave a third person so ostentatiously 
 outside the conversation ? 
 
 ' Miss Leyburn, why are you coughing ? ' said Lady Charlotte 
 suddenly. 
 
 ' There is a great draught,' said Rose, shivering a little. 
 
 ' So there is ! ' cried Lady Charlotte. ' Why, we have got 
 both the windows open. Hugh, draw up Miss Leyburn's.' 
 
 He moved over to her and drew it up. 
 
 'I thought you liked a tornado,' he said to her, smiling. 
 ' Will you have a shawl ? there is one behind me.' 
 
 ' No, thank you,' she replied rather stiffly, and he was silent 
 retaining his place opposite to her, however. 
 
 'Have we reached Mr. Elsmere's part of the world yet?' 
 asked Lady Charlotte, looking out. 
 
 ' Yes, we are not far off the river is to our right. We shall 
 pass St. Wilfrid's soon.' 
 
 The coachman turned into a street where an open-air market
 
 CHAP, xxxix NEW OPENINGS 489 
 
 was going on. The roadway and pavements were swarming 
 the carriage could barely pick its way through the masses 01 
 human beings. Flaming gas-jets threw it all into strong satanic 
 light and shade. At the corner of a dingy alley Rose could see 
 a fight going on ; the begrimed ragged children, regardless of 
 the April rain, swooped backwards and forwards under the 
 very hoofs of the horses, or flattened their noses against the 
 windows whenever the horses were forced into a walk. 
 
 The young girl-figure in gray, with the gray feathered hat, 
 seemed specially to excite their notice. The glare of the street 
 brought out the lines of the face, the gold of the hair. The 
 Arabs outside made loutishly flattering remarks once or twice, 
 and Rose, colouring, drew back as far as she could into the 
 carriage. Mr. Flaxman seemed not to hear ; his aunt, with that 
 obtrusive thirst for information which is so fashionable now 
 among all women of position, was cross-questioning him as to 
 the trades and population of the district, and he was drily 
 responding. In reality his mind was full of a whirl of feeling, 
 of a wild longing to break down a futile barrier and trample on 
 a baffling resistance, to take that beautiful tameless creature in 
 strong coercing arms, scold her, crush her, love her ! Why does 
 she make happiness so difficult ? What right has she to hold 
 devotion so cheap ? He too grows angry. ' She was not in love 
 with that spectral creature,' the inner self declares with energy 
 'I will vow she never was. But she is like all the rest a 
 slave to the merest forms and trappings of sentiment. Because 
 he ought to have loved her, and didn't, because she fancied she 
 loved him, and didn't, my love is to be an offence to her ! 
 Monstrous unjust ! ' 
 
 Suddenly they sped past St. Wilfrid's, resplendent with lights, 
 the jewelled windows of the choir rising above the squalid walls 
 and roofs into the rainy darkness, as the mystical chapel of the 
 Graal, with its 'torches glimmering fair,' flashed out of the 
 mountain storm and solitude on to Galahad's seeking eyes. 
 
 Rose bent forward involuntarily. ' What angel singing ! ' she 
 said, dropping the window again to listen to the retreating 
 sounds, her artist's eye kindling. ' Did you hear it ? It was the 
 last chorus in the St. Matthew Passion music.' 
 
 'I did not distinguish it,' he said 'but their music is 
 famous.' 
 
 His tone was distant ; there was no friendliness in it. It 
 wpuld have been pleasant to her if he would have taken up her 
 little remark and let bygones be bygones. But he showed no 
 readiness to do so. The subject dropped, and presently he 
 moved back to his former seat, and Lady Charlotte* and he re- 
 sumed their talk. Rose could not but see that his manner 
 towards her was much changed. She herself had compelled it, 
 but all the same she saw him leave her with a capricious little 
 pang of regret, and afterwards the drive seemed to her more 
 tedious and the dismal streets more dismal than before.
 
 490 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 She tried to forget her companions altogether. Oh ! what 
 would Robert have to say 1 She was unhappy, restless. In her 
 trouble lately it had often pleased her to go quite alone to 
 strange churches, where for a moment the burden of the self 
 had seemed lightened. But the old things were not always con- 
 
 fsnial to her, and there were modern ferments at work in her. 
 o one of her family, unless it were Agnes, suspected what was 
 going on. But in truth the rich crude nature had been touched 
 at last, as Robert's had been long ago in Mr. Grey's lecture- 
 room, by the piercing under- voices of things the moral message 
 of the world. 'What will he have to say?' she asked herself 
 again feverishly, and as she looked across to Mr. Flaxman she 
 felt a childish wish to be friends again with him, with every- 
 body. Life was too difficult as it was, without quarrels and 
 misunderstandings to make it worse. 
 
 CHAPTER XL 
 
 A LONG street of warehouses and at the end of it the horses 
 slackened. . 
 
 'I saw the president of the club yesterday,' said Flaxman, 
 looking out. ' He is an old friend of mine a most intelligent 
 fanatic met him on a Mansion House Fund committee last 
 winter. He promised we should be looked after. But we shall 
 only get back seats, and you'll have to put up with the smoking. 
 They don't want ladies, and we shall only be there on suf- 
 ferance.' 
 
 The carriage stopped. Mr. Flaxman guided his charges with 
 some difficulty through the crowd about the steps, who inspected 
 them and their vehicle with a frank and not over -friendly 
 curiosity. At the door they found a man who had been sent to 
 look for them, and were immediately taken possession of. He 
 ushered them into the back of a large bare hall, glaringly lit, 
 lined with white brick, and hung at intervals with political 
 portraits and a few cheap engravings of famous men, Jesus of 
 Nazareth taking his turn with Buddha, Socrates, Moses, Shake- 
 speare, and Paul of Tarsus. 
 
 'Can't put you any forrarder, I'm afraid,' said their guide, 
 with a shrug of the shoulders. 'The committee don't like 
 strangers coming, and Mr. Collett, he got hauled -over the coals 
 for letting you in this evening.' 
 
 It was a^new position for Lady Charlotte to be anywhere on 
 sufferance.* However, in the presence of three hundred smoking 
 men, who might all of them be political assassins in disguise 
 for anything she knew, she accepted her fate with meekness ; 
 and she and Rose settled themselves into their back seat under 
 a rough sort of gallery, glad of their veils, and nearly blinded 
 with the smoke.
 
 CHAP. XL NEW OPENINGS 491 
 
 The hall was nearly full, and Mr. Flaxrnan looked curiously 
 round upon its occupants. The majority of them were clearly 
 artisans a spare, stooping, sharp -featured race. Here and 
 there were a knot of stalwart dock-labourers, strongly marked 
 out in physique from the watchmakers and the potters, or an 
 occasional seaman out of work, ship-steward, boatswain, or what 
 not, generally bronzed, quick-eyed, and comely, save where the 
 film of excess had already deadened colour and expression. 
 Almost every one had a pot of beer before him, standing on long 
 wooden flaps attached to the benches. The room was full of 
 noise, coming apparently from the farther end, where sortie 
 political bravo seemed to be provoking his neighbours. In their 
 own vicinity the men scattered about were for the most part 
 tugging silently at their pipes, alternately eyeing the clock and 
 the new-comers. 
 
 There was a stir of feet round the door. 
 
 ' There he is,' said Mr. Flaxman, craning round to see, and 
 Robert entered. 
 
 He started as he saw them, flashed a smile to Rose, shook his 
 head at Mr. Flaxman, and passed up the room. 
 
 'He looks pale and nervous,' said Lady Charlotte grimly, 
 pouncing at once on the unpromising side of things. 'If he 
 breaks down are vou prepared, Hugh, to play Elisha ? ' 
 
 Flaxman was far too much interested in the beginnings of 
 the performance to answer. 
 
 Robert was standing forward on the platform, the chairman 
 of the meeting at his side, members of the committee sitting 
 behind on either hand. A good many men put down their pipes, 
 and the hubbub of talk ceased. Others smoked on stolidly. 
 
 The chairman introduced the lecturer. The subject of the 
 address would be, as they already knew, 'The Claim of Jesus 
 upon Modern Life.' It was not very likely, he imagined, that 
 Mr. Elsmere's opinions would square with those dominant in 
 the club ; but, whether or no; he claimed for him, as for every- 
 body, a patient hearing, and the Englishman's privilege of fair 
 play. 
 
 The speaker, a cabinetmaker dressed in a decent brown suit, 
 spoke with fluency, and at the same time with that accent of 
 moderation and savoir faire which some Englishmen in all 
 classes have obviously inherited from centuries of government 
 by discussion. Lady Charlotte, whose Liberalism was the mere 
 varnish of an essentially aristocratic temper, was conscious of 
 a certain dismay at the culture of the democracy as the man sat 
 down. Mr. Flaxman, glancing to the right, saw a group of men 
 standing, and amongst them a slight sharp -featured thread- 
 paper of a man, with a taller companion, whom he identified as 
 the pair he had noticed on the night of the story-telling. The 
 little gasfitter was clearly all nervous fidget and expectation ; 
 the other, large and gaunt in figure, with a square impassive 
 face, and close-shut lips that had a perpetual mocking twist in
 
 492 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 the corners, stood beside him like some clumsy modern version, 
 in a commoner clay, of Goethe's ' spirit that denies.' 
 
 Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hand. 
 
 His first words were hardly audible. Rose felt her colour 
 rising, Lady Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing 
 group of men cried, ' Speak up ! ' The voice in the distance rose 
 at once, braced by the touch of difficulty, and what it said came 
 firmly down to them. 
 
 In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the 
 experience of this evening. When he did he would generally 
 say, briefly, that as an intellectual effort he had never been 
 inclined to rank this first public utterance very high among 
 Elsmere's performances. The speaker's own emotion had stood 
 somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps, when he 
 feels less. 
 
 'I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more 
 cogently in conversation,' Flaxman would say though only to 
 his most intimate friends 'but what I never saw before or 
 since was such an effect of personality as he produced that 
 night. From that moment, at any rate, I loved him, and I 
 understood his secret ! ' 
 
 Elsm'ere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the 
 club for the hearing they had promised him. 
 
 Then he passed on to the occasion of his address the vogue 
 in the district of ' certain newspapers which, I understand, are 
 specially relished and patronised by your association.^ 
 
 And he laid down on a table beside him the copies of the 
 Freethinker and of Faith and Fools which he had brought with 
 him, and faced his audience again, his hands on his sides. 
 
 ' Well ! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. 
 I want to reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If 
 there is anybody here who takes pleasure in them, who thinks 
 that such writing and such witticisms as he gets purveyed to 
 him in these sheets do really help the cause of truth and in- 
 tellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position from the 
 front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in 
 him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that 
 what is injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox 
 Christian, or the Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and 
 inevitably the man who writes it and the man who loves it ! 
 His mind is possessed of an inflaming and hateful image, which 
 drives him to mockery and violence. I want to replace it, if I 
 can, by one of calm, of beauty and tenderness, which may drive 
 him to humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the only 
 way in which opinion is ever really altered by the substitution 
 of one mental picture for another. 
 
 ' But in the first place,' resumed the speaker, after a moment's 
 pause, changing his note a little, ' a word about myself. I am 
 not here to-night quite in the position of the casual stranger, 
 coming down to your district for the first time. As some of you
 
 CHAP. XL NEW OPENINGS 493 
 
 know, I am endeavouring to make what is practically a settle- 
 ment among you, asking you working-men to teach me, if you 
 will, what you have to teach as to the wants and prospects of 
 your order, and offering you in return whatever there is in me 
 which may be worth your taking. Well, I imagine I should 
 look at a man who preferred a claim of that sort with some 
 closeness ! You may well ask me for " antecedents," and I 
 should like, if I may, to give them to you very shortly. 
 
 'Well, then, though I came down to this place under the 
 wing of Mr. Edwardes' (some cheering) 'who is so greatly liked 
 and respected here, I am not a Unitarian, nor am I an English 
 Churchman. A year ago I was the vicar of an English country 
 parish, where I should have been proud, so far as personal 
 happiness went, to spend my life. Last autumn I left it and 
 resigned my orders because I could no longer accept the creed 
 of the English Church.' Unconsciously the thin dignified figure 
 drew itself up, the voice took a certain dryness. All this was 
 distasteful, but the orator's instinct was imperious. 
 
 As he spoke about a score of pipes which had till now been 
 active in Flaxman's neighbourhood went down. The silence in 
 the room became suddenly of a perceptibly different quality. 
 
 'Since then I have joined no other religious association. 
 But it is not God forbid ! because there is nothing left me to 
 believe, but because in this transition England it is well for a 
 man who has broken with the old things, to be very patient. 
 No good can come of forcing opinion or agreement prematurely. 
 A generation, nay, more, may have to spend itself in mere 
 waiting and preparing for those new leaders and those new 
 forms of corporate action which any great revolution of opinion, 
 such as that we are now living through, has always produced in 
 the past, and will, we are justified in believing, produce again. 
 But the hour and the men will come, and " they also serve who 
 only stand and wait ! " ' 
 
 Voice and look had kindled into fire. The consciousness of 
 his audience was passing from him the world of ideas was 
 growing clearer. 
 
 'So much, then, for personalities of one sort. There are 
 some of another, however, which I must touch upon for a 
 moment. I am to speak to you to-night of the Jesus of history, 
 but not only as an historian. History is good, but religion is 
 better! and if Jesus of Nazareth concerned me, and, in my 
 belief, concerned you, only as an historical figure, I should not 
 be here to-night. 
 
 ' But if I am to talk religion to you, and I have begun by 
 telling you I am not this and not that, it seems to me that for 
 mere clearness' sake, for the sake of that round and whole image 
 of thought which I want to present to you, you must let me run 
 through a preliminary confession of faith as short and simple 
 as I can make it. You must let me describe certain views of 
 the universe and of man's place in it, which make the frame-
 
 494 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 work, as it were, into which I shall ask you to fit the picture of 
 Jesus which will come after.' 
 
 Robert stood a moment considering. An instant's nervous- 
 ness, a momentary sign of self -consciousness, would have 
 broken the spell and set the room against him. He showed 
 neither. 
 
 ' My friends,' he said at last, speaking to the crowded benches 
 of London workmen with the same simplicity he would have 
 used towards his boys at Murewell, ' the man who is addressing 
 you to-night believes in God; and in Conscience, which is God's 
 witness in the soul ; and in Experience, which is at once the 
 record and the instrument of man's education at God's hands. 
 He places his whole trust, for life and death, " in God the Father 
 Almighty" in that force at the root of things which is revealed 
 to us whenever a man helps his neighbour, or a mother denies 
 herself for her child ; whenever a soldier dies without a murmur 
 for his country, or a sailor puts out in the darkness to rescue 
 the perishing; whenever a workman throws mind and con- 
 science into his work, or a statesman labours not for his own 
 gain but for that or the State ! He believes in an Eternal 
 Goodness and an Eternal Mind of which Nature and Man 
 are the continuous and the only revelation. . . . ' 
 
 The room grew absolutely still. And into the silence there 
 fell, one by one, the short terse sentences, in which the seer, the 
 believer, struggled to express what God has been, is, and will 
 ever be to the soul which trusts Him. In them the whole effort 
 of the speaker was really to restrain, to moderate, to deper- 
 sonalise the voice of faith. But the intensity of each word 
 burnt it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even Lady Charlotte 
 turned a little pale the tears stood in her eyes. 
 
 Then, from the witness of God in the soul, and in the history 
 of mans moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of 
 Experience, ' of that unvarying and rational order of the world 
 which has been the appointed instrument of man's training 
 since life and thought began.' 
 
 ' There,' he said slowly, ' in the unbroken sequences of nature, 
 in the physical history of the world, in the long history of man, 
 physical, intellectual, moral there lies the revelation of God. 
 There is no other, my friends ! ' 
 
 Then, while the room hung on his words, he entered on a 
 brief exposition of the text, ' Miracles do not happen,' restating 
 Hume's old argument, and adding to it some of the most cogent 
 of those modern arguments drawn from literature, from history, 
 from the comparative study of religions and religious evidence, 
 which were not practically at Hume's disposal, but which are 
 now affecting the popular mind as Hume's reasoning could 
 never have affected it. 
 
 ' We are now able to show how miracle, or the belief in it, 
 which is the same thing, comes into being. The study of 
 miracle in all nations, and under all conditions, yields every-
 
 CHAP. XL NEW OPENINGS 495 
 
 where the same results. Miracle may be the child of imagina- 
 tion, of love, nay, of a passionate sincerity, but invariably it 
 lives with ignorance and is withered by knowledge ! ' 
 
 And then, with lightning unexpectedness, he turned upon 
 his audience, as though the ardent soul reacted at once against 
 a strain of mere negation. 
 
 'But do not let yourselves imagine for an instant that, 
 because in a rational view of history there is no place for a 
 Resurrection and Ascension, therefore you may profitably allow 
 yourself a mean and miserable mirth of this sort over the past !' 
 and his outstretched hand struck the newspapers beside him 
 with passion. 'Do not imagine for an instant that what is 
 binding, adorable, beautiful in that past is done away with 
 when miracle is given up ! No, thank God ! We still "live by 
 admiration, hope, and love." God only draws closer, great men 
 become greater, human life more wonderful as miracle dis- 
 appears. Woe to you if you cannot see it ! it is the testing 
 truth of our day. 
 
 ' And besides do you suppose that mere violence, mere in- 
 vective, and savage mockery ever accomplished anything nay, 
 what is more to the point, ever destroyed anything in human 
 liistory ? No an idea cannot be killed from without it can 
 only be supplanted, transformed, by another idea, and that one 
 of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox ! In the moral 
 world you cannot pull down except by gentleness you cannot 
 revolutionise except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded 
 Judaism by absorbing and recreating all that was best in it. 
 There are no inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of 
 humanity. The religion of to-day, with all its faults and mis- 
 takes, will go on unshaken so long as there is nothing else of 
 equal loveliness and potency to put in its place. The Jesus of 
 the churches will remain paramount so long as the man of to-day 
 imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge from 
 loving the Jesus of history. 
 
 ' But why ? you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history 
 matter to me ?' 
 
 And so he was brought to the place of great men in the 
 development of mankind to the part played in the human 
 story by those lives in which men nave seen all their noblest 
 thoughts of God, of duty, and of law embodied, realised before 
 them with a shining ana incomparable beauty. 
 
 ' . . . You think because it is becoming plain to the modern 
 eye that the ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life 
 in legend, that therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, 
 you can put him aside as though he had never been 1 Folly ! 
 Do what you will, you cannot escape him. His life and death 
 underlie our institutions as the alphabet underlies our literature. 
 Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed are wrought in- 
 efiaceably into the civilisation of Africa and Asia, so the life of 
 Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilisation, the
 
 496 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your 
 being and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as English- 
 men and as citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was 
 born and grew to manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. 
 And you think that a fact so tremendous can be just scoffed 
 away that we can get rid of it, and of our share in it, by a 
 ribald paragraph and a caricature ! 
 
 'No. Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And 
 thank God they are powerless. There is no wanton waste in 
 the moral world, any more than in the material. There is only 
 fruitful change and beneficent transformation. Granted that 
 the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was from the beginning 
 obscured by error and mistake ; granted that those errors and 
 mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are now 
 its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are 
 now threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the 
 hold of Jesus on the love and remembrance of man. What 
 then 1 The fact is merely a call to you and me, who recognise 
 it, to go back to the roots of things, to reconceive the Christ, 
 to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the life so freely 
 given for man minister again in new ways to man's new needs. 
 Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great ideas, 
 capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation. 
 And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant 
 before it must on any of those rare and precious possessions 
 which have helped it in the past, and may again inspire it in 
 the future ! 
 
 ' To reconceive the Christ I It is the special task of our age, 
 though in some sort and degree it has been the ever-recurring 
 task of Europe since the beginning.' 
 
 He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood 
 by those who heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great 
 operation worked by the best intellect of Europe during the 
 last half -century broadly speaking on the facts and docu- 
 ments of primitive Christianity. From all sides and by the 
 help of every conceivable instrument those facts have been 
 investigated, and now at last the great result ' the revivified 
 reconceived truth ' seems ready to emerge ! Much may still 
 be known much can never be known ; but if we will, we may 
 now discern the true features of Jesus of Nazareth, as no genera- 
 tion but our own has been able to discern them, since those who 
 had seen and handled passed away. 
 
 ' Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, that 
 life of lives, that story of stories, as the labour of our own age 
 in particular has patiently revealed it to us. Come back with 
 me through the centuries ; let us try and see the Christ of Galilee 
 and the Christ of Jerusalem as he was, before a credulous love 
 and Jewish tradition and Greek subtlety had at once dimmed 
 and glorified the truth. Ah ! do what we will, it is so scanty 
 and poor, this knowledge of ours, compared with all that we
 
 CHAP. XL NEW OPENINGS 497 
 
 yearn to know but, such as it is, let me, very humbly and 
 very tentatively, endeavour to put it before you.' 
 
 At this point Flaxman's attention was suddenly distracted 
 by a stir round the door of entrance on his left hand. Looking 
 round, lie saw a Ritualist priest, in cassock and cloak, disputing 
 in hurried undertones with the men about the door. At last 
 he gained his point apparently, for the men, with half -angry, 
 half -quizzing looks at each other, allowed him to come in, and 
 he found a seat. Flaxman was greatly struck by the face by 
 its ascetic beauty, the stern and yet delicate whiteness and 
 emaciation of it. He sat with both hands resting on the stick 
 he held in front of him, intently listening, the perspiration of 
 physical weakness on his brow and round his finely curved 
 mouth. Clearly he could hardly see the lecturer, for the room 
 had become inconveniently crowded, and the men about him 
 were mostly standing. 
 
 ' One of the St. Wilfrid's priests, I suppose,' Flaxman said to 
 himself. ' What on earth is he doing dans cette galere ? Are we 
 to have a disputation ? That would be dramatic.' 
 
 He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder 
 was promptly forgotten. When he turned back to the platform 
 he found that Robei*t, with Mackay's help, had hung on a screen 
 to his right, four or five large drawings of Nazareth, of the Lake 
 of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and the Temple of Herod, of the 
 ruins of that synagogue on the probable site of Capernaum in 
 which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They were bold and 
 striking, and filled the bare hall at once with suggestions of the 
 East. He had used them often at Murewell. Then, adopting 
 a somewhat different tone, he plunged into the life of Jesus. He 
 brought to it all his trained historical power, all his story- 
 telling faculty, all his sympathy with the needs of feeling. And 
 bit by bit, as the quick nervous sentences issued and struck, 
 each like the touch of a chisel, the majestic figure emerged, set 
 against its natural backgrou iid, instinct with some fraction at 
 least of the magic of reality, most human, most persuasive, most 
 tragic. He brought out the great words of the new faith, to 
 which, whatever may be their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus 
 only, gave currency and immortal force. He dwelt on the 
 magic, the permanence, the expansiveness, of the young Naza- 
 rene's central conception the spiritualised, universalised ' King- 
 dom of God.' Elsmere's thought, indeed, knew nothing of a 
 perfect man, as it knew nothing of an incarnate God he 
 shrank from nothing that he believed true ; but every limi- 
 tation, every reserve he allowed himself, did but make the 
 whole more poignantly real, and the claim of Jesus more 
 penetrating. 
 
 'The world has grown since Jesus preached in Galilee and 
 Judaea. We cannot learn the whole of God's lesson from him 
 now nay, we could not then ! But all that is most essential 
 to man all that saves the soul, all that purifies the heart that 
 
 2 K
 
 498 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 he has still for you and me, as he had it for the men and women 
 of his own time.' 
 
 Then he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a little ; his 
 notes dropped from his hand : and the silence grew oppressive. 
 The dramatic force, the tender passionate insight, the fearless 
 modernness with which the story was told, made it almost un- 
 bearable. Those listening saw the trial, the streets of Jeru- 
 salem, that desolate place outside the northern gate ; they were 
 spectators of the torture, they heard the last cry. No one 
 present had ever so seen, so heard before. Rose had hidden her 
 face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch the audience ; 
 the men had forgotten each other ; and for the first time that 
 night, in many a cold embittered heart, there was born that 
 love of the Son of Man which Nathaniel felt, and John, and 
 Mary of Bethany, and which has in it now, as then, the promise 
 of the future. 
 
 ' " He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, 
 and he rolled a stone against the door of the tomb." The ashes 
 of Jesus of Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestine 
 
 ' " Far hence he lies 
 
 In the lorn Syrian town, 
 And on his grave, with shining eyes, 
 The Syrian stars look down." ' 
 
 He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. 
 Then a gleam broke over the pale exhausted face a gleam of 
 extraordinary sweetness. 
 
 ' And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and 
 passionate fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite 
 fable of the Resurrection. How natural and amid all its false- 
 ness how true, is that naive and contradictory story ! The 
 rapidity with which it spread is a measure of many things. It 
 is, above all, a measure of the greatness of Jesus, of the force 
 with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and imagina- 
 tions of men. . . . 
 
 ' And now, my friends, what of all this ? If these things I 
 have been saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them 
 for you and me 1 Simply this, as I conceive it that instead of 
 wasting your time, and degrading your souls, by indulgence in 
 such grime as this ' and he pointed to the newspapers ' it is 
 your urgent business and mine at this moment to do our very 
 utmost to bring this life of Jesus, our precious invaluable 
 possession as a people, back into some real and cogent relation 
 with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not answer 
 me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived 
 in the vague, apart from reality that men must have some- 
 thing to worship, and that if they cannot worship Jesus they 
 will not trouble to love him. Is the world desolate with God 
 still in it, and does it rest merely with us to love or not to love 1 
 Love and revere something we must, if we are to be men and
 
 CHAP. XL NEW OPENINGS 499 
 
 not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I have tried to 
 show you, man has helped himself by the constant and passionate 
 memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him 
 most audibly of God and of eternal hope. And for us Euro- 
 peans and Englishmen, as I have also tried to show you, history 
 and inheritance have decided. If we turn away from the true 
 Jesus of Nazareth because he has been disfigured and misre- 
 presented by the Churches, we turn away from that in which 
 our weak wills and desponding souls are meant to find their 
 most obvious and natural help and inspiration from that 
 symbol of the Divine, which, of necessity, means most to us. 
 No ! give him back your hearts be ashamed that you have 
 ever forgotten your debt to him ! Let combination and brother- 
 hood do for the newer and simpler faith what they did once for 
 the old let them give it a practical shape, a practical grip on 
 human life. . . . Then we too shall have our Easter ! we too 
 shall have the right to say, He is not here, he is risen. Not here 
 in legend, in miracle, in the beautiful outworn forms and 
 crystallisations of older thought. He is risen in a wiser rever- 
 ence and a more reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help 
 inspired by his memory, called afresh by his name ! Eisen if 
 you and your children will it in a church or company of the 
 faithful, over the gates of which two sayings of man s past, into 
 which man's present has breathed new meanings, shall be 
 written : 
 
 'In Thee, Eternal, have I put my trust : 
 and 
 
 ' This do in remembrance of Me. ' 
 
 The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance 
 in which it had been held with a sudden burst of talk and 
 movement. In the midst of it, and as the majority of the 
 audience were filing out into the adjoining rooms, the gasfitter's 
 tall companion Andrews mounted the platform, while the gas- 
 fitter himself, with an impatient shrug, pushed his way into the 
 outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately to 
 work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal 
 sangfroid which seemed to change in a moment the whole 
 aspect and temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. 
 Elsmere had talked of what great scholars had done to clear up 
 this matter of Christ and Christianity. Well, he was free to 
 maintain that old Tom Paine was as good a scholar as any of 
 'em, and most of them in that hall knew what lie thought about 
 it. Tom Paine hadn't anything to say against Jesus Christ, 
 and he hadn't. He was a workman and a fine sort of man, and 
 if he'd been alive now he'd have been a Socialist, ' as most of us 
 are,' and he'd have made it hot for the rich loafers, and the 
 sweaters, and the middlemen, ' as we'd like to make it hot for 
 'em.' But as for those people who got up the Church Mytho- 
 logists Tom Paine called 'em and the miracles, and made an
 
 500 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily speaking, he 
 didn't see what they'd got to do with keeping up, or mending, 
 or preserving their precious bit of work. The world had found 
 'em out, and serve 'em right. 
 
 And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not 
 without a harsh savour and eloquence, which was much clapped 
 by the small knot of workmen amongst whom he had been 
 standing. 
 
 Then there followed a Socialist an eager, ugly, black- 
 bearded little fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of 
 doing without ' any cultus whatsoever,' threw scorn on both the 
 Christians and the Positivists for refusing so to deny them- 
 selves, and appealed earnestly to his group of hearers ' to help 
 in bringing religion back from heaven to earth, where it 
 belongs.' Mr. Elsmere's new church, if he ever got it, would 
 only be a fresh instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie. 
 And when the people had got their rights and brought down 
 the capitalists, they were not going to be such fools as put their 
 necks under the heel of what were called ' the educated classes.' 
 The people who wrote the newspapers Mr. Elsmere objected to, 
 knew quite enough for the working-man and people should 
 not be too smooth-spoken ; what the working class wanted be- 
 yond everything just now was grit. 
 
 A few other short speeches followed, mostly of the common 
 Secularist type, in defence of the newspapers attacked. But 
 the defence, on the whole, was shuffling and curiously half- 
 hearted. Robert, sitting by with his head on his hand, felt that 
 there, at any rate, his onslaught had told. 
 
 He said a few words in reply, in a low husky voice, without 
 a trace of his former passion, and the meeting broke up. The 
 room had quickly filled when it was known that he was up 
 again ; and as he descended the steps of the platform, after 
 shaking hands with the chairman, the hundreds present broke 
 into a sudden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte pressed for- 
 ward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home. 
 ' Come with us, Mr. Elsmere ; you look like a ghost.' But he 
 shook his head, smiling. ' No, thank you, Lady Charlotte I 
 must have some air,' and he took her out on his arm, while 
 Flaxman followed with Rose. 
 
 It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he 
 had seen come in. But there were no signs of him. ' I had an 
 idea he would have spoken,' he thought. ' Just as well, perhaps. 
 We should have had a row.' 
 
 Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they 
 drove off, with a long breath, and the inward reflection, ' So his 
 wife wouldn't come and hear him ! Must be a woman with a 
 character that a Strafford in petticoats ! ' 
 
 Robert turned up the street to the City, the tall slight figure
 
 CHAP. XL NEW OPENINGS 501 
 
 seeming to shrink together as he walked. After his passionate 
 effort, indescribable depression had overtaken him. 
 
 ' Words words ! ' he said to himself, striking out his hands 
 in a kind of feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own 
 powerlessness, against that weight of the present and the actual 
 which seems to the enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy 
 as the mass of ./Etna on the breast of Enceladus. 
 
 Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man's figure in a long 
 black robe stopped him and laid a hand on his arm. 
 
 ' Newcome ! ' cried Robert, standing still. 
 
 'I was there,' said the other, bending forward and looking 
 close into his eyes. ' I heard almost all. I went to confront, to 
 denounce you ! ' 
 
 By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the attenu- 
 ated whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to which 
 weeks of fasting and mystical excitement had given a kind of 
 unearthly remoteness. He gathered himself together with an 
 inward groan. He felt as though there were no force in him at 
 that moment wherewith to meet reproaches, to beat down 
 fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength seemed un- 
 bearable. 
 
 Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden 
 shrinking and hesitation. He had often in old days felt the 
 same sense of power over the man who yet, in what seemed his 
 weakness, had always escaped him in the end. 
 
 ' I went to denounce,' he continued, in a strange tense voice, 
 ' and the Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching for you 
 here. These words are not mine I speak. I waited patiently 
 in that room till the Lord should deliver His enemy into my 
 hand. My wrath was hot against the deserter that could not 
 even desert in silence hot against his dupes. Then suddenly 
 words came to me they have come to me before, they burn up 
 the very heart and marrow in me " Who is he that saith, and it 
 cometh to pass, and the Lord commandeth it not ? " There they 
 were in my ears, written on the walls the air ' 
 
 The hand dropped from Robert's arm. A dull look of defeat, 
 of regret, darkened the gleaming eyes. They were standing in 
 a quiet deserted street, but through a side opening the lights, 
 the noise, the turbulence of the open-air market came drifting 
 to them through the rainy atmospnere which blurred and mag- 
 nified everything. 
 
 ' Ay, after days and nights in His most blessed sanctuary ' 
 Newcome resumed slowly, 'I came by His commission, as I 
 thought, to fight His battle with a traitor ! And at the last 
 moment His strength, which was in me, went f rom me. I sat 
 there dumb ; His hand was heavy upon me. His will be done ! ' 
 
 The voice sank the priest drew his thin shaking hand across 
 his eyes, as though the awe of a mysterious struggle were still 
 upon him. Then he turned again to Elsmere, his face softening, 
 radiating.
 
 502 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ' Elsmere, take the sign, the message ! I thought it was 
 given to me to declare the Lord's wrath. Instead, He sends 
 you once more by me, even now even fresh from this new 
 defiance of His mercy, the tender offer of His grace ! He lies 
 at rest to-night, my brother ' what sweetness in the low vibrat- 
 ing tones ! ' after all the anguish. Let me draw you down on 
 your knees beside Him. It is you, you, who have helped to 
 drive in the nails, to embitter the agony ! It is you who in His 
 loneliness have been robbing Him of the souls that should be 
 His ! It is you who have been doing your utmost to make His 
 Cross and Passion of no effect. Oh, let it break your heart to 
 think of it ! Watch by Him to-night 2 my friend, my brother, 
 and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim His own ! ' 
 
 Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beau- 
 tiful ; never surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more pene- 
 trating gentleness. After the storm of those opening words the 
 change was magical. The tears stood in Elsmere's eyes. But 
 his quick insight, in spite of himself, divined the subtle natural 
 facts behind the outburst, the strained physical state, the irrit- 
 able brain all the consequences of a long defiance of physical 
 and mental law. The priest repelled him, the man drew him 
 like a magnet. 
 
 ' What can I say to you, Newcpme ? ' he cried despairingly. 
 ' Let me say nothing, dear old friend ! I am tired out ; so, I 
 expect, are you. I know what this week has been to you. 
 Walk with me a little. Leave these great things alone. We 
 cannot agree. Be content God knows ! Tell me about the old 
 place and the people. I long for news of them.' 
 
 A sort of shudder passed through his companion. Newcorne 
 stood wrestling with himself. It was like the slow departure of 
 a possessing force. Then he sombrely assented, and they turned 
 towards the City. But his answers, as Robert questioned him, 
 were sharp and mechanical, and presently it became evident 
 that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere rigor- 
 ously held him were more than he could bear. 
 
 As they reached St. Paul's, towering into the watery moon- 
 light of the clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night. 
 
 ' You came to me in the spirit of war, said Robert, with some 
 emotion, as he held his hand ; ' give me instead the grasp of 
 peace ! ' 
 
 The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A 
 melancholy quivering smile dawned on the priest's delicate lip. 
 
 ' God bless you God restore you ! ' he said sadly, and was 
 gone. 
 
 CHAPTER XLI 
 
 A WEEK later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, 
 after his story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf
 
 CHAP. XLI NEW OPENINGS 503 
 
 of some thirty or forty members of the North R Club that 
 
 he would give them a course of lectures on the New Testament. 
 One of them was the gasfitter Charles Richards : another was 
 the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally challenged Robert 
 to deliver himself ; and the third was a tough old Scotchman of 
 sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of Hume 
 and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest 
 of cracked voices, the Club had writhed many an impatient half- 
 hour on debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a 
 kind of ' sport ' as compared with the rest of his character, which 
 made him a valued designer in the pottery works ; but his real 
 interests were speculative and argumentative, concerned with 
 ' common nawtions and the praimary elements of reason,' and the 
 appearance of Robert in the district seemed to offer him at last 
 a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly suspected that 
 the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give 
 mostly as a new and favourable exercising ground for their own 
 wits ; but he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and 
 fixed Sunday afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture. 
 
 His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was de- 
 livered to thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the 
 political and social state of Palestine and the East at the time of 
 Christ's birth ; and Robert, who was as fervent a believer in 
 ' large maps ' as Lord Salisbury, had prepared a goodly store of 
 them for the occasion, together with a number of drawings and 
 photographs which formed part of the collection he had been 
 gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. There 
 was nothing he laid more stress on than these helps to the eye 
 and imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was accustomed 
 to maintain in his arguments with Hugh Flaxman that the or- 
 thodox traditional teaching of Christianity would become im- 
 possible as soon as it should be the habit to make a free and 
 modern use of history and geography and social material in con- 
 nection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, he would say. 
 to break down the irrational barrier which men have raised 
 about this particular tract of historical space, nothing helps so 
 much to let in the light and air of scientific thought upon it, and 
 therefore nothing prepares the way so effectively for a series 
 of new conceptions. 
 
 By a kind of natural selection Richards became Elsmere's 
 chief helper and adjutant in the Sunday lectures, with regard 
 to all such matters as beating up recruits, keeping guard over 
 portfolios, handing round maps and photographs, etc., sup- 
 planting in this function the jealous and sensitive Mackay, who, 
 after his original opposition, had now arrived at regarding 
 Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer's quick 
 smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right. 
 The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, however, was 
 irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion for Robert 
 as for a being of another order and another world. In the dis-
 
 504 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 cussions which generally followed the lecture he showed a recep- 
 tiveness, an intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of 
 the mind but of the heart. He loved, therefore he understood. 
 At the club he stood for Elsmere with a quivering spasmodic 
 eloquence, as against Andrews and the Secularists. One thing 
 only puzzled Robert. Among all the little fellow's sallies and 
 indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no reference to his 
 home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert ab- 
 solutely at arm's length. Robert knew that he was married and 
 had children, nothing more. 
 
 The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture 
 somewhat crestfallen. 
 
 ' Not the sort of stooff I'd expected ! ' he said, with a shade of 
 perplexity on the rugged face. ' He doosn't talk eneuf in the 
 aobstract for me.' 
 
 But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of 
 the Gospels, got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a 
 whole armoury of new arguments in support of Hume's doctrine 
 of conscience, and in defiance of 'that blatin' creetur, Reid.' 
 The thesis with which Robert, drawing on some of the stores 
 supplied him by the squire's book, began his account i.e. the 
 gradual growth within the limits of history of man's capacity 
 for telling the exact truth fitted in, to the Scotchman's think- 
 ing, so providentially with his own favourite experimental doc- 
 trines as against the ' intueetion ' folks, ' who will have it that a 
 babby's got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone, ef it only knew 
 it ! ' that afterwards he never missed a lecture. 
 
 Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited tempera- 
 ment of the Genevese frondeur, which made Geneva the head- 
 quarters of Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to 
 make her the headquarters of continental radicalism in the nine- 
 teenth. Robert never felt his wits so much stretched and sharp- 
 ened as when after the lecture Lestrange was putting questions 
 and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence worthy of 
 a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the Cal- 
 vinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau. 
 Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and 
 adroitness. He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes 
 had warned him. But luckily he. knew a great deal ; his thought 
 was clearing and settling month by month, and whatever he 
 may have lost at any moment by the turn of an argument, he 
 recovered immediately afterwards by the force of personality, 
 and of a single-mindedness in which there was never a trace of 
 personal grasping. 
 
 Week by week the lecture became more absorbing to him, the 
 men more pliant, his hold on them firmer. His disinterestedness, 
 his brightness and resource, perhaps, too, the signs about him of 
 a light and frail physical organisation, the novelty of his posi- 
 tion, the inventiveness of his method, gave him little by little 
 an immense power in the place. After the first two lectures
 
 CHAP. XLI NEW OPENINGS 505 
 
 Murray Edwardes became his constant and enthusiastic hearer 
 on Sunday afternoons, and, catching some of Robert's ways and 
 spirit, he gradually brought his own chapel and teaching more 
 and more into line with the Elgood Street undertaking. So that 
 the venture of the two men began to take ever larger propor- 
 tions and, kindled by the growing interest and feeling about 
 him, dreams began to rise in Elsmere's mind which as yet he 
 hardly dared to cherish ; which came and went, however, weav- 
 ing a substance for themselves out of each successive incident 
 and effort. 
 
 Meanwhile he was at work on an average three evenings in 
 the week besides the Sunday. In West End drawing-rooms his 
 personal gift had begun to tell no less than in this crowded, 
 squalid East ; and as his aims became known, other men, find- 
 ing the thoughts of their own hearts revealed in him, or touched 
 with that social compunction which is one of the notes of our 
 time, came down and became his helpers. Of all the social pro- 
 jects of which that Elgood Street room became the centre, Els- 
 mere was, in some sense, the life and inspiration. But it was 
 not these projects themselves which made this period of his 
 life remarkable. London at the present moment, it it be honey- 
 combed with vice and misery, is also honeycombed with the 
 labour of an ever-expanding charity. Week by week men and 
 women of like gifts and energies with Elsmere spend themselves, 
 as he did, in the constant effort to serve and to alleviate. What 
 was noticeable, what was remarkable in this work of his, was 
 the spirit, the religious passion which, radiating from him, began 
 after a while, to kindle the whole body of men about him. It 
 was from his Sunday lectures and his talks with the children, 
 boys and girls, who came in after the lecture to spend a happy 
 hour and a half with him on Sunday afternoons, that in later 
 years hundreds of men and women will date the beginnings of 
 a new absorbing life. There came a time, indeed, when, instead 
 of meeting criticism by argument, Robert was able simply to 
 point to accomplished facts. 'You ask me,' he would say in 
 effect. ' to prove to you that men can love, can make a new and 
 fruitful use, for daily life and conduct, of a merely human 
 Christ. Go amongst our men, talk to our children, and satisfy 
 yourself. A little while ago scores of these men either hated the 
 very name of Christianity or were entirely indifferent to it. To 
 scores of them now the name of the teacher of Nazareth, the 
 victim of Jerusalem, is dear and sacred ; his life, his death, his 
 words, are becoming once more a constant source of moral effort 
 and spiritual hope. See for yourself ! ' 
 
 However, we are anticipating. Let us go back to May. 
 
 One beautiful morning Robert was sitting working in his 
 study, his windows open to the breezy blue sky and the budding 
 plane-trees outside, when the door was thrown open and ' Mr. 
 Wendover ' was announced. 
 
 The squire entered ; but what a shrunken and aged squire !
 
 506 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 The gait was feeble, the bearing had lost all its old erectness, 
 the bronzed strength of the face had given place to a waxen 
 and ominous pallor. Robert, springing up with joy to meet the 
 great gust of Murewell air which seemed to blow about him 
 with the mention of the squire's name, was struck, arrested. 
 He guided his guest to a chair with an almost filial carefulness. 
 
 ' I don't believe, Squire,' he exclaimed, ' you ought to be doing 
 this wandering about London by yourself ! ' 
 
 But the squire, as silent and angular as ever when anything 
 personal to himself was concerned, would take no notice of the 
 implied anxiety and sympathy. He grasped his umbrella 
 between his knees with a pair of brown twisted hands, and, 
 sitting very upright, looked critically round the room. Robert, 
 studying the dwindled figure, remembered with a pang the 
 saying of another Oxford scholar, a propos of the death of a 
 young man of extraordinary promise, ' What learning has perished 
 with him I How vain seems all toil to acquire / ' and the words, 
 as they passed through his mind, seemed to him to ring another 
 death-knell. 
 
 But after the first painful impression he could not help 
 losing himself in the pleasure of the familiar face, the Murewell 
 associations. 
 
 ' How is the village, and the Institute ? And what sort of 
 man is my successor the man, I mean, who came after Armit- 
 stead?' 
 
 ' I had him once to dinner,' said the squire briefly : ' he made 
 a false quantity, and asked me to subscribe to the Church 
 Missionary Society. I haven't seen him since. He and the 
 village have been at loggerheads about the Institute, I believe. 
 He wanted to turn out the dissenters. Bateson came to me, and 
 we circumvented him, of course. But the man's an ass. Don't 
 talk of him ! ' 
 
 Robert sighed a long sigh. Was all his work undone ? It 
 wrung his heart to remember the opening of the Institute, the 
 ardour of his boys. He asked a few questions about individuals, 
 but soon gave it up as hopeless. The squirexneither knew nor 
 cared. 
 
 'And Mrs. Darcy?' 
 
 ' My sister had tea in her thirtieth summer-house last Sunday,' 
 remarked the squire grimly. ' She wished me to communicate 
 the fact to you and Mrs. Elsmere. Also, that the worst novel 
 of the century will be out in a fortnight, and she trusts to you 
 to see it well reviewed in all the leading journals.' 
 
 Robert laughed, but it was not very easy to laugh. There 
 was a sort of ghastly undercurrent in the squire's sarcasms that 
 effectually deprived them of anything mirthful. 
 
 ' And your book ? ' 
 
 ' Is in abeyance. I shall bequeath you the manuscript in my 
 will, to do what you like with. 
 
 'Squire!'
 
 CHAP. XLI NEW OPENINGS 507 
 
 ' Quite true ! If you had stayed, I should have finished it, I 
 suppose. But after a certain age the toil of spinning cobwebs 
 entirely out of his own brain becomes too much for a man.' 
 
 It was the first thing of the sort that iron mouth had ever 
 said to him. Elsmere was painfully touched. 
 
 ' You must not you shall not give it up,' he urged. ' Publish 
 the first part alone, and ask me for any help you please.' 
 
 The squire shook his head. 
 
 ' Let it be. Your paper in the Nineteenth Century showed 
 me that the best thing I can do is to hand on my materials to 
 you. Though I am not sure that when you have got them you 
 will make the best use of them. You and Grey between you 
 call yourselves Liberals, and imagine yourselves reformers, and 
 all the while you are doing nothing but playing into the hands 
 of the Blacks. All this theistic philosophy of yours only means 
 so much grist to their mill in the end.' 
 
 'They don't see it in that light themselves,' said Robert, 
 smiling. 
 
 'No,' returned the squire, 'because most men are puzzle- 
 heads. Why,' he added, looking darkly at Robert, while the 
 great head fell forward on his breast in the familiar Murewell 
 attitude, ' why can't you do your work and let the preaching 
 alone 1 ' 
 
 ' Because,' said Robert, ' the preaching seems to me my work. 
 There is the great difference between us, Squire. You look 
 upon knowledge as an end in itself. It may be so. But to me 
 knowledge has always been valuable first and foremost for its 
 bearing on life.' 
 
 'Fatal twist that,' returned the squire harshly. 'Yes, I 
 know ; it was always in you. Well, are you happy ? does this 
 new crusade of yours give you pleasure ? ' 
 
 'Happiness,' replied Robert, leaning against the chimney- 
 piece and speaking in a low voice, ' is always relative. No one 
 knows it better than you. Life is full of oppositions. But the 
 work takes my whole heart and all my energies.' 
 
 The squire looked at him in disapproving silence for a while. 
 
 ' You will bury your lif e in it miserably,' he said at last ; ' it 
 will be a toil of Sisyphus leaving no trace behind it ; whereas 
 such a book as you might write, if you gave your lif e to it, might 
 live and work, and harry the enemy when you are gone.' 
 
 ! Robert forbore the natural retort. 
 
 The squire went round his library, making remarks, with all 
 the caustic shrewdness natural to him, on the new volumes that 
 Robert had acquired since their walks and talks together. 
 
 ' The Germans,' he said at last, putting back a book into the 
 shelves with a new accent of distaste and weariness, ' are begin- 
 ning to founder in the sea of their own learning. Sometimes I 
 think I will read no more German. It is a nation of learned 
 fools, none of whom ever sees an inch beyond his own pro- 
 fessorial nose.'
 
 508 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many 
 feelings perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate 
 sense of wrong at this man's hands was kind to him, and talked 
 and smiled, indeed, so much that the squire for the first time in 
 his life took individual notice of her, and as he parted with 
 Elsmere in the hall made the remark that Mrs. Elsmere seemed 
 to like London, to which Robert, busy in an opportune search 
 for his guest's coat, made no reply. 
 
 ' When are you coming to Murewell ? ' the squire said to him 
 abruptly, as he stood at the door muffled up as though it were 
 December. ' There are a good many points in that last article 
 you want talking to about. Come next month with Mrs. 
 Elsmere.' 
 
 Robert drew a long breath, inspired by many feelings. 
 
 ' I will come, but not yet. I must get broken in here more 
 thoroughly first. Murewell touches me too deeply, and my 
 wife. You are going abroad in the summer, you say. Let me 
 come to you in the autumn.' 
 
 The squire said nothing, and went his way, leaning heavily 
 on his stick, across the square. Robert felt himself a brute to 
 let him go, and almost ran after him. 
 
 That evening Robert was disquieted by the receipt of a note 
 from a young fellow of St. Anselm's, an intimate friend and 
 occasional secretary of Grey. Grey, the writer said, had received 
 Robert's last letter, was deeply interested in his account of his 
 work, and begged him to write again. He would have written, 
 but that he was himself in the doctor's hands, suffering from 
 various ills, probably connected with an attack of malarial 
 fever which had befallen him in Rome the year before. 
 
 Catherine found him poring over the letter, and, as it seemed 
 to her, oppressed by an anxiety out of all proportion to the 
 news itself. 
 
 'They are not really troubled, I think,' she said, kneeling 
 down beside him, and laying her cheek against his. ' He will 
 soon get over it, Robert.' 
 
 But, alas ! this mood, the tender characteristic mood of the 
 old Catherine, was becoming rarer and rarer with her. As the 
 spring expanded, as the sun and the leaves came back, poor 
 Catherines temper had only grown more wintry and more 
 rigid. Her life was full of moments of acute suffering. Never, 
 for instance, did she forget the evening of Robert's lecture to 
 the club. All the time he was away she had sat brooding by 
 herself in the drawing-room, divining with a bitter clairvoyance 
 *all that scene in which he was taking part, her being shaken 
 with a tempest of misery and repulsion. And together with 
 that torturing image of a glaring room in which her husband, 
 once Christ's loyal minister, was employing all his powers of 
 mind and speech to make it easier for ignorant men to desert 
 and fight against the Lord who bought them, there mingled a 
 hundred memories of her father which were now her constant
 
 CHAP. XLI NEW OPENINGS 509 
 
 companions. In proportion as Robert and she became more 
 divided, her dead father resumed a ghostly hold upon her. 
 There were days when she went about rigid and silent, in 
 reality living altogether in the past, among the gray farms, 
 the crags, and the stony ways of the mountains. 
 
 At such times her mind would be full of pictures of her 
 father's ministrations his talks with the shepherds on the hills, 
 with the women at their doors, his pale dreamer's face beside 
 some wild deathbed, shining with the Divine message, the 
 'visions' which to her awestruck childish sense would often 
 seem to hold him in their silent walks among the misty hills. 
 
 Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognise 
 these states of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to 
 shrink more and more sensitively while they lasted from any 
 collision with her. He kept his work, his friends, his engage- 
 ments to himself, talking resolutely of other things, she trying 
 to do the same, but with less success, as her nature was less 
 pliant than his. 
 
 Then there would come moments when the inward pre- 
 occupation would give way, and that strong need of loving, which 
 was, after all, the basis of Catherine's character, would break 
 hungrily through, and the wife of their early married days 
 would reappear, though still only with limitations. A certain 
 nervous physical dread of any approach to a particular range 
 of subjects with her husband was always present in her. Nay, 
 through all these months it gradually increased in morbid 
 strength. Shock had produced it : perhaps shock alone could 
 loosen the stifling pressure of it. But still every now and then 
 her mood was brighter, more caressing, and the area of common 
 mundane interests seemed suddenly to broaden for them. 
 
 Robert did not always make a wise use of these happier 
 times ; he was incessantly possessed with his old idea that if 
 she only would allow herself some very ordinary intercourse 
 with his world, her mood would become less strained, his occu- 
 pations and his friends would cease to be such bugbears to her, 
 and, for his comfort and hers, she might ultimately be able to 
 sympathise with certain sides at any rate of his work. 
 
 So again and again, when her manner no longer threw him 
 back on himself, he made efforts and experiments. But he 
 managed them far less cleverly than he would have managed 
 anybody else's affairs, as generally happens. For instance, at 
 a period when he was feeling more enthusiasm than usual for 
 his colleague Wardlaw, and when Catherine was more accessible 
 than usual, it suddenly occurred to him to make an effort to 
 bring them together. Brought face to face, each must recognise 
 the nobleness of the other. He felt boyishly confident of it. 
 So he made it a point, tenderly but insistently, that Catherine 
 should ask Wardlaw and his wife to come and see them. And 
 Catherine, driven obscurely by a longing to yield in something, 
 which recurred, and often terrified herself, yielded in this.
 
 510 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 The Wardlaws, who in general never went into society, were 
 asked to a quiet dinner in Bedford Square, and came. Then, 
 of course, it appeared that Robert, with the idealist's blindness, 
 had forgotten a hundred small differences of temperament and 
 training which must make it impossible for Catherine, in a 
 state of tension, to see the hero in James Wardlaw. It was an 
 unlucky dinner. James Wardlaw, with all his heroisms and 
 virtues, had long ago dropped most of those delicate intuitions 
 and divinations, which make the charm of life in society, along 
 the rough paths of a strenuous philanthropy. He had no tact, 
 and, like most saints, he drew a certain amount of inspiration 
 from a contented ignorance of his neighbour's point of view. 
 Also, he was not a man who made much of women, and he held 
 strong views as to the subordination of wives. It never occurred 
 to him that Robert might have a Dissenter in his own house- 
 hold, and as, in spite of their speculative differences, he had 
 always been accustomed, to talk freely with Robert, he now 
 talked freely to Robert plus his wife, assuming, as every good 
 Comtist does, that the husband is the wife's pope. 
 
 Moreover, a solitary eccentric life, far from the society of his 
 equals, had developed in him a good many crude Jacobinisms. 
 His experience of London clergymen, for instance, had not been 
 particularly favourable, and he had a store of anecdotes on the 
 subject which Robert had heard before, but which now, repeated 
 in Catherine's presence, seemed to have lost every shred of 
 humour they once possessed. Poor Elsmere tried with all his 
 might to divert the stream, but it showed a tormenting ten- 
 dency to recur to the same channel. And meanwhile the little 
 spectacled wife, dressed in a high home-made cashmere, sat 
 looking at her husband with a benevolent and smiling admira- 
 tion. She kept all her eloquence for the poor. 
 
 After dinner things grew worse. Mrs. Wardlaw had recently 
 presented her husband with a third infant, and the ardent pair 
 had taken advantage of the visit to London of an eminent 
 French Comtist to have it baptized with full Comtist rites. 
 Wardlaw stood astride on the rug, giving the assembled com- 
 pany a minute account of the ceremony observed, while his 
 wife threw in gentle explanatory interjections. The manner 
 of both showed a certain exasperating confidence, if not in the 
 active sympathy, at least in the impartial curiosity of their 
 audience, and in the importance to modern religious history of 
 the incident itself. Catherine's silence grew deeper and deeper ; 
 the conversation fell entirely to Robert. _ At last Robert, by 
 main force, as it were, got Wardlaw off into politics, but the 
 new Irish Coercion Bill was hardly introduced before the irre- 
 pressible being turned to Catherine, and said to her with smiling 
 obtuseness 
 
 ' I don't believe I've seen you at one of your husband's Sunday 
 addresses yet, Mrs. Elsmere ? And it isn't so far from this part 
 of the world either.'
 
 CHAP. XLII NEW OPENINGS 511 
 
 Catherine slowly raised her beautiful large eyes upon him. 
 Robert, looking at her with a qualm, saw an expression he was 
 learning to dread flash across the face. 
 
 ' I have my Sunday school at that time, Mr. Wardlaw. I am 
 a Churchwoman.' 
 
 The tone had a touch of hauteur Robert had hardly ever 
 heard from his wife before. It effectually stopped all further 
 conversation. Wardlaw fell into silence, reflecting that he had 
 been a fool. His wife, with a timid flush, drew out her knitting, 
 and stuck to it for the twenty minutes that remained. Catherine 
 immediately did her best to talk, to be pleasant ; but the dis- 
 comfort of the little party was too great. It broke up at ten, 
 and the Wardlaws departed. 
 
 Catherine stood on the rug while Elsmere went with his 
 guests to the door, waiting restlessly for her husband's return. 
 Robert, however, came back to her, tired, wounded, and out of 
 spirits, feeling that the attempt had been wholly unsuccessful, 
 and shrinking from any further talk about it. He at once sat 
 down to some letters for the late post. Catherine lingered a 
 little, watching him, longing miserably, like any girl of eighteen, 
 to throw herself on his neck and reproach him for their unhap- 
 piness, his friends she knew not what ! He all the time was 
 intimately conscious of her presence, of her pale beauty, which 
 now at twenty-nine, in spite of its severity, had a subtler finish 
 and attraction than ever, of the restless little movements so 
 unlike herself, which she made from time to time. But neither 
 spoke except upon indifferent things. Once more the difficult 
 conditions of their lives seemed too obvious, too oppressive. 
 Both were ultimately conquered by the same sore impulse to 
 let speech alone. 
 
 CHAPTER XLII 
 
 AND after this little scene, through the busy exciting weeks of 
 the season which followed, Robert, taxed to the utmost on all 
 sides, yielded to the impulse of silence more and more. 
 
 Society was another difficulty between them. Robert de- 
 lighted in it so far as his East End life allowed him to have it. 
 No one was ever more ready to take other men and women at 
 their own valuation than he. Nothing was so easy to him as to 
 believe in other people's goodness, or cleverness, or superhuman 
 achievement. On the other hand, London is kind to such men 
 as Robert Elsmere. His talk, his writing, were becoming 
 known and relished ; and even the most rigid of the old school 
 found it difficult to be angry with him. His knowledge of the 
 poor and of social questions attracted the men of actions ; his 
 growing historical reputation drew the attention of the men of 
 thought. Most people wished to know him and to talk to him,
 
 512 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 and Catherine, smiled upon for his sake, and assumed to be his 
 chief disciple, felt herself more and more bewildered and 
 antagonistic as the season rushed on. 
 
 For what pleasure could she get out of these dinners and 
 these evenings, which supplied Robert with so much intellectual 
 stimulus ? With her all the moral nerves were jarring and out 
 of tune. At any time Richard Leyburn's daughter would have 
 found it hard to tolerate a society where everything is an open 
 question and all confessions of faith are more or less bad taste. 
 But now, when there was no refuge to fall back upon in Robert's 
 arms, no certainty of his sympathy nay, a certainty that, 
 however tender and pitiful he might be, he would still think 
 her wrong and mistaken ! She went here and there obediently 
 because he wished ; but her youth seemed to be ebbing, the 
 old Murewell gaiety entirely left her, and people in general 
 wondered why Elsmere should have married a wife older than 
 himself, and apparently so unsuited to him in temperament. 
 
 Especially was she tried at Madame de Netteville's. For 
 Robert's sake she tried for a time to put aside her first im- 
 pression and to bear Madame de Netteville's evenings little 
 dreaming, poor thing, all the time that Madame de Netteville 
 thought her presence at the famous ' Fridays ' an incubus only 
 to be put up with because the husband was becoming socially 
 an indispensable. 
 
 But after two or three Fridays Catherine's endurance failed 
 her. On the last occasion she found herself late in the evening 
 hemmed in behind Madame de Netteville and a distinguished 
 African explorer, who was the lion of the evening. Eugenie de 
 Netteville had forgotten her silent neighbour, and presently, 
 with some biting little phrase or other, she asked the great man 
 his opinion on a burning topic of the day, the results of Church 
 Missions in Africa. The great man laughed, shrugged his 
 shoulders, and ran lightly through a string of stories in which 
 both missionaries and converts played parts which were either 
 grotesque or worse. Madame de Netteville thought the stories 
 amusing, and as one ceased she provoked another, her black 
 eyes full of a dry laughter, her white hand lazily plying her 
 great ostrich fan. 
 
 Suddenly a figure rose behind them. 
 
 ' Oh, Mrs. Elsmere ! ' said Madame de Netteville, starting, 
 and then coolly recovering herself, 'I had no idea you were 
 there all alone. I am afraid our conversation has been disagree- 
 able to you. I am afraid you are a friend of missions ! ' 
 
 And her glance, turning from Catherine to her companion, 
 made a little malicious signal to him which only he detected, as 
 though bidding him take note of a curiosity. 
 
 ' Yes, I care for them, I wish for their success,' said Catherine, 
 one hand, which trembled slightly, resting on the table beside 
 her, her great gray eyes fixed on Madame de Netteville. ' No 
 Christian has any right to do otherwise.'
 
 CHAP. XLII NEW OPENINGS 513 
 
 Poor brave goaded soul ! She had a vague idea of ' bearing 
 testimony' as her father would have borne it in like circum- 
 stances. But she turned very pale. Even to her the word 
 ' Christian ' sounded like a bombshell in that room. The great 
 traveller looked up astounded. He saw a tall woman in white 
 with a beautiful head, a delicate face, a something indescribably 
 noble and unusual in her whole look and attitude. She looked 
 like a Quaker prophetess like Dinah Morris in society like 
 but his comparisons failed him. How did such a being come 
 there ? He was amazed ; but he was a man of taste, and 
 Madame de Netteville caught a certain aesthetic approbation 
 in his look. 
 
 She rose, her expression hard and bright as usual. 
 
 'May one Christian pronounce for all?' she said with a 
 scornful affectation of meekness. 'Mrs. Elsmere, please find 
 some chair more comfortable than that ottoman ; and Mr. 
 Ansdale, will you come and be introduced to Lady Aubrey ? ' 
 
 After her guests had gone Madame de Netteville came back 
 to the fire flushed and frowning. It seemed to her that in that 
 strange little encounter she had suffered, and she never forgot 
 or forgave the smallest social discomfiture. 
 
 ' Can I put up with that again ? ' she asked herself with a 
 contemptuous hardening of the lip. 'I suppose I must if he 
 cannot be got without her. But 1 have an instinct that it is 
 over that she will not appear here again. Daudet might make 
 use of her I can't. What a specimen ! A boy and girl match, 
 I suppose. What else could have induced that poor wretch to 
 cut his throat in such fashion ? He, of all men ! ' 
 
 And Eugenie de Netteville stood thinking not, apparently, 
 of the puritanical wife; the dangerous softness which over- 
 spread the face could have had no connection with Catherine. 
 
 Madame de Netteville's instinct was just. Catherine Elsmere 
 never appeared again in her drawing-room. 
 
 But, with a little sad confession of her own invincible 
 distaste, the wife pressed the husband to go without her. She 
 urged it at a bitter moment, when it was clear to her that their 
 lives must of necessity, even in outward matters, be more 
 separate than before. Elsmere resisted for a time ; then, lured 
 one evening towards the end of February by the prospect 
 conveyed in a note from Madame de Netteville, wherein 
 Catherine was mentioned in the most scrupulously civil terms, 
 of meeting one of the most eminent of French critics, he went, 
 and thenceforward went often. He had, so far, no particular 
 liking for the hostess ; he hated some of her habitues ; but there 
 was no doubt that in some ways she made an admirable holder 
 of a salon, and that round about her there was a subtle mixture 
 of elements, a liberty of discussion and comment, to be found 
 nowhere else. And how bracing and refreshing was that free 
 play of equal mind to the man weary sometimes of his leader's 
 rdle and weary of himself ! 
 
 2L
 
 514 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vr 
 
 As to the woman, his social naivete, which was extraordinary, 
 but in a man of his type most natural, made him accept her 
 exactly as he found her. If there were two or three people in 
 Paris or London who knew or suspected incidents of Madame 
 de Netteville's young married days which made her reception 
 at some of the strictest English houses a matter of cynical 
 amusement to them, not the remotest inkling of their know- 
 ledge was ever likely to reach Elsmere. He was not a man 
 who attracted scandals. Nor was it anybody's interest to 
 spread them. Madame de Netteville's position in London 
 society was obviously excellent. If she had peculiarities of 
 manner and speech they were easily supposed to be French. 
 Meanwhile she was undeniably rich and distinguished, and 
 gifted with a most remarkable power of protecting herself and 
 her neighbours from boredom. At the same time, though 
 Elsmere was, in truth, more interested in her friends than in 
 her, he could not possibly be insensible to the consideration 
 shown for him in her drawing-room. Madame de Netteville 
 allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates as to the 
 
 Eaung reformer's social simplicity, his dreams, his optimisms, 
 ut those intimates were the first to notice that as soon as he 
 entered the room those optimisms of his were adroitly respected. 
 She had various delicate contrivances for giving him the lead ; 
 she exercised a kind of surveillance over the topics introduced ; 
 or in conversation with him she would play that most seductive 
 part of the cynic shamed out of cynicism by the neighbourhood 
 of the enthusiast. 
 
 Presently she began to claim a practical interest in his 
 Elgood Street work. Her offers were made with a curious 
 mixture of sympathy and mockery. Elsmere could not take 
 her seriously. But neither could he refuse to accept her money, 
 if she chose to spend it on a library for Elgood Street, or to 
 consult with her about the choice of books. This whim of hers 
 created a certain friendly bond between them which was not 
 present before. And on Elsmere's side it was strengthened 
 when, one evening, in a corner of her inner drawing-room, 
 Madame de Netteville suddenly, but very quietly, told him the 
 story of her life her English youth, her elderly French husband, 
 the death of her only child, and her flight as a young widow to 
 England during the war of 1870. She told the story of the 
 child, as it seemed to Elsmere, with a deliberate avoidance of 
 emotion, nay, even with a certain hardness. But it touched 
 him profoundly. And everything else that she said, though she 
 professed no great regret for her husband, or for the break-up 
 of her French life, and though everything was reticent and 
 measured, deepened the impression of a real forlornness behind 
 all the outward brilliance and social importance. He began to 
 feel a deep and kindly pity for her, coupled with an earnest 
 wish that he could help her to make her life more adequate and 
 satisfying. And all this he showed in the look of his frank gray
 
 CHAP. XLII NEW OPENINGS 515 
 
 eyes, in the cordial grasp of the hand with which he said good- 
 bye to her. 
 
 Madame de Netteville's gaze followed him out of the room 
 the tall boyish figure, the nobly carried head. The riddle of 
 her flushed cheek and sparkling eye was hard to read. But 
 there were one or two persons living who could have read it, 
 and who could have warned you that the true story of Eugenie 
 de Netteville's life was written, not in her literary studies or 
 her social triumphs, but in various recurrent outbreaks of un- 
 bridled impulse the secret, and in one or two cases the shame- 
 ful landmarks of her past. And, as persons of experience, they 
 could also have warned you that the cold intriguer, always mis- 
 tress of herself, only exists in fiction, and that a certain poisoned 
 and fevered interest in the religious leader, the young and pious 
 priest, as such, is common enough among the corrupter women 
 of all societies. 
 
 Towards the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine ' en petit 
 comit^, a gentlemen's dinner except for my cousin, Lady Aubrey 
 WillerV to meet an eminent Liberal Catholic, a friend of 
 Montalembert's youth. 
 
 It was a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw ex- 
 periment. Do what each would, the sore silence between the 
 husband and wife was growing, was swallowing up more of life. 
 
 ' Shall I go, Catherine ? ' he asked, handing her the note. 
 
 'It would interest you,' she said gently, giving it back to 
 him scrupulously, as though she had nothing to do with it. 
 
 He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, look- 
 ing at her with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal 
 written in them. His heart was hungry for that old clinging 
 dependence, that willing weakness of love, her youth had 
 yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent strength of anta- 
 gonism. The memory of her Murewell self flashed miserably 
 through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence towards 
 him after her first sight of Newcome, of their night walks dur- 
 ing the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his arms only 
 the ghost and shadow of that Murewell Catherine ? 
 
 She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, 
 for she gave a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a 
 kind of agony to resist. 
 
 ' Let me go, Robert ! ' she said gently, kissing him on the 
 forehead and drawing back. ' I hear Mary calling, and nurse 
 is out.' 
 
 The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville's 
 dinner-party had come round. About seven o'clock that even- 
 ing Catherine sat with the child in the drawing-room, expect- 
 ing Robert. He had gone off early in the afternoon to the East 
 End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a committee of work- 
 men organised for the establishment of a choral union in R , 
 
 the scheme of which had been Flaxman's chief contribution so 
 far to the Elgood Street undertaking.
 
 516 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open 
 on to the bit of garden, where the trees were already withered 
 and begrimed, that the air without and her heart within were 
 alike stifling and heavy with storm. Something must put an 
 end to this oppression, this misery ! She did not know herself. 
 Her whole inner being seemed to her lessened and degraded by 
 this silent struggle, this fever of the soul, which made impos- 
 sible all those serenities and sweetnesses of thought in which 
 her nature had always lived of old. The fight into which fate 
 had forced her was destroying her. She was drooping like a 
 plant cut off from all that nourishes its life. 
 
 And yet she never conceived it possible that she should re- 
 linquish that fight. Nay, at times there sprang up in her now 
 a dangerous and despairing foresight of even worse things in 
 store. In the middle of her suffering she already began to feel 
 at moments the ascetic's terrible sense of compensation. What, 
 after all, is the Christian life but warfare ? ' / came not to send 
 peace, but a sword 1 ' 
 
 Yes, in these June days Elsmere's happiness was perhaps 
 nearer wreck than it had ever been. All strong natures grow 
 restless under such a pressure as was now weighing on Cathe- 
 rine. Shock and outburst become inevitable. 
 
 So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presenti- 
 ments, by vague terror for herself and him ; while the child 
 tottered about her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impul- 
 sively, with a ceaseless energy, like her father. 
 
 The outer door opened, and she heard Robert's step, and 
 apparently Mr. Flaxman's also. There was a hurried subdued 
 word or two in the hall, and the two entered the room where 
 she was sitting. 
 
 Robert came, pressing back the hair from his eyes with a 
 gesture which with him was the invariable accompaniment of 
 mental trouble. Catherine sprang up. 
 
 ' Robert, you look so tired ! and how late you are ! ' Then as 
 she came nearer to him : ' And vour coat torn blood / ' 
 
 'There is nothing wrong with me, dear,' he said hastily, 
 taking her hands ' nothing ! But it has been an awful after- 
 noon. Flaxman will tell you. I must go to this place, I sup- 
 pose, though I hate the thought of it ! Flaxman, will you tell 
 her all about it ? ' And, loosing his hold, he went heavily out 
 of the room and upstairs. 
 
 ' It has been an accident,' said Flaxman gently, coming for- 
 ward, ' to one of the men of his class. May we sit down, Mrs. 
 Elsmere ? Your husband and I have gone through a good deal 
 these last two hours.' 
 
 He sat down with a long breath, evidently trying to regain 
 his ordinary even manner. His clothes, too, were covered with 
 dust, and his hand shook. Catherine stood before him in con- 
 sternation, while a nurse came for the child. 
 
 'We had just begun our committee at four o'clock,' he said
 
 CHAP. XMI NEW OPENINGS 617 
 
 at last, ' though only about half of the men had arrived, when 
 there was a great shouting and commotion outside, and a man 
 rushed in calling for Elsmere. We ran out, found a great 
 crowd, a huge brewer's dray standing in the street, and a man 
 run over. Your husband pushed his way in. I followed, and, 
 to my horror, I found him kneeling by Charles Richards ! ' 
 
 ' Charles Richards ? ' Catherine repeated vacantly. 
 
 Flaxman looked up at her, as though puzzled ; then a flash 
 of astonishment passed over his face. 
 
 'Elsmere has never told you of Charles Richards, the little 
 gasfitter, who has been his right hand for the past three 
 months 1 ' 
 
 'No never,' she said slowly. 
 
 Again he looked astonished ; then he went on sadly : ' All 
 this spring he has been your husband's shadow I never saw 
 such devotion. We found him lying in the middle of the road. 
 He had only just left work, a man said who had been with him, 
 and was running to the meeting. He slipped and fell, crossing 
 the street, which was muddy from last night's rain. The dray 
 swung round the corner the driver was drunk or careless 
 and they went right over him. One foot was a sickening sight. 
 Your husband and I luckily knew how to lift him for the best. 
 We sent off for doctors. His home was in the next street, as it 
 happened nearer than any hospital : so we carried him there. 
 The neighbours were round the door. 
 
 Then he stopped himself. 
 
 ' Shall I tell you the whole story ? ' he said kindly ; ' it has 
 been a tragedy ! I won't give you details if you had rather 
 not.' 
 
 ' Oh no ! ' she said hurriedly ; ' no tell me.' 
 
 And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his 
 chivalry, should treat her as though she were a girl with 
 nerves. 
 
 ' Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When 
 we got to the house an old woman rushed at me " His wife's 
 in there, but ye'll not find her in her senses ; she's been at it 
 from eight o'clock this morning. We've took the children 
 away." I didn't know what she meant exactly till we got 
 into the little front room. There, such a spectacle ! A young 
 woman on a chair by the fire sleeping heavily, dead drunk ; the 
 breakfast things on the table, the sun blazing in on the dust 
 and the dirt, and on the woman's face. I wanted to carry him 
 into the room on the other side he was unconscious ; but a 
 doctor had come up with us, and made us put him down on a 
 bed there was in the corner. Then we got some brandy and 
 poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his foot, 
 threw something over it. " Nothing to be done," he said " in- 
 ternal injuries he can't live half an hour." The next minute 
 the poor fellow opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed 
 from the wall. Your husband was on the farther side, kneel-
 
 518 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ing. When he opened his eyes, clearly the first thing he saw 
 was his wife. He half sprang up Elsmere caught him and 
 gave a horrible cry indescribably horrible. " At it again, at 
 tt again! My God!" Then he fell back fainting. They got 
 the wife out of the room between them a perfect log you 
 could hear her heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We 
 gave him more brandy and he came to again. He looked up in 
 your husband's face. " She hasn't broke out for two months," 
 he said, so piteously, "two months and now I'm done I'm 
 done and she'll just go straight to the devil ! " And it comes 
 out, so the neighbours told us, that for two years or more he 
 had been patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a 
 word of complaint to anybody, though his life must have been 
 a dog's life. And now, on his deathbed, what seemed to be 
 breaking his heart was, not that he was dying, but that his 
 task was snatched from him ! ' 
 
 Flaxman paused, and looked away out of window. He told 
 his story with difficulty. 
 
 ' Your husband tried to comfort him promised that the wife 
 and children should be his special care, that everything that 
 could be done to save and protect them should be done. And 
 the poor little fellow looked up at him, with the tears running 
 down his cheeks, and and blessed him. "I cared about 
 nothing," he said, "when you came. You've been God to me 
 I've seen Him in you." Then he asked us to say something. 
 Your husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of the 
 Gospels, of St. PauL His eyes grew filmy, but he seemed 
 every now and then to struggle back to life, and as soon as he 
 caught Elsmere's face his look lightened. Towards the last he 
 said something we none of us caught ; but your husband 
 thought it was a line from Emily Bronte's " Hymn," which he 
 said to them last Sunday in lecture.' 
 
 He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no 
 response in her face. 
 
 4 1 asked him about it,' the speaker went on, ' as we came 
 home. He said Grey of St. Anselm's once quoted it to him, and 
 he has had a love for it ever since.' 
 
 ' Did he die while you were there I' asked Catherine presently 
 after a silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He thought her 
 a strange woman. 
 
 ' No,' said Flaxman, almost sharply ; ' but by now it must be 
 over. The last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his 
 children's names. They brought them in, but his hands had to 
 be guided to them. A few minutes after it seemed to me that 
 he was really gone, though he still breathed. The doctor was 
 certain there would be no more consciousness. We stayed 
 nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other 
 relations, and we left him. Oh, it is over now ! ' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London 
 garden. Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of
 
 CHAP. XLII NEW OPENINGS 519 
 
 Elsmere's pale, silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How 
 could she receive such a story in such a way ? 
 
 The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly. 
 
 ' Good-night, Catherine he has told you ? ' 
 
 He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully looking 
 at her, the face full of signs of what he had gone through. 
 
 ' Yes, it was terrible ! ' she said, with an effort. 
 
 His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and went 
 away. 
 
 When he was gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leant 
 against the open French window, looking keenly down on his 
 companion. A new idea had stirred in him. 
 
 And presently, after more talk of the incident of the after- 
 noon, and when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped 
 gradually into the subject of his own experiences in North 
 
 R during the last six months. He assumed all through 
 
 that she knew as much as there was to be known of Elsmere's 
 work, and that she was as much interested as the normal wife 
 is in her husband's doings. His tact, his delicacy, never failed 
 him for a moment. But he spoke of his own impressions, of 
 matters within his personal knowledge. And since the Easter 
 sermon he had been much on Elsmere's track ; he had been 
 filled with curiosity about him. 
 
 Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in 
 long folds about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed on 
 her lap. Sometimes she gave him a startled look ? sometimes 
 she shaded her eyes, while her other hand played silently with 
 her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching her closely, however little 
 he might seem to do so, was struck by her austere and delicate 
 beauty as he had never been before. 
 
 She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened 
 without resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of 
 hunger. He went from story to story, from scene to scene, 
 without any excitement, in his most ordinary manner, making 
 his reserves now and then, expressing his own opinion when it 
 occurred to him, and not always favourably. But gradually the 
 whole picture emerged, began to live before them. At last he 
 hurriedly looked at his watch. 
 
 ' What a time I have kept you ! It has been a relief to talk 
 to you.' 
 
 ' You have not had dinner ! ' she said, looking up at him with 
 a sudden nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly 
 changed his impression of her. 
 
 ' No matter. I will get some at home. Good-night ! ' 
 
 When he was gone she carried the child up to bed ; her 
 supper was brought to her solitary in the dining-room ; and 
 afterwards in the drawing-room, where a soft twilight was 
 fading into a soft and starlit night, she mechanically brought 
 out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by the 
 window. After about an hour she looked up straight before
 
 520 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head 
 resting on the chair. 
 
 The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay 
 Catherine Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with her- 
 self, with memory, with God. It was the greatest moral up- 
 heaval she had ever known greater even than that which had 
 convulsed her life at Murewell. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIII 
 
 ROBERT, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this 
 evening for a dinner-party in which conversation would be 
 treated more or less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost 
 its charm ; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacor- 
 daire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again as it 
 were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed within 
 him as he sped westwards by the recurrent memory of that 
 miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white 
 dying face. 
 
 In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small 
 number of people assembled. M. de Qu^rouelle, a middle-sized, 
 round-headed old gentleman of a familiar French type ; Lady 
 Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptu- 
 ous mingling of dark red and silver ; Lord Rupert, beaming 
 under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill for 
 Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of 
 ' a beastly set of tenants ' ; Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private 
 secretary with a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a 
 general air of superlativeness which demanded and secured 
 attention ; a famous journalist, whose smiling self -repressive 
 look assured you that he carried with him the secrets of several 
 empires ; and one Sir John Headlam, a little ^ black -haired 
 Jewish -looking man with a limp an ex -Colonial Governor, 
 who had made himself accepted in London as an amusing 
 fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of 
 society as he was popular with the other. 
 
 ' Purely for talk, you see, not for show ! ' said Madame de 
 Netteville to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle 
 as they stood waiting for the commencement of dinner. 
 
 ' I shall hardly do my part,' he said with a little sigh. ' I have 
 just come from a very different scene.' 
 
 She looked at him with inquiring eyes. 
 
 ' A terrible accident in the East End,' he said briefly. ' We 
 won't talk of it. I only mention it to propitiate you beforehand. 
 Those things are not forgotten at once.' 
 
 She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart, 
 physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle considera-
 
 CHAP. XLIII NEW OPENINGS 521 
 
 tion for him at dinner. M. de Que'rouelle was made to talk. His 
 hostess wound him up and set him going, tune after tune. He 
 played them all, and, by dint of long practice, to perfection, in 
 the French way. A visit of his youth to the island grave of 
 Chateaubriand ; his early memories, as a poetical aspirant, of 
 the magnificent flatteries by which victor Hugo made himself 
 the god of young romantic Paris ; his talks with Montalembert 
 in the days of L'Avenir; his memories of Lamennais's sombre 
 figure, of Maurice de Gue"rin's feverish ethereal charm ; his 
 account of the opposition salons under the Empire they had 
 all been elaborated in the course of years, till every word fitted 
 and each point led to the next with the ' inevitableness ' of true 
 art. Robert, at first silent and distrait, found it impossible after 
 a while not to listen with interest. He admired the skill, too, 
 of Madame de Netteville's second in the duet, the finish, the 
 alternate sparkle and melancholy of it ; and at last he too was 
 drawn in, and found himself listened to with great benevolence 
 by the Frenchman, who had been informed about him, and 
 regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of 
 English religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addle- 
 stone, who had won a European reputation for wisdom by a 
 great scantiness of speech in society, coupled with the look of 
 Minerva's owl, attached himself to them ; while Lady Aubrey, 
 Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr. Wharnclifle made a 
 noisier and more dashing party at the other end. 
 
 ' Are you still in your old quarters. Lady Aubrey ? ' asked Sir 
 John Headlam, turning his old roguish face upon her. ' That 
 house of Nell Gwynne's, wasn't it, in Meade Street ? ' 
 
 ' Oh dear no ! We could only get it up to May this year, and 
 then they made us turn out for the season, for the first time for 
 ten years. There is a tiresome young heir who has married a 
 wife and wants to live in it. I could have left a train of gun- 
 powder and a slow match behind, I was so cross ! ' 
 
 'Ah "Reculer pour mieux faire sauter!"' said Sir John, 
 mincing out his pun as though he loved it. 
 
 ' Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, ' but you 
 have way to make up. You were so dull the last tune you took 
 me in to dinner, that positively ' 
 
 ' You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the 
 Socidie de Londres' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer 
 might have seen an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear 
 Lady Aubrey, it was simply because I had not seen you for six 
 weeks. My education had been neglected. I get my art and 
 my literature from you. The last time but one we met, you 
 
 ave me the cream of three new French novels and all the 
 ramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. 
 
 By the way, have you read the Princesse de ? ' 
 
 He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even 
 Paris. 
 
 ' I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed
 
 522 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 a rapier-glance at him, ' but if I had, I should say precisely the 
 same. Lord Rupert, will you kindly keep Sir John in order ? ' 
 
 Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion 
 characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a 
 modern gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was 
 a delusion. The casual spectator, to borrow a famous Cam- 
 bridge mot, invariably assumed that all ' the time he could spare 
 from neglecting his duties he must spend in adorning his person.' 
 Not at all ! The tenue of a dandy was never more cleverly used 
 to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of a 
 Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in 
 reality going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very 
 soon to be on the top rungs. 
 
 It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain 
 stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses 
 of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the 
 chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the party 
 became fused into one for a while under the genial influence of 
 a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the 
 whole scene the dainty oval room, the lights, the servants, the 
 exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the tapestried 
 walls would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a dream, 
 yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream 
 never has. 
 
 The hard self-confidence of these people did it belong to the 
 same world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment 
 which had shone on him that afternoon from Charles Richards's 
 begrimed and blood-stained face ? ' Blessed are the poor in spirit' 
 he said to himself once with an inward groan. ' Why am I 
 here ? Why am I not at home with Catherine 1 ' 
 
 But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had 
 never seen her so womanly, never felt more grateful for her 
 delicate social skill. As she talked to him, or to the Frenchman, 
 of literature, or politics, or famous folk, flashing her beautiful 
 eyes from one to the other, Sir John Headlam would, every now 
 and then, turn his odd puckered face observantly towards the 
 farther end of the table. 
 
 ' By Jove ! ' he said afterwards to Wharncliffe as they walked 
 away from the door together, ' she was inimitable to-night ; she 
 lias more roles than Desforets ! ' Sir John and his hostess were 
 very old friends. 
 
 Upstairs smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Nette- 
 ville joining in. M. de Que"rouelle, having talked the best of 
 his repertoire at dinner, was now inclined for amusement, and 
 had discovered that Lady Aubrey could amuse him, and was, 
 moreover, une belle personne. Madame de Netteville was 
 obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men 
 stood chatting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious 
 of a complete failure of social energy, began to look at his 
 watch. Instantly Madame de Netteville glided up to him.
 
 CHAP. XLIII NEW OPENINGS 523 
 
 ' Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must 
 know how my aft'airs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come 
 into my little writing -room.' And she led him into a tiny 
 panelled room at the far end of the drawing-room and shut off 
 from it by a heavy curtain, which she now left half -drawn. 
 
 ' The latest ? ' said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising 
 his eyebrows with the slightest motion of the head towards the 
 writing-room. 
 
 ' I suppose so,' she said indifferently ; ' she is East-Ending for 
 a change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy's young 
 man who " liked bad wine, he was so bored with good." ' 
 
 Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the 
 open window of the fantastic little room, with Robert beside 
 her. 
 
 ' You look as if you had had a strain,' she said to him abruptly, 
 after they had talked business for a few minutes. ' What has 
 been the matter ? ' 
 
 He told her Richards's story, very shortly. It would have 
 been impossible to him to give more than the driest outline of 
 it in that room. His companion listened gravely. She was an 
 epicure in all things, especially in moral sensation, and she 
 liked his moments of reserve and strong self-control. They 
 made his general expansiveness more distinguished. 
 
 Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying 
 
 ' I was at your lecture last Sunday you didn't see me ! ' 
 
 ' Were you ? Ah ! I remember a person in black, and veiled, 
 who puzzled me. I don't think we want you there, Madame de 
 Netteville.' 
 
 His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision 
 in it. 
 
 'Why not? Is it only the artisans who have souls? A 
 reformer should refuse no one.' 
 
 ' You have your own opportunities,' he said quietly ; ' I think 
 the men prefer to have it to themselves for the present. Some 
 of them are dreadfully in earnest.' 
 
 ' Oh, I don't pretend to be in earnest,' she said with a little 
 wave of her hand ; ' or, at any rate, I know better than to talk 
 of earnestness to you.' 
 
 ' Why to me ?' he asked, smiling. 
 
 ' Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the 
 upper class and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. 
 You are not interested in any other, and, indeed, you know 
 nothing of any other.' 
 
 She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night 
 was splendid and regal her dress of black and white brocade, 
 the diamonds at her throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the 
 marks of experience and living on the dark subtle face. 
 
 ' Perhaps not,' he replied ' it is enough for one life to try and 
 make out where the English working class is tending to.' 
 
 ' You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps
 
 524 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 his eye only on the lower class will achieve nothing. What can 
 the idealist do without the men of action the men who can 
 take his beliefs and make them enter by violence into existing 
 institutions ? And the men of action are to be found with us.' 
 
 ' It hardly looks just now as if the upper class was to go on 
 enjoying a monopoly of them,' he said, smiling. 
 
 "Then appearances are deceptive. The populace supplies 
 mass and weight nothing else. What you want is to touch the 
 leaders, the men and women whose voices carry, and then your 
 populace would follow hard enough. For instance,' and she 
 dropped her aggressive tone and spoke with a smiling kind- 
 ness, ' come down next Saturday to my little Surrey cottage ; 
 you shall see some of these men and women there, and I will 
 make you confess when you go away that you have profited 
 your workmen more by deserting them than by staying with 
 them. Will you come 1 ' 
 
 ' My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de 
 Netteville. Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper class 
 can produce a Brook Farm, but nothing more. The religious 
 movement of the future will want a vast effusion of feeling and 
 passion to carry it into action, and feeling and passion are only 
 to be generated in sufficient volume among the masses, where 
 the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous. You 
 upper-class folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if 
 you shirk it but ' 
 
 ' Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. ' I 
 know you would give us all the work and refuse us all the pro- 
 fits. We are to starve for your workman, to give him our 
 hearts and purses and everything we have, not that we may 
 hoodwink him which might be worth doing but that he may 
 rule us. It is too much ! ' 
 
 ' Very well,' he said drily, his colour rising. ' Very well, let 
 it be too much.' 
 
 And, dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she 
 saw that he meant to be going. Her look swept over him from 
 head to foot over the worn face with its look of sensitive 
 refinement and spiritual force, the active frame, the delicate but 
 most characteristic hand. Never had any man so attracted her 
 for years ; never had she found it so difficult to gain a hold. 
 Eugenie de Netteville, poseuse, schemer, woman of the world 
 that she was, was losing command of herself. 
 
 ' What did you really mean by " worldliness " and the " world " 
 in your lecture last Sunday ? ' she asked him suddenly, with a 
 little accent of scorn. ' I thought your diatribes absurd. What 
 you religious people call the " world " is really only the average 
 opinion of sensible people which neither you nor your kind 
 could do without for a day.' 
 
 He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and defended 
 himself not very seriously. But she threw all her strength into 
 the argument, and he forgot that he had meant to go at once.
 
 CHAP. XLIII NEW OPENINGS 525 
 
 When she chose she could talk admirably, and she chose now. 
 She had the most aggressive ways of attacking, and then, in 
 the same breath, the most subtle and softening ways of yielding 
 and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly her antagonist 
 turned upon her he found nimself disarmed he knew not how. 
 The disputant disappeared, and he felt the woman, restless, 
 melancholy, sympathetic, hungry for friendship and esteem, 
 yet too proud to make any direct bid for either. It was im- 
 possible not to be interested and touched. 
 
 Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. 
 Whether in his hours of intimacy with her, twelve months 
 before, young Alfred Evershed had received the same impres- 
 sion may be doubted. In all things Eugenie de Netteville was 
 an artist. 
 
 Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing- 
 room was drawn back, and Sir John Headlam stood in the 
 doorway. He had the glittering amused eyes of a malicious 
 child as he looked at them. 
 
 'Very sorry, madame,' he began in his high cracked voice, 
 ' but Wharncliffe and I are off to the New Club to see Desforets. 
 They have got her there to-night.' 
 
 ' Go,' she said, waving her hand to him, ' I don't envy you. 
 She is not what she was.' 
 
 ' No, there is only one person,' he said, bowing with grotesque 
 little airs of gallantry, ' for whom time stands still.' 
 
 Madame de Netteville looked at him with smiling half -con- 
 temptuous serenity. He bowed again, this time with ironical 
 emphasis, and disappeared. 
 
 ' Perhaps I had better go back and send them off,' she said, 
 rising. ' But you and I have not had our talk out yet.' 
 
 She led the way into the drawing-room. Lady Aubrey was 
 lying back on the velvet sofa, a little green paroquet that was 
 accustomed to wander tamely about the room perching on her 
 hand. She was holding the field against Lord Rupert and Mr. 
 Addlestone in a three-cornered duel of wits, while M. de Que- 
 rouelle sat by, his plump hands on his knees, applauding. 
 
 They all rose as their hostess came in. 
 
 ' My dear,' said Lady Aubrey, ' it is disgracefully early, but 
 my country before pleasure. It is the Foreign Office to-night, 
 and since James took office I can't with decency absent myself. 
 I had rather be a scullerymaid than a minister's wife. Lord 
 Rupert, I will take you on if you want a lift.' 
 
 She touched Madame de Netteville's cheek with her lips, 
 nodding to the other men present, and went out, her fair stag- 
 like head well in the air, ' chaffing ' Lord Rupert, who obediently 
 followed her, performing marvellous feats 01 agility in his desire 
 to keep out of the way of the superb train sweeping behind her. 
 It always seemed as if Lady Aubrey could have had no child- 
 hood, as if she must always have had just that voice and those 
 eyes. Tears she' could never have shed, not even as a baby over
 
 526 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could she have 
 looked upon a lost possession as anything else than the oppor- 
 tunity for a new one. 
 
 The other men took their departure for one reason or another. 
 It was not late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Que- 
 rouelle talked with gusto of four ' At homes ' still to be grappled 
 with. 
 
 As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his 
 hand. 
 
 ' No,' she said, with a quick impetuousness, ' no : I want my 
 talk out. It is barely half -past ten, and neither of us wants to 
 be racing about London to-night.' 
 
 Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he 
 lingered rather reluctantly for another ten minutes, as he 
 supposed. 
 
 She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open 
 to the back of the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane 
 Street came borne in upon the warm night air. Her superb 
 dark head stood out against a stand of yellow lilies close behind 
 her, and the little paroquet, bright with all the colours of the 
 tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back of her chair, 
 touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers. 
 
 Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his 
 dying day with shame and humiliation. 
 
 In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a 
 woman who was five years his senior had made him what was 
 practically a confession of love had given him to understand 
 that she knew what were the relations between himself and his 
 wife-^-and had implored him with the quick breath of an in- 
 describable excitement to see what a woman's sympathy and a 
 woman's unique devotion could do for the causes he had at 
 heart. 
 
 The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in 
 him, when at last it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repul- 
 sion, which his most friendly biographer can only regard with 
 a kind of grim satisfaction. For after all there is an amount of 
 innocence and absent-mindedness in matters of daily human 
 life, which is not only niaiserie, but comes very near to moral 
 wrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to walk 
 about with his eyes always on the stars. His stumbles may 
 have too many consequences. A harsh but a salutary truth ! 
 If Elsmere needed it, it was bitterly taught him during a 
 terrible half -hour. When the half -coherent enigmatical sen- 
 tences, to which he listened at first with a perplexed surprise, 
 began gradually to define themselves ; when he found a woman 
 roused and tragically beautiful between him and escape ; when 
 no determination on his part not to understand ; when nothing 
 he could say availed to protect her from herself; when they 
 were at last face to face with a confession and an appeal which 
 were a disgrace to both then at last Elsmere paid 'in one
 
 CHAP. XLIII NEW OPENINGS 527 
 
 minute glad life's arrears,' the natural penalty of an optimism, 
 a boundless faith in human nature, with which life, as we know 
 it, is inconsistent. 
 
 How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a woman 
 who was an expert in all the arts of fascination he never knew. 
 In memory afterwards it was all a ghastly mirage to him. The 
 low voice, the splendid dress, the scented room came back to 
 him, and a confused memory of his own futile struggle to ward 
 oil' what she was bent on saying little else. He had been 
 maladroit, he thought, had lost his presence of mind. Any 
 man of the world of his acquaintance, he believed, trampling 
 on himself, would have done better. 
 
 But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart 
 and humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary 
 life disappeared, and something took her place which was like 
 a coarse and malignant underself suddenly brought into the 
 light of day from that point onwards, in after days, he remem- 
 bered it all. 
 
 ' . . . I know,' cried Eugenie de Netteville at last, standing 
 at bay before him, her hands locked before her, her white lips 
 quivering, when her cup of shame was full, and her one impulse 
 left was to strike the man who had humiliated her 'I know 
 that you and your puritanical wife are miserable miserable. 
 What is the use of denying facts that all the world can see, 
 that you have taken pains,' and she laid a fierce deliberate 
 emphasis on each word, ' all the world shall see ? There let 
 your wife's ignorance and bigotry, and your own obvious rela- 
 tion to her, be my excuse, if I wanted any ; but,' and she 
 shrugged her white shoulders passionately, ' I want none ! I 
 am not responsible to your petty codes. IS ature and feeling are 
 enough for me. I saw you wanting sympathy and affection ' 
 
 ' My wife ! ' cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. 
 And then, his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he 
 made a stern step forward. 
 
 ' Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget 
 that you are a woman and I a man, and that in some way I 
 cannot understand my own blindness and folly 
 
 ' Must have led to this most undesirable scene,' she said with 
 mocking suddenness, throwing herself, however, effectually in 
 his way. Then a change came over her, and erect, ghastly 
 white, with frowning brow and shaking limbs, a baffled and 
 smarting woman from whom every restraint had fallen away, 
 let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness which he 
 could not have cut short without actual violence. 
 
 He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when 
 what seemed to him an outbreak of mania should have spent 
 itself. But suddenly he caught Catherine's name coupled with 
 some contemptuous epithet or other, and his self-control failed 
 him. With flashing eyes he went close up to her and took her 
 wrists in a grip of iron.
 
 528 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ' You shall not,' he said, beside himself, ' you shall not ! 
 What have I done what has she done that you should allow 
 yourself such words 1 My poor wife ! ' 
 
 A passionate flood of self -reproachful love was on his lips. 
 He choked it back. It was desecration that her name should be 
 mentioned in that room. But he dropped the hand he held. 
 The fierceness died out of his eyes. His companion stood beside 
 him panting, breathless, afraid. 
 
 ' Thank God,' he said slowly, ' thank God for yourself and me 
 that I love my wife ! I am not worthy of her doubly unworthy, 
 since it has been possible for any human being to suspect for one 
 instant that I was ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I 
 could ever forget and dishonour her ! But worthy or not 
 No ! no matter ! Madame de Netteville, let me go, and forget 
 that such a person exists.' 
 
 She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manli- 
 ness of the face which seemed in this half -hour to have grown 
 older, at the attitude with its mingled dignity and appeal. In 
 that second she realised what she had done and what she had 
 forfeited ; she measured the gulf between herself and the man 
 before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding him, as it 
 were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she waved 
 her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, 
 passed her, and the door shut. 
 
 For nearly an hour afterwards Elsmere wandered blindly and 
 aimlessly through the darkness and silence of the park. 
 
 The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself 
 wrestling in the grip of dark implacable things, upheld by a 
 single thread above that moral abyss which yawns beneath us 
 all, into which the individual life sinks so easily to ruin and 
 nothingness. At such moments a man realises within himself, 
 within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all tilings hideous 
 and vile. ' Save for the grace of God,' he says to himself, shud- 
 dering, ' save only for the grace of God ' 
 
 Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as 
 he had just beheld them ; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a 
 stinging self-reproach all these things wrestled within him. 
 What, preach to others, and stumble himself into such mire as 
 this ? Talk loudly of love and faith, and make it possible all the 
 time that a fellow human creature should think you capable at 
 a pinch of the worst treason against both ? 
 
 Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. 
 Was it all the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a 
 wretched relaxation of effort a wretched acquiescence in some- 
 thing second best? Had love been cooling? Had it simply 
 ceased to take the trouble love must take to maintain itself ? 
 And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis ? 
 
 All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a 
 moment in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate
 
 CHAP. XLIII NEW OPENINGS 529 
 
 reverential action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image 
 which had been pursuing him gave way, and in its place came 
 the image of a new-made mother, her child close within her 
 sheltering arm. Ah ! it was all plain to him now. The moral 
 tempest had done its work. 
 
 One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning 
 to keep his wife's love ! If she had slipped away from him, to 
 the injury and moral lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his 
 clumsiness, be the blame ! Above all, on his fatal power of ab- 
 sorbing himself in a hundred outside interests, controversy, 
 literature, society. Even his work seemed to have lost half its 
 sacred ness. If there be a canker at the root, no matter how 
 large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the 
 more to wither ! Of what worth is any success, but that which 
 is grounded deep on the rock of personal love and duty ? 
 
 Oh ! let him go back to her ! wrestle with her, open his heart 
 again, try new ways, make new concessions. How faint the 
 sense of her trial has been growing within him of late ! hers 
 which had once been more terrible to him than his own ! He 
 feels the special temptations of his own nature ; he throws him- 
 self, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene he 
 has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction 
 of remorseful love. 
 
 So he sped homewards at last through the noise of Oxford 
 Street, seeing, hearing nothing. He opened his own door, and 
 let himself into the dim, silent house. How the moment recalled 
 to him that other supreme moment of his life at Murewell ! No 
 light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs and softly turned 
 the handle of her room. 
 
 Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window 
 was wide open. The free loosely-growing branches of the plane 
 trees made a dark, delicate network against the luminous blue 
 of the night. A cool air came to him laden with an almost rural 
 scent of earth and leaves. By the window sat a white motion- 
 less figure. As he closed the door it rose and walked towards 
 him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that something 
 unknown to him had been passing here. He paused breathless, 
 expectant. 
 
 She came to him. She linked her cold trembling fingers 
 round his neck. 
 
 ' Robert, I have been waiting so long it was so late ! I 
 thought ' and she choked down a sob ' perhaps something has 
 happened to him, we are separated for ever, and I shall never 
 be able to tell him. Robert, Mr. Flaxman talked to me; he 
 opened my eyes ; I have been so cruel to you, so hard ! I have 
 broken my vow. I don't deserve it ; but Robert I ' 
 
 She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last 
 word, which fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine 
 Elsmere had very little of the soft clingingness which makes the 
 
 2 M
 
 530 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 charm of a certain type of woman. Each phrase she had spoken 
 had seemed to take with it a piece of her life. She trembled 
 and tottered in her husband's arms. 
 
 He bent over her with half -articulate words of amazement, 
 of passion. He led her to her chair, and, kneeling before her, 
 he tried, so far as the emotion of both would let him, to make 
 her realise what was in his own heart, the penitence and longing 
 which had winged his return to her. Without a mention of 
 Madame de Netteville's name, indeed ! That horror she should 
 never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed his 
 poignant sense of something half -jeopardised and wholly re- 
 covered ; it was that consciousness in the background of his 
 mind, ignorant of it as Catherine was then and always, which 
 gave the peculiar epoch-making force to this sacred and critical 
 hour of their lives. But she would hear nothing of his self- 
 blame nothing. She put her hand across his lips. 
 
 ' I have seen things as they are, Robert,' she said very simply ; 
 ' while I have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flax- 
 man left me. You were rightI would not understand. And, 
 in a sense, I shall never understand. I cannot change,' and her 
 voice broke into piteousness. ' My Lord is my Lord always ; 
 but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say what you will ! That 
 is what has been hidden from me ; that is what my trouble 
 has taught me ; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words. 
 It is the spirit that quickeneth. I should never have felt it so, 
 but for this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering 
 in strange places, through strange thoughts. God has not one 
 language, but many. I have dared to think He had but one, 
 the one I knew. I have dared ' and she faltered ' to condemn 
 your faith as no faith. Oh ! I lay there so long in the dark 
 downstairs, seeing you by that bed ; I heard your voice, I crept 
 to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was He was ! 
 Leave me that comfort ! What are you saying ? Wrong you ? 
 Unkind ? Your wife knows nothing of it. Oh, did you think 
 when you came in just now before dinner that I didn't care, that 
 I had a heart of stone ? Did you think I had broken my solemn 
 promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell 1 So I have, a 
 hundred times over. I made it in ignorance ; I had not counted 
 the cost how could I ? It was all so new, so strange. I dare 
 not make it again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. 
 But oh ! take me back into your life ! Hold me there ! Remind 
 me always of this night ; convict me out of my own mouth ! 
 But I will learn my lesson ; I will learn to hear the two voices, 
 the voice that speaks to you and the voice that speaks to me 
 I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been appointed me.' 
 
 Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back 
 in her chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish 
 touch over his hair. 
 
 ' But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. 
 Words are nothing.'
 
 CHAP. XLIV NEW OPENINGS 531 
 
 Strange ending to a day of torture ! As she towered above 
 him in the dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of 
 nature all dissolved, lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, 
 he thought of the man who passed through the place of sin, and 
 the place of expiation, and saw at last the rosy light creeping 
 along the East, caught the white moving figures, and that sweet 
 distant melody rising through the luminous air, which an- 
 nounced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of 
 those ' shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and 
 sun.' For eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future 
 and distant. Dante knew it when he talked of ' quella que im- 
 paradisa la mia mente.' Paradise is here, visible and tangible 
 oy mortal eyes and hands, whenever self is lost in loving, when- 
 ever the narrow limits of personality are beaten down by the 
 inrush of the Divine Spirit. 
 
 CHAPTEE XLIV 
 
 THE saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose 
 history we have followed for so long was over and done with. 
 Henceforward to the end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as 
 of old. 
 
 But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert 
 than on Catherine. Afterwards she gradually came to feel, 
 running all through his views of life, a note sterner, deeper, 
 maturer than any present there before. The reasons for it 
 were unknown to her, though sometimes her own tender, igno- 
 rant remorse supplied them. But they were hidden deep in 
 Elsmere's memory. 
 
 A few days afterwards he was casually told that Madame de 
 Netteville had left England for some time. As a matter of fact 
 he never set eyes on her again. After a while the extravagance 
 of his self -blame abated. lie saw things as they were without 
 morbidness. But a certain boyish carelessness of mood he 
 never afterwards quite recovered. Men and women of all 
 classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and 
 more tragic moral truths more awful to him. It was the 
 penalty of a highly-strung nature set with exclusive intensity 
 towards certain spiritual ends. 
 
 On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh 
 Flaxman which had so deeply affected her, Catherine accom- 
 panied Elsmere to his Sunday lecture. He tried a little, 
 tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went, shrinking and yet 
 determined. 
 
 She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon 
 of his in Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brood- 
 ing had been burnt into her mind. The bare Elgood Street 
 room, the dingy outlook on the high walls of a warehouse oppo-
 
 532 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 site, the lines of blanched quick-eyed artisans, the dissent from 
 what she loved, and he had once loved, implied in every- 
 thing, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the Passion ; it 
 was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was glad 
 to be there. 
 
 Afterwards Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere 
 that ' any fool could see he was getting done up,' insisted on 
 taking the children's class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, 
 as she saw Robert raised a little above her in the glare of many 
 windows, with the sudden perception that the worn, exhausted 
 look of the preceding summer had returned upon him. She 
 held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm word of 
 thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her 
 there after all ? 
 
 Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously cod- 
 dled, and that Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday 
 than he, was carried off to the Embankment, and the two spent 
 a happy hour wandering westward, Somerset House, the bridges, 
 the Westminster towers rising before them into the haze of the 
 June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the river ; that, or 
 his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into Elsmere. 
 And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart, 
 with flashes of her old sweet gaiety, as she had not talked for 
 months. 
 
 Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a 
 final restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very 
 end of life, in which the blind would see, the doubter be con- 
 vinced. And, meanwhile, the blessedness of this peace, this sur- 
 render ! Surely the air this afternoon was pure and life-giving 
 for them, the bells rang for them, the trees were green for them ! 
 
 He had need in the week that followed of all that she had 
 given back to him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a danger- 
 ous and alarming turn. It seemed to be the issue of long ill- 
 health, and the doctors feared that there were no resources of 
 constitution left to carry him through it. Every day some old 
 St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and with each 
 post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left 
 Oxford he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions 
 on which he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as 
 for many another man of our time, Henry Grey's influence was 
 not primarily an influence of personal contact. His mere life, 
 that he was there, on English soil, within a measurable dis- 
 tance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments one of his 
 thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no 
 longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to 
 conduct, every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and 
 coming truth holds a special place in the hearts of men who can 
 neither accept fairy tales, nor reconcile themselves to a world 
 without faith. The saintly life grows to be a beacon, a witness.
 
 CHAP. XLIV NEW OPENINGS 533 
 
 Men cling to it as they have always clung to each other, to the 
 visible and the tangible ; as the elders of Miletus, though the 
 Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set their feet 
 therein, ' sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no 
 more.' 
 
 The accounts grew worse all friends shut out, no possibility 
 of last words the whole of Oxford moved and sorrowing. 
 Then at last, on a Friday, came the dreaded expected letter : 
 ' He is gone ! He died early this morning, without pain, con- 
 scious almost to the end. He mentioned several friends by 
 name, you among them, during the night. The funeral is to be 
 on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.' 
 
 Sad and memorable day ! By an untoward chance it fell in 
 Commemoration week, ana Robert found the familiar streets 
 teeming with life and noise, under a showery uncertain sky, which 
 every now and then would send the bevies of lightly -gowned 
 maidens, with their mothers and attendant squires, skurrying 
 for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements glistening. He 
 walked up to St. Anselm's found, as he expected, that the first 
 part of the service was to be in the chapel, the rest in the 
 cemetery, and then mounted the well-known staircase to Lang- 
 ham's rooms. Langham was apparently in his bedroom. Lunch 
 was on the table the familiar commons, the familiar toast-and- 
 water. There, in a recess, were the same splendid wall maps of 
 Greece he had so often consulted after lecture. There was the 
 little case of coins, with the gold Alexanders he had handled 
 with so much covetous reverence at eighteen. Outside, the 
 irregular quadrangle with its dripping trees stretched before 
 him ; the steps of the new Hall, now the shower was over, were 
 crowded with gowned figures. It might have been yesterday 
 that he had stood in that room, blushing with awkward pleasure 
 under Mr. Grey's first salutation. 
 
 The bedroom door opened and Langham came in. 
 
 ' Elsmere ! But of course I expected you.' 
 
 His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was a 
 flatness in it, an absence of positive cordiality which was new 
 to him in any greeting of Langham's to himself, and had a chill- 
 ing effect upon him. The face, too, was changed. Tint and 
 expression were both dulled; its marble -like sharpness and 
 finish had coarsened a little, and the figure, which had never 
 possessed the erectness of youth, had now the pinched look and 
 the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian. 
 
 1 1 did not write to you, Elsmere,' he said immediately, as 
 though in anticipation of what the other would be sure to say ; 
 ' I knew nothing but what the bulletins said, and I was told 
 that Cathcart wrote to you. It is many years now since I have 
 seen much of Grey. Sit down and have some lunch. We have 
 time, but not too much time.' 
 
 Robert took a few mouthf uls. Langham was difficult, talked 
 disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon painfully con-
 
 534 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 scious that the old sympathetic bond between them no longer 
 existed. Presently, Langham, as though with an effort to re- 
 member, asked after Catherine, then inquired what he was 
 doing in the way of writing, and neither of them mentioned the 
 name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat spasmodically 
 talking, in reality expectant. And at last the sound present 
 already in both minds made itself heard the first long solitary 
 stroke of the chapel bell. 
 
 Robert covered his eyes. 
 
 'Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced 
 us first?' 
 
 ' I remember,' replied the other abruptly. Then, with a half- 
 cynical, half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he said, 
 after a pause, ' What a faculty of hero-worship you have always 
 had, Elsmere ! ' 
 
 ' Do you know anything of the end ? ' Robert asked him pre- 
 sently, as that tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feeling 
 beneath more irresistibly to the surface. 
 
 ' No, I never asked ! ' cried Langham, with sudden harsh ani- 
 mation. 'What purpose could be served? Death should be 
 avoided by the living. We have no business with it. Dp what 
 we will, we cannot rehearse our own parts. And the sight of 
 other men's performances helps us no more than the sight of a 
 great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do for us is to 
 imperil the little nerve, break through the little calm, we have 
 left.' 
 
 Elsmere's hand dropped, and he turned round to Mm with a 
 flashing smile. 
 
 ' Ah I know it now you loved him still.' 
 
 Langham, who was standing, looked down on him sombrely, 
 yet more indulgently. 
 
 ' How much you always made of feeling,' he said after a little 
 pause, 'in a world where, according to me, our chief object 
 should be not to feel ! ' 
 
 Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another 
 minute the two made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, 
 where the rain was sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden 
 voice of the bell rolled, from pause to pause, above the gowned 
 figures, spreading thence in wide waves of mourning sound over 
 Oxford. 
 
 The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic 
 dream. The lines of undergraduate faces, the provost's white 
 head, the voice of the chaplain reading, the full male unison of 
 the voices replying how they carried him back to the day 
 when as a lad from school he had sat on one of the chancel 
 benches beside his mother, listening for the first time to the 
 subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the 
 provost's preaching ! Just opposite to where lie sat now with 
 Langham, Grey had sat that first afternoon ; the freshman's 
 curious eyes had been drawn again and again to the dark
 
 CHAP. XLIV NEW OPENINGS 535 
 
 massive head, the face with its look of reposeful force, of 
 righteous strength. During the lesson from Corinthians, 
 Elsmere's thoughts were irrelevantly busy with all sorts of 
 mundane memories of the dead. What was especially present 
 to him was a series of Liberal election meetings in which Grey 
 had taken a warm part, and in which he himself had helped just 
 before he took Orders. A hundred odd, incongruous details 
 came back to Robert now with poignant force. Grey had been 
 to him at one time primarily the professor, the philosopher, the 
 representative of all that was best in the life of the University ; 
 now, fresh from his own grapple with London and its life, what 
 moved him most was the memory of the citizen, the friend and 
 brother of common man, the thinker who had never shirked 
 action in the name of thought, for whom conduct had been 
 from beginning to end the first reality. 
 
 The procession through the streets afterwards, which con- 
 veyed the body of this great son of modern Oxford to its last 
 resting-place in the citizens' cemetery on the western side of the 
 town, will not soon be forgotten, even in a place which forgets 
 notoriously soon. All the University was there, all the town 
 was there. Side by side with men honourably dear to England, 
 who had carried with them into one or other of the great 
 English careers the memory of the teacher, were men who had 
 known from day to day the cheery modest helper in a hundred 
 local causes : side by side with the youth of Alma Mater went 
 the poor of Oxford : tradesmen and artisans followed or accom- 
 panied the group 01 gowned and venerable figures, representing 
 the Heads of Houses and the Professors, or mingled with the 
 slowly pacing crowd of Masters ; while along the route groups 
 of visitors and merrymakers, young men in flannels or girls in 
 light dresses, stood with suddenly grave faces here and there, 
 caught by the general wave of mourning, and wondering what 
 such a spectacle might mean. 
 
 Robert, losing sight of Langham as they left the chapel, 
 found his arm grasped by young Cathcart, his correspondent. 
 The man was a junior Fellow who had attached himself to Grey 
 during the two preceding years with especial devotion. Robert 
 had only a slight knowledge of him, but there was something 
 in his voice and grip which made him feel at once infinitely 
 more at home with him at this moment than he had felt with 
 the old friend of his undergraduate years. 
 
 They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain came 
 on again, and the long black crowd stretched before them was 
 lashed by the driving gusts. As they went along, Cathcart 
 told him all he wanted to know. 
 
 ' The night before the end he was perfectly calm and consci- 
 ous. I told you he mentioned your name among the friends to 
 whom he sent his good-bye. He thought for everybody. For 
 all those of his house he left the most minute and tender direc- 
 tions. He forgot nothing. And all with such extraordinary
 
 536 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a journey ! In 
 the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a North-country woman 
 whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was 
 much attached, was sitting with him. I was there too. She 
 was a beautiful old figure in her white cap and kerchief, and it 
 seemed to please him to lie and look at her. " It'll not be for 
 long, Henry," she said to him once. "I'm seventy-seven this 
 spring. I shall come to you soon." He made no reply, and his 
 silence seemed to disturb her. I don't fancy she had known 
 much of his mind of late years. " You'll not be doubting the 
 Lord's goodness, Henry 1 " she said to him, with the tears in her 
 eyes. " No," he said, " no, never. Only it seems to be His Will, 
 we should be certain of nothing but Himself ! I ask no more." 
 I shall never forget the accent of those words : they were the 
 breath of his inmost life. If ever man was Gottbetrunken it was 
 he and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be true, beyond 
 what the intellect could grasp ! ' 
 
 Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The 
 rain beat down on the black concourse of mourners. But there 
 were blue spaces in the drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light 
 played at intervals over the Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and 
 over the butter-cupped river meadows, where the lush hay- 
 grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his left, the 
 provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was reading 
 the rest of the service. 
 
 As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. ' My 
 friend, my master,' cried the yearning filial heart, ' oh, give me 
 something of yourself to take back into life, something to brace 
 me through this darkness of our ignorance, something to keep 
 hope alive as you kept it to the end ! ' 
 
 And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a last 
 message, words which years before he had found marked in a 
 little book of Meditations borrowed from Grey's table words 
 long treasured and often repeated 
 
 ' Amid a world of f orgetf ulness and decay, in the sight of his 
 own shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the tomb, 
 he alone who has found his soul in losing it, who in singleness 
 of mind has lived in order to love and understand, will find that 
 the God who is near to him as his own conscience has a face of 
 light and love ! ' 
 
 Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the 
 triumphant outbursts of the Christian service. 
 
 ' Man's hope,' he thought, ' has grown humbler than this. It 
 keeps now a more modest mien in the presence of the Eternal 
 Mystery; but is it in truth less real, less sustaining? Let 
 Grey's trust answer for me.' 
 
 He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid 
 street outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round for 
 Langham. Instead, he found Cathcart, who had just come up 
 with him.
 
 CHAP. XLIV NEW OPENINGS 537 
 
 ' Is Langham behind 1 ' he asked. ' I want a word with him 
 before I go.' 
 
 ' Is he here ? asked the other with a change of expression. 
 
 ' But of course ! He was in the chapel. How could you ' 
 
 ' I thought he would probably go away,' said Cathcart with 
 some bitterness. ' Grey made many efforts to get him to come 
 and see him before he became so desperately ill. Langham 
 came once. Grey never asked for him again.' 
 
 ' It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,' said Robert 
 troubled ; 'his dread of being forced to take a line, to face any- 
 thing certain and irrevocable. I understand. He could not 
 say good-bye to a friend to save his life. There is no shirking 
 that ! One must either do it or leave it ! ' 
 
 Cathcart shrugged his shoulders, and drew a masterly little 
 picture of Langham's life in college. He had succeeded by the 
 most adroit devices in completely isolating himself both from 
 the older and the younger men. 
 
 'He attends college-meeting sometimes, and contributes a 
 sarcasm or two on the cramming system of the college. He 
 takes a constitutional to Summertown every day on the least 
 frequented side of the road, that he may avoid being spoken to. 
 And as to his ways of living, he and I happen to have the same 
 scout old Dobson, you remember ? And if I would let him, he 
 would tell me tales by the hour. He is the only man in the 
 University who knows anything about it. I gather from what 
 he says that Langham is becoming a complete valetudinarian. 
 Everything must go exactly by rule his food, his work, the 
 management of his clothes and any little contretemps makes 
 him ill. But the comedy is to watch him when there is any- 
 thing going on in the place that he thinks may lead to a canvass 
 and to any attempt to influence him for a vote. On these 
 occasions he goes off with automatic regularity to an hotel at 
 West Malyern, and only reappears when the Times tells him 
 the thing is done with.' 
 
 Both laughed. Then Robert sighed. "Weaknesses of Lang- 
 ham's sort may be amusing enough to the contemptuous and 
 unconcerned outsider. But the general result of them, whether 
 for the man himself or those whom he affects, is tragic, not 
 comic ; and Elsmere had good reason for knowing it. 
 
 Later, after a long talk with the provost, and meetings with 
 various other old friends, he walked down to the station, under 
 a sky clear from rain, and through a town gay with festal pre- 
 parations. Not a sign now, in these crowded, bustling streets, 
 of that melancholy pageant of the afternoon. The heroic 
 memory had flashed for a moment like something vivid and 
 gleaming in the sight of all, understanding and ignorant. Now 
 it lay committed to a few faithful hearts, there to become one 
 seed among many of a new religious life in England. 
 
 On the platform Robert found himself nervously accosted by 
 a tall shabbily -dressed man.
 
 538 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ' Elsmere, have you forgotten me ? ' 
 
 He turned and recognised a man whom he had last seen as a 
 St. Anselm's undergraduate one MacNiell, a handsome rowdy 
 young Irishman, supposed to be clever, and decidedly popular 
 in the college. As he stood looking at him, puzzled by the 
 difference between the old impression and the new, suddenly 
 the man's story flashed across him ; he remembered some dis- 
 graceful escapade an expulsion. 
 
 ' You came for the funeral, of course ? ' said the other, his face 
 flushing consciously. 
 
 ' Yes and you too 1 ' 
 
 The man turned away, and something in his silence led 
 Eobert to stroll on beside him to the open end of the platform. 
 
 ' I have lost my only friend,' MacNiell said at last hoarsely. 
 ' He took me up when my own father would have nothing to 
 say to me. He found me work ; he wrote to me ; for years he 
 stood between me and perdition. I am just going out to a post 
 in New Zealand he got for me, and next week before I sail I 
 I am to be married and he was to be there. He was so 
 pleased he had seen her.' 
 
 It was one story out of a hundred like it, as Robert knew 
 very well. They talked for a few minutes, then the train loomed 
 in the distance. 
 
 ' He saved you,' said Robert, holding out his hand, ' and at a 
 dark moment in my own life I owed him everything. There is 
 nothing we can do for him in return but to remember him ! 
 Write to me, if you can or will, from New Zealand, for his sake.' 
 
 A few seconds later the train sped past the bare little ceme- 
 tery, which lay just beyond the line. Robert bent forward. In 
 the pale yellow glow of the evening he could distinguish the 
 grave, the mound of gravel, the planks, and some figures mov- 
 ing beside it. He strained his eyes till he could see no more, his 
 heart full of veneration, of memory, of prayer. In himself life 
 seemed so restless and combative. Surely he, more than others, 
 had need of the lofty lessons of death ! 
 
 CHAPTER XLV 
 
 IN the weeks which followed weeks often of mental and 
 physical depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by 
 the influence of an overworked state he could not be got to 
 admit Elsmere owed much to Hugh Flaxman's cheery sym- 
 pathetic temper, and became more attached to him than ever, 
 and more ready than ever, should the fates deem it so, to welcome 
 him as a brother-in-law. However, the fates for the moment 
 seemed to have borrowed a leaf from Langham's book, and did 
 not apparently know their own minds. It says volumes for 
 Hugh Flaxman's general capacities as a human being that at
 
 CHAP. XLV NEW OPENINGS 539 
 
 this period he should have had any attention to give to a friend, 
 his position as a lover was so dubious and difficult. 
 
 After the evening at the Workmen's Club, and as a result of 
 further meditation, he had greatly developed the tactics first 
 adopted on that occasion. He had beaten a masterly retreat, 
 and Rose Leyburn was troubled with him no more. 
 
 The result was that a certain brilliant young person was 
 soon sharply conscious of a sudden drop in the pleasures of 
 living. Mr. Flaxman had been the Leyburns' most constant 
 and entertaining visitor. During the whole of May he paid 
 one formal call in Lerwick Gardens, and was then entertained 
 tete-a-tete by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose's intense subsequent annoy- 
 ance, who knew perfectly well that her mother was incapable 
 of chattering about anything but her daughters. 
 
 He still sent flowers, but they came from his head gardener, 
 addressed to Mrs. Leyburn. Agnes put them in water; and 
 Rose never gave them a look. Rose went to Lady Helen's 
 because Lady Helen made her, and was much too engaging a 
 creature to be rebuffed; but, however merry and protracted 
 the teas in those scented rooms might be, Mr. Flaxman's step 
 on the stairs, and Mr. Flaxman's hand on the curtain over the 
 door, till now the feature -in the entertainment most to be 
 counted on, were, generally speaking, conspicuously absent. 
 
 He and the Leyburns met, of course ; for their list of common 
 friends was now considerable ; but Agnes, reporting matters to 
 Catherine, could only say that each of these occasions left Rose 
 more irritable, and more inclined to say biting things as to the 
 foolish ways in which society takes its pleasures. 
 
 Rose certainly was irritable, and at times, Agnes thought, 
 depressed. But as usual she was unapproachable about her 
 own affairs, and the state of her mind could only be somewhat 
 dolefully gathered from the fact that she was much less unwill- 
 ing to go back to Burwood this summer than had ever been 
 known before. 
 
 Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman left certain other people in no 
 doubt as to his intentions. 
 
 ' My dear aunt,' he said calmly to Lady Charlotte, ' I mean 
 to marry Miss Leyburn if I can at any time persuade her to 
 have me. So much you may take as fixed, and it will be quite 
 waste of breath on your part to quote dukes to me. But the 
 other factor in the problem is by no means fixed. Miss Leyburn 
 won't have me at present, and as for the future I have most 
 salutary qualms.' 
 
 ' Hugh ! ' interrupted Lady Charlotte angrily, ' as if you 
 hadn't had the mothers of London at your feet for years ! ' 
 
 Lady Charlotte was in a most variable frame of mind ; one 
 day hoping devoutly that the Langham affair might prove last- 
 ing enough in its effects to tire Hugh out ; the next, outraged 
 that a silly girl should waste a thought on such a creature, 
 while Hugh was in her way ; at one time angry that an
 
 540 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 insignificant chit of a schoolmaster's daughter should apparently 
 care so little to be the Duke of Sedbergh's niece, and should 
 even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing a Flaxman ; 
 at another, utterly sceptical as to any lasting obduracy on the 
 chit's part. The girl was clearly anxious not to fall too easily, 
 but as to final refusal pshaw ! And it made her mad that 
 Hugh would hold himself so cheap. 
 
 Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman felt himself in no way called upon 
 to answer that remark of his aunt's we have recorded. 
 
 ' I have qualms,' he repeated, ' but I mean to do all I know, 
 and you and Helen must help me.' 
 
 Lady Charlotte crossed her hands before her. 
 
 ' I may be a Liberal and a lion-hunter,' she said firmly, ' but 
 I have still conscience enough left not to aid and abet my 
 nephew in throwing himself away.' 
 
 She had nearly slipped in ' again ' ; but just saved herself. 
 
 'Your conscience is all a matter of the Duke,' he told her. 
 ' Well, if you won't help me, then Helen and I will have to 
 arrange it by ourselves.' 
 
 But this did not suit Lady Charlotte at all. She had always 
 played the part of earthly providence to this particular nephew, 
 and it was abominable to her that the wretch, having refused 
 for ten years to provide her with a love affair to manage, should 
 now manage one for himself in spite of her. 
 
 ' You are such an arbitrary creature ! ' she said fretfully ; 
 ' you prance about the world like Don Quixote, and expect me 
 to play Sancho without a murmur.' 
 
 ' How many drubbings have I brought you yet ? ' he asked 
 her laughing. He was really very fond of her. 'It is true 
 there is a point of likeness ; I won't take your advice. But 
 then why don't you give me better ? It is strange,' he added 
 musing ; ' women talk to us about love as if we were too gross 
 to understand it ; and when they come to business, and they're 
 not in it themselves, they show the temper of attorneys.' 
 
 ' Love ! ' cried Lady Charlotte nettled. ' Do you mean to 
 tell me, Hugh, that you are really, seriously in love with that 
 girl?' 
 
 ' Well, I only know,' he said, thrusting his hands far into his 
 pockets, ' that unless things mend I shall go out to California 
 in the autumn and try ranching.' 
 
 Lady Charlotte burst into an angry laugh. He stood opposite 
 to her, with his orchid in his buttonhole, himself the fine flower 
 of civilisation. Ranching, indeed ! However, he had done so 
 many odd things in his life, that, as she knew, it was never 
 quite safe to decline to take him seriously, and he looked at her 
 now so defiantly, his clear greenish eyes so wide open and alert, 
 that her will began to waver under the pressure of his. 
 
 ' What do you want me to do, sir ? ' 
 
 His glance relaxed at once, and he laughingly explained to 
 her that what he asked of her was to keep the prey in sight.
 
 CHAP. XLV NEW OPENINGS 541 
 
 ' I can do nothing for myself at present,' he said ; ' I get on 
 her nerves. She was in love with that black-haired enfant du 
 siecle, or rather, she prefers to assume that she was and I 
 haven't given her time to forget him. A serious blunder, 
 and I deserve to suffer for it. very well, then, I retire, and 
 I ask you and Helen to keep watch. Don't let her go. Make 
 yourselves nice to her : and, in fact, spoil me a little now I 
 am on the high road to .forty, as you used to spoil me at 
 fourteen.' 
 
 Mr. Flaxman sat down by his aunt and kissed her hand, after 
 which Lady Charlotte was as wax before him. ' Thank heaven,' 
 she reflected, ' in ten days the Duke and all of them go out of 
 town.' Retribution, therefore, for wrong-doing would be tardy, 
 if wrong-doing there must be. She could but ruefully reflect 
 that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted ; moreover, if 
 Hugh would force her to befriend him in this criminality, there 
 might be a certain joy in thereby vindicating those Liberal 
 principles of hers, in which a scornful family had always refused 
 to believe. So, being driven into it, she would fain have done 
 it boldly and with a dash. But she could not rid her mind of 
 the Duke, and her performance all through, as a matter of fact, 
 was blundering. 
 
 However, she was for the time very gracious to Rose, being 
 in truth really fond of her ; and Rose, however high she might 
 hold her little head, could find no excuse for quarrelling either 
 with her or Lady Helen. 
 
 Towards the middle of June there was a grand ball given by 
 Lady Fauntleroy at Fauntleroy House, to which the two Miss 
 Leyburns, by Lady Helen's machinations, were invited. It 
 was to be one of the events of the season, and when the cards 
 arrived ' to have the honour of meeting their Royal Highnesses/ 
 etc. etc., Mrs. Leyburn, good soul, gazed at them with eyes 
 which grew a little moist under her spectacles. She wished 
 Richard could have seen the girls dressed, 'just once.' But 
 Rose treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. 'If one 
 could but put them up to auction,' she said flippajitly, holding 
 them up, 'how many German opera tickets I should get for 
 nothing ! I don't know what Agnes feels. As for me, I have 
 neither nerve enough for the people, nor money enough for the 
 toilette.' 
 
 However, with eleven o'clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh 
 vision of blue and white, to suggest certain dresses for the 
 sisters which had occurred to her in the visions of the night, 
 ' original, adorable, cost, a mere nothing ! ' 
 
 ' My harpy,' she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker, ' would 
 ruin you over them, of course. Your maid' the Leyburns 
 possessed a remarkably clever one ' will make them divinely 
 for twopence-halfpenny. Listen.' 
 
 Rose listened ; her eye kindled ; the maid was summoned ; 
 and the invitation accepted in Agnes's neatest hand. Even
 
 542 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 Catherine was roused during the following ten days to a smiling 
 indulgent interest in the concerns of the workroom. 
 
 The evening came, and Lady Helen fetched the sisters in her 
 carriage. The ball was a magnificent affair. The house was 
 one of historical interest and importance, and all that the 
 ingenuity of the present could do to give fresh life and gaiety 
 to the pillared rooms, the carved galleries and stately staircases 
 of the past, had been done. The ball-room, lined with Vandycks 
 and Lelys, glowed softly with electric light ; the picture gallery 
 had been banked with flowers and carpeted with red, and the 
 beautiful dresses of the women trailed up and down it, challeng- 
 ing the satins of the Netschers and the Terburgs on the walls. 
 
 Rose's card was soon full to overflowing. The young men 
 present were of the smartest, and would not willingly have 
 bowed the knee to a nobody, however pretty. But Lady 
 Helen's devotion, the girl's reputation as a musician, and her 
 little nonchalant disdainful ways, gave her a kind of prestige, 
 which made her, for the time being at any rate, the equal of 
 anybody. Petitioners came and went away empty. Royalty 
 was introduced, and smiled both upon the beauty and the 
 beauty's delicate and becoming dress ; and still Rose, though a 
 good deal more flushed and erect than usual, and though flesh 
 and blood could not resist the contagious pleasure which 
 glistened even in the eyes of that sage Agnes, was more than 
 half -inclined to say with the Preacher, that all was vanity. 
 
 Presently, as she stood waiting with her hand on her 
 partner's arm before gliding into a waltz, she saw Mr. Flaxman 
 opposite to her, and with him a young debutante in white tulle 
 a thin, pretty, undeveloped creature, whose sharp elbows and 
 timid movements, together with the blushing enjoyment glow- 
 ing so frankly from her face, pointed her out as the school-girl 
 of sweet seventeen, just emancipated, and trying her wings. 
 SK-. 'Ah, there is Lady Florence !' said her partner, a handsome 
 young Hussar. 'This ball is in her honour, you know. She 
 comes out to-night. What, another cousin ? Really she keeps 
 too much in the family ! ' 
 
 ' Is Mr. Flaxman a cousin ? ' 
 
 The young man replied that he was, and then, in the intervals 
 of waltzing, went on to explain to her the relationships of many 
 of the people present, till the whole gorgeous affair began to 
 seem to Rose a mere family party. Mr. Flaxman was of it. 
 She was not. 
 
 ' Why am I here ? ' the little Jacobin said to herself fiercely 
 as she waltzed ; ' it is foolish, unprofitable. I do not belong to 
 them, nor they to me ! ' 
 
 ' Miss Leyburn ! charmed to see you ! ' cried Lady Charlotte, 
 stopping her ; and then, in a loud whisper in her ear, ' Never 
 saw you look better. Your taste, or Helen's, that dress ? The 
 roses exquisite ! ' 
 
 Rose dropped her a little mock curtsey and whirled on again.
 
 CHAP. XLV NEW OPENINGS 543 
 
 ' Lady Florences are always well dressed,' thought the child 
 angrily ; ' and who notices it ? ' 
 
 Another turn brought them against Mr. Flaxman and his 
 partner. Mr. Flaxman came at once to greet her with smiling 
 courtesy. 
 
 ' I have a Cambridge friend to introduce to you a beautiful 
 youth. Shall I find you by Helen? Now, Lady Florence, 
 patience a moment. That corner is too crowded. How good 
 that last turn was ! ' 
 
 And bending with a sort of kind chivalry over his partner, 
 who looked at him with the eyes of a joyous excited child, he 
 led her away. Five minutes later Rose, standing flushed by 
 Lady Helen, saw him coming again towards her, ushering a tall 
 blue-eyed youth, whom he introduced to her as ' Lord Waynflete.' 
 The handsome boy looked at her with a boy's open admiration, 
 and beguiled her of a supper dance, while a group standing 
 near, a mother and three daughters, stood watching with cold 
 eyes and expressions which said plainly to the initiated that 
 mere beauty was receiving a ridiculous amount of attention. 
 
 'I wouldn't have given it him, but it is rude it is bad 
 manners, not even to ask ! ' the supposed victress was saying to 
 herself, with quivering lips, her eyes following not the Trinity 
 freshman, who was their latest captive, but an older man's well- 
 knit figure, and a head on which the fair hair was already grow- 
 ing scantily, receding a little from the fine intellectual brows. 
 
 An hour later she was again standing by Lady Helen, waiting 
 for a partner, when she saw two persons crossing the room, 
 which was just beginning to fill again for dancing, towards 
 them. One was Mr. Flaxman, the other was a small wrinkled 
 old man, who leant upon his arm, displaying the ribbon of the 
 Garter as he walked. 
 
 'Dear me,' said Lady Helen, a little fluttered, 'here is my 
 uncle Sedbergh. I thought they had left town.' 
 
 The pair approached, and the old Duke bowed over his niece's 
 hand with the manners of a past generation. 
 
 ' I made Hugh give me an arm,' he said quaveringly. ' These 
 floors are homicidal. If I come down on them I shall bring an 
 action.' 
 
 ' I thought you had all left town ? ' said Lady Helen. 
 
 ' Who can make plans with a Government in power pledged 
 to every sort of villainy and public plunder ? ' said the old man 
 testily. 'I suppose Var ley's there to-night, helping to vote 
 away my property and Fauntleroy's.' 
 
 ' Some of his own too, if you please ! ' said Lady Helen 
 smiling. ' Yes, I suppose he is waiting for the division, or he 
 would be here.' 
 
 ' I wonder why Providence blessed me with such a Radical 
 crew of relations?' remarked the Duke. 'Hugh is a regular 
 Communist. I never heard such arguments in my life. And 
 as for any idea of standing by his order ' The old man
 
 544 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 shook his bald head and shrugged his small shoulders with 
 almost French vivacity. He had been handsome once, and 
 delicately featured, but now the left eye drooped, and the face 
 had a strong look of peevishness and ill-health. 
 
 ' Uncle,' interposed Lady Helen, ' let me introduce you to my 
 two great friends, Miss Leyburn, Miss Rose Leyburn.' 
 
 The Duke bowed, looked at them through a pair of sharp 
 eyes, seemed to cogitate inwardly whether such a name had ever 
 been known to him, and turned to his nephew. 
 
 'Get me out of this, Hugh, and I shall be obliged to you. 
 Young people may risk it, but if / broke I shouldn't mend.' 
 
 And still grumbling audibly about the floor, he hobbled oft 
 towards the picture gallery. Mr. Flaxman had only time for a 
 smiling backward glance at Rose. 
 
 ' Have you given my pretty boy a dance ? ' 
 
 ' Yes,' she said, but with as much stiffness as she might have 
 shown to his uncle. 
 
 ' That's over,' said Lady Helen with relief. ' My uncle hardly 
 meets any of us now without a spar. He has never forgiven 
 my father for going over to the Liberals. And then he thinks 
 we none of us consult him enough. No more we do except 
 Aunt Charlotte. She's afraid of him ! ' 
 
 ' Lady Charlotte afraid ! ' echoed Rose. 
 
 ' Odd, isn't it ? The Duke avenges a good many victims on 
 her, if they only knew ! ' 
 
 Lady Helen was called away, and Rose was left standing, 
 wondering what had happened to her partner. 
 
 Opposite, Mr. Flaxman was pushing through a doorway, and 
 Lady Florence was again on his arm. At the same time she 
 became conscious of a morsel of chaperons' conversation such 
 as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a girl is tolerably sure to 
 hear under similar circumstances. 
 
 The debutante's good looks, Hugh Flaxman's apparent sus- 
 ceptibility to them, the possibility of results, and the satis- 
 factory disposition of the family goods and chattels that would 
 be brought about by such a match, the opportunity it would 
 offer the man, too, of rehabilitating himself socially after his 
 first matrimonial escapade Rose caught fragments of all these 
 topics as they were discussed by two old ladies, presumably also 
 of the family ' ring ' who gossiped behind her with more gusto 
 than discretion. Highmindedness, of course, told her to move 
 away ; something else held her fast, till her partner came up 
 for her. 
 
 Then she floated away into the whirlwind of waltzers. But 
 as she moved round the room on her partner's arm, her delicate 
 half-scornful grace attracting look after look, the soul within 
 was all aflame aflame against the serried ranks and phalanxes 
 of this unfamiliar, hostile world ! She had just been reading 
 Trevelyan's Life of Fox aloud to her mother, who liked occa- 
 sionally to flavour her knitting with literature, and she began
 
 CHAP. XLV NEW OPENINGS 545 
 
 now to revolve a passage from it, describing the upper class of 
 the last century, which had struck that morning on her quick 
 retentive memory: '"A few thousand people iv/io thought that 
 the world was made for them " did it not run so 1 " and that all 
 outside their own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism, 
 bestowed upon each other an amount of attention quite inconceiv- 
 able. . . . Within the charmed precincts there prevailed an easy 
 and natural mode of intercourse, in some respects singularly 
 delightful." Such, for instance, as the Duke of Sedbergh was 
 master of ! Well, it was worth while, perhaps, to have gained 
 an experience, even at the expense of certain illusions, as to the 
 manners of dukes, and and as to the constancy of friends. 
 But never again never again ! ' said the impetuous inner voice. 
 ' I have my world they theirs ! ' 
 
 But why so strong a flood of bitterness against our poor 
 upper class, so well intentioiied for all its occasional lack of 
 lucidity, should have arisen in so young a breast it is a little 
 difficult for the most conscientious biographer to explain. She 
 had partners to her heart's desire ; young Lord Waynflete used 
 his utmost arts upon her to persuade her that at least half a 
 dozen numbers of the regular programme were extras and 
 therefore at his disposal ; and when royalty supped, it was 
 graciously pleased to ordain that Lady Helen and her two 
 companions should sup behind the same folding-doors as itself, 
 while beyond these doors surged the inferior c^pwd of persons 
 who had been specially invited to 'meet their Hoyal High- 
 nesses,' and had so far been held worthy neither to dance nor 
 to eat in the same room with them. But in vain. Rose still 
 felt herself, for all her laughing outward insouciance, a poor, 
 bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel of a world 
 which was intolerably powerful, rich, and self-satisfied, the 
 odious product of ' family arrangements.' 
 
 Mr. Flaxman sat far away at the same royal table as herself. 
 Beside him was the thin tall debutante. ' She is like one of the 
 Gainsborough princesses,' thought Rose, studying her with 
 involuntary admiration. 'Of course it is all plain. He will 
 get everything he wants, and a Lady Florence into the bargain. 
 Radical, indeed ! What nonsense ! ' 
 
 Then it startled her to find that the eyes of Lady Florence's 
 neighbour were, as it seemed, on herself ; or was he merely 
 nodding to Lady Helen ? and she began immediately to give a 
 smiling attention to the man on her left. 
 
 An hour later she and Agnes and Lady Helen were descend- 
 ing the great staircase on their way to their carriage. The 
 morning light was flooding through the chinks of the carefully 
 veiled windows; Lady Helen was yawning behind her tiny 
 white hand, her eyes nearly asleep. But the two sisters, who 
 had not been up till three, on four preceding nights, like their 
 chaperon, were still almost as fresh as the flowers massed in the 
 hall below. 
 
 2N
 
 546 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ' Ah, there is Hugh-! ' cried Lady Helen. ' How I hope he has 
 found the carriage ! ' 
 
 At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which 
 had dropped from the bouquet of some predecessor. To pre- 
 vent herself from falling downstairs, she caught hold of the 
 stem of a brazen chandelier fixed in the balustrade. It saved 
 her, but she gave her arm a most painful wrench, and leant 
 limp and white against the railing of the stairs. Lady Helen 
 turned at Agnes's exclamation, but before she could speak, as it 
 seemed, Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just 
 below them, was on the stairs. 
 
 ' You have hurt your arm 1 Don't speak take mine. Let 
 me get you downstairs out of the crush.' 
 
 She was too far gone to resist, and when she was mistress of 
 herself again she found herself in the library with some water 
 in her hand which Mr. Flaxman had just put there. 
 
 ' Is it the playing hand ? ' said Lady Helen anxiously. 
 
 ' No,' said Rose, trying to laugh ; ' the bowing elbow.' And 
 she raised it, but with a contortion of pain. 
 
 'Don't raise it,' he said peremptorily. 'We will have a 
 doctor here in a moment, and have it bandaged.' 
 
 He disappeared. Rose tried to sit up, seized with a frantic 
 longing to disobey him, and get off before he returned. Sting- 
 ing the girl's mind was the sense that it might all perfectly well 
 seem to him a planned appeal to his pity. 
 
 ' Agnes, help me up,' she said with a little involuntary groan ; 
 ' I shall be better at home.' 
 
 But both Lady Helen and Agnes laughed her to scorn, and 
 she lay back once more overwhelmed by fatigue and faintness. 
 A few more minutes, and a doctor appeared, caught by good 
 luck in the next street. He pronounced it a severe muscular 
 strain, but nothing more ; applied a lotion and improvised a 
 sling. Rose consulted him anxiously as to the interference 
 with her playing. 
 
 ' A week,' he said ; ' no more, if you are careful.' 
 
 Her pale face brightened. Her art had seemed specially 
 dear to her of late. 
 
 ' Hugh ! ' called Lady Helen, going to the door. ' Now we are 
 ready for the carriage. 
 
 Rose leaning on Agnes walked out into the hall. They 
 found him there waiting. 
 
 ' The carriage is here,' he said, bending towards her with a 
 look and tone which so stirred the fluttered nerves, that the 
 sense of faintness stole back upon her. 'Let me take you 
 to it.' 
 
 ' Thank you,' she said coldly, but by a superhuman effort ; 
 ' my sister's help is quite enough.' 
 
 He followed them with Lady Helen. At the carriage door 
 the sisters hesitated a moment. Rose was helpless without a 
 right hand. A little imperative movement from behind dis-
 
 CHAP. XLV NEW OPENINGS 547 
 
 placed Agnes, and Rose felt herself hoisted in by a strong arm. 
 She sank into the farther corner. The glow of the dawn caught 
 her white delicate features, the curls on her temples, all the 
 silken confusion of her dress. Hugh Flaxman put in Agnes 
 and his sister, said something to Agnes about coming to inquire, 
 and raised his hat. Rose caught the quick force and intensity 
 of his eyes, and then closed her own, lost in a languid swoon of 
 pain, memory, and resentful wonder. 
 
 Flaxman walked away down Park Lane through the chill 
 morning quietness, the gathering light striking over the houses 
 beside him on to the misty stretches of the Park. His hat was 
 over his eyes, his hands thrust into his pockets ; a close observer 
 would have noticed a certain trembling of the lips. It was but 
 a few seconds since her young warm beauty had been for an 
 instant in his arms ; his whole being was shaken by it, and by 
 that last look of hers. ' Have I gone too far ? ' he asked himself 
 anxiously. 'Is it divinely true already that she resents 
 being left to herself ? Oh, little rebel ! You tried your best 
 not to let me see. But you were angry, you were ! Now, then, 
 how to proceed ? She is all fire, all character ; I rejoice in it. 
 She will give me trouble ; so much the better. Poor little hurt 
 thing ! the fight is only beginning ; but I will make her do 
 penance some day for all that loftiness to-night.' 
 
 If these reflections betray to the reader a certain masterful 
 note of confidence in Mr. Flaxman's mind, he will perhaps find 
 small cause to regret that Rose did give him a great deal of 
 trouble. 
 
 Nothing could have been more 'salutary,' to use his own 
 word, than the dance she led him during the next three weeks. 
 She provoked him indeed at moments so much that he was a 
 hundred times on the point of trying to seize his kingdom of 
 .heaven by violence, of throwing himself upon her with a tem- 
 pest shock of reproach and appeal. But some secret instinct 
 restrained him. She was wilful, she was capricious ; she had a 
 real and powerful distraction in her art. He must be patient 
 and risk nothing. 
 
 He suspected, too, what was the truth that Lady Charlotte 
 was doing harm. Rose, indeed, had grown so touchily sensitive 
 that she found offence in almost every word of Lady Charlotte's 
 about her nephew. Why should the apparently casual remarks 
 of the aunt bear so constantly on the subject of the nephew's 
 social importance ? Rose vowed to herself that she needed no 
 reminder of that station whereunto it had pleased God to call 
 her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those 
 anxieties and reluctances which the girl's quick sense detected, 
 in spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwick 
 Gardens. 
 
 The end of it all was that Hugh Flaxman found himself 
 aq-ain driven into a corner. At the bottom of him was still a 
 confidence that would not yield. Was it possible that he had
 
 548 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vi 
 
 ever given her some tiny involuntary glimpse of it, and that 
 but for that glimpse she would have let him make his peace 
 much more easily ? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end 
 of his resources. 
 
 'I must change the venue,' he said to himself ; 'decidedly I 
 must change the venue.' 
 
 So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish 
 in Norway with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the 
 news with a callousness which made even Lady Helen want to 
 shake her. 
 
 On the eve of his journey, however, Hugh Flaxman had at 
 last confessed himself to Catherine and Robert. His obvious 
 plight made any further scruples on their part futile, and what 
 they had they gave him in the way of sympathy. Also Robert, 
 gathering that he already knew much, and without betraying 
 any confidence of Rose's, gave him a hint or two on the subject 
 of Langham. But more not the friendliest mortal could do for 
 him, and Flaxman went off into exile announcing to a mocking 
 Elsmere that lie should sit pensive on the banks of Norwegian 
 rivers till fortune had had time to change.
 
 BOOK YII 
 
 GAIN AND LOSS
 
 CHAPTER XLVI 
 
 A HOT July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in 
 Elgood Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a 
 holiday. Catherine and the child he had driven away more 
 than once, but the claims upon himself were becoming so ab- 
 sorbing he did not know how to go even for a few weeks. 
 There were certain individuals in particular who depended on 
 him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The 
 poor desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's 
 hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been 
 kindly and skilfully treated, and after six weeks' abstinence she 
 had just returned to her children, and was being watched by 
 himself and a competent woman neighbour, whom he had suc- 
 ceeded in interesting in the case. 
 
 Another was a young ' secret springer,' to use the mysteri- 
 ous terms of the trade Robson by name whom Elsmere had 
 originally known as a clever workman belonging to the watch- 
 making colony, and a diligent attendant from the beginning on 
 the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave his lodgings, 
 and his sickly pessimist personality had established a special 
 hold on Robert. He was dying of tumour in the throat, and 
 had become a torment to hirnseli and a disgust to others. There 
 was a spark of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled 
 him to bear his ills with a mixture of savage humour and clear- 
 eyed despair. In general outlook he was much akin to the 
 author or the City of Dreadful Night, whose poems he read : 
 the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him with a kind 
 of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that 
 he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for 
 hours, startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him 
 with ghastly Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living 
 no one exactly knew how, though it was supposed on supplies 
 sent him by a shopkeeper uncle in the country, and constantly 
 on the verge, as all his acquaintances felt, of some ingenious 
 expedient or other for putting an end to himself and his 
 troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No 
 woman willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How 
 Robert had gained any hold upon him no one could guess. But
 
 552 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vir 
 
 from the moment when Elsmere, struck in the lecture-room by 
 the pallid ugly face and swathed neck, began regularly to go 
 and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that virtue had 
 gone out of him, and that in some subtle way yet another life 
 had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of 
 strength and comfort. 
 
 His lecturing and teaching work also was becoming more 
 and more the instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore 
 more and more difficult to leave. The thoughts of God, the 
 image of Jesus, which were active and fruitful in his own mind, 
 had been gradually passing from the one into the many, and 
 Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion, once nur- 
 tured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men 
 and women his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a 
 trembling joy, a humble prostration of the soul before the 
 Eternal Truth, no words can fitly describe. With an ever-in- 
 creasing detachment of mind from the objects of self and sense, 
 he felt himself a tool in the Great Workman's hand. ' Accom- 
 plish Thy purposes in me,' was the cry of his whole heart and 
 life; 'use me to the utmost; spend every faculty I have, O 
 " Thou who mouldest men " ! ' 
 
 But in the end his work itself drove him away. A certain 
 memorable Saturday evening brought it about. It had been 
 his custom of late to spend an occasional evening hour after his 
 
 night-school work in the North R Club, of which he was 
 
 now by invitation a member. Here, in one of the inner rooms, 
 he would stand against the mantelpiece chatting, smoking often 
 with the men. Everything came up in turn to be discussed ; 
 aud Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical 
 workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal 
 talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lec- 
 tures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to 
 face ; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and 
 difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and all his 
 knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing 
 natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his 
 influence so well as these moments of free discursive inter- 
 course. The mere orator, the mere talker, indeed, would never 
 have gained any permanent hold ; but the life behind gave 
 weight to every acute or eloquent word, and importance even 
 to those mere sallies of a boyish enthusiasm which were still 
 common enough in him. 
 
 He had already visited the club once during the week pre- 
 ceding this Saturday. On both occasions there was much talk 
 of the growing popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street 
 work, of the numbers attending the lectures, the story-telling, 
 the Sunday school, and of the way in which the attractions of 
 it had spread into other quarters of the parish, exciting there, 
 especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid's, an anxious and 
 critical attention. The conversation on Saturday night, how-
 
 CIIAK XLVI GAIN AND LOSS 553 
 
 ever, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and 
 curious note of responsibility/. The men present were evidently 
 beginning to regard the work as their work also, and its success 
 as their interest. It was perfectly natural, for not only had 
 most of them been his supporters and hearers from the begin- 
 ning, but some of them were now actually teaching in the 
 night-school or helping in the various branches of the large and 
 overflowing boys' club. He listened to them for a while in his 
 favourite attitude, leaning against the mantelpiece, throwing 
 in a word or two now and then as to how this or that part of 
 the work might be amended or expanded. Then suddenly a 
 kind of inspiration seemed to pass from them to him. Bending 
 forward as the talk dropped a moment, he asked them, with an 
 accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of this colla- 
 boration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him 
 and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new 
 departure. 
 
 ' Suppose I drop my dictatorship,' he said, ' suppose we set 
 up parliamentary government, are you ready to take your 
 share 1 Are you ready to combine, to commit yourselves ? Are 
 you ready for an effort to turn this work into something lasting 
 and organic ? ' 
 
 The men gathered round him smoked on in silence for a 
 minute. Old Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly 
 puffing away in a corner peculiarly his own, and dedicated to 
 the glorification in broad Berwickshire of the experimental 
 philosophers, laid down his pipe and put on his spectacles, that 
 he might grasp the situation better. Then Lestrange, in a 
 dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself further. 
 
 Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, 
 his eye kindling. 
 
 But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of 
 those striking rapid gestures characteristic of him. 
 
 ' But no mere social and educational body, mind you ! ' and 
 his bright commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good 
 thing surely, " yet is there better than it." The real difficulty 
 of every social effort you know it and I know it lies, not in 
 the planning of the work, but in the kindling of will and pas- 
 sion enough to carry it through. And that can only be done by 
 religion by faith.' 
 
 He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind 
 him. The men gazed at him at the slim figure, the transparent 
 changing face with a kind of fascination, but were still silent, 
 till Macdonald said slowly, taking off his glasses again and 
 dealing his throat 
 
 'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther 
 Elsmere 1 ' 
 
 ' If you like,' said Robert impetuously. ' I have no fear of 
 the great words. You can do nothing by despising the past 
 and its products ; you can also do nothing by being too much
 
 554 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 afraid of them, by letting them choke and stifle your own life. 
 Let the new wine have its new bottles if it must, and never 
 mind words. Be content to be a new " sect," " conventicle," or 
 what not, so long as you feel that you are something with a life 
 and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.' 
 
 Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat 
 with his elbows on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair 
 brushed back tightly from the bony face, on the lips the slightest 
 Voltairean smile. Perhaps it was the coolness of his look which 
 insensibly influenced Robert's next words. 
 
 ' However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church ! 
 Something much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make 
 anything of these suggestions of mine. " Association," " society," 
 " brotherhood," what you will ! But always, if I can persuade 
 you, with something in the name, and everything in the body 
 itself, to show that for the members of it life rests still, as all 
 life worth having has everywhere rested on trust and memory ! 
 trust in the God of experience and history ; memory of that 
 God's work in man, by which alone we know Him and can 
 approach Him. Well, of that work I have tried to prove it to 
 you a thousand times Jesus of Nazareth has become to us, by 
 the evolution of circumstance, the most moving, the most effi- 
 cacious of all types and epitomes. We have made our protest 
 we are daily making it in the face of society, against the 
 fictions and overgrowths which at the present time are exclud- 
 ing him more and more from human love. But now, suppose 
 we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere 
 denial ! Suppose we throw all our energies into the practical 
 building of a new house of faith, the gathering and organising 
 of a new Company of Jesus ! ' 
 
 Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The 
 little room was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast be- 
 tween the squalid modernness of the scene, with its incongruous 
 sights and sounds, the Club-room, painted in various hideous 
 shades of cinnamon and green, the smoke, the lines and groups 
 of working-men in every sort of working dress, the occasional 
 rumbling of huge waggons past the window, the click of glasses 
 and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir of spiritual 
 passion which any competent observer might have felt sweeping 
 through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was 
 passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history 
 of the world. 
 
 After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, 
 stood up. He was commonly known among his fellow-potters 
 as ' the hartist,' because of his long hair, his little affectations 
 of dress, and his aesthetic susceptibilities generally. The wits 
 of the Club made him their target, but the teasing of him that 
 went on was more or less tempered by the knowledge that 
 in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two 
 young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart
 
 CHAP. XLVI GAIN AND LOSS 555 
 
 had been killed before his eyes a year before in a railway acci- 
 dent. 
 
 I dun know/ he said in a high treble voice, ' I dun know 
 whether I speak for anybody but myself very likely not ; but 
 what I do know,' and he raised his right hand and shook it with 
 a gesture of curious felicity, ' is this what Mr. Elsmere starts 
 I'D. join ; where he goes I'll go ; what's good enough for him's 
 good enough for me. He's put a new heart and a new stomach 
 into me, and what I've got he shall have, whenever it pleases 
 'im to call for it ! So if he wants to run a new thing against 
 or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with it 
 I don t know as I'm very clear what he's driving at, nor what 
 good I can do 'im but when Tom Wheeler's asked for he'll be 
 there ! ' 
 
 A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent ran 
 through the little assembly. Kobert bent forward, his eye 
 glistening, a moved acknowledgment in his look and gesture. 
 But in reality a pang ran through the fiery soul. It was 'the 
 personal estimate,' after all, that was shaping their future and 
 his, and the idealist was up in arms for his idea, sublimely 
 jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its power 
 and place. 
 
 A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the 
 possible outlines of a possible organisation, and as to the ob- 
 servances which might be devised to mark its religious character. 
 As it flowed on the atmosphere grew more and more electric. 
 A new passion, though still timid and awestruck, seemed to 
 shine from the looks of the men standing or sitting round the 
 central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under the pres- 
 sure of that strange subdued expectancy about him ; and when 
 llobert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon 
 liim an almost awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future. 
 
 He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he 
 sank into a chair and fainted. He was probably not uncon- 
 scious verjr long, but after he had struggled back to his senses, 
 and was lying stretched on the sofa among the books with which 
 it was littered, the solitary candle in the big room throwing 
 weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression over- 
 took him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of 
 death. How was it he had come to feel so ill ? Suddenly, as 
 he looked back over the preceding weeks, the physical weakness 
 and disturbance which nad marked them, and which he had 
 struggled through, paying as little heed as possible, took shape, 
 spectre-like, in his mind. 
 
 And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against 
 weakness and disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, 
 his head in his hands. 
 
 ' Rest strength,' he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, 
 ' for the work's sake ! ' 
 
 He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine
 
 556 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 till the morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to 
 take him and the babe off without delay to the Norman coast, 
 vowing that he would lounge and idle for six whole weeks if she 
 would let him. Shocked by his looks, she gradually got from him 
 the story of the night before. As he told it, his swoon was a mere 
 untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual drama, the 
 thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her. The 
 contrast, however, between the strong hopes she felt pulsing 
 through him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to 
 melt the heart within her, and make her whole being, she hardly 
 knew why, one sensitive dread. She sat beside him, her head 
 laid against his shoulder, oppressed by a strange and desolate 
 sense of her comparatively small share in this ardent life. In 
 spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as though he 
 were no longer hers as though a craving hungry world, whose 
 needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him 
 from her, claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased 
 the quick mind and delicate frame. 
 
 As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take 
 them in whether for protest or sympathy. She could think 
 only of where to go, what doctor to consult, how she could per- 
 suade him to stay away long enough. 
 
 There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere 
 announced that he must go off for a while. He so announced 
 it that everybody who heard him understood that his temporary 
 withdrawal was to be the mere preparation for a great effort 
 the vigil before the tourney : and the eager friendliness with 
 which he was met sent him off in good heart. 
 
 Three or four days later he, Catherine and Mary were at 
 Petites Dalles, a little place on the Norman coast, near Fecamp, 
 with which he had first made acquaintance years before, when 
 he was at Oxford. 
 
 Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August 
 heat suffered 'a sea change,' and became so much matter for 
 physical delight. It was fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, 
 between five and six o'clock, Catherine would stand by the 
 little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the 
 eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing 
 world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into a 
 quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, 
 they would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. 
 The first event of the day was always Mary's bathe, which 
 gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, so ingenious 
 were the blandishments of the father who wooed her into the 
 warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and pluck of 
 the two-year-old English bebe. By eleven the heat out of doors 
 grew intolerable, and they would stroll back father and 
 mother and trailing child past the hotels on the piaffe, along 
 the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had
 
 OHAP. XLVI GAIN AND LOSS 557 
 
 established themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French bonne 
 to look after them ; would find the green wooden shutters 
 drawn close; the dejeuner waiting for them in the cool bare 
 room ; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, 
 where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual warfare. 
 Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would 
 be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image 
 of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on the boards which 
 alone separated one storey from the other, warned mother and 
 nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile 
 Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety 
 armchair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing and dream- 
 ing, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comedie 
 humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving 
 optimist mind. 
 
 Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to 
 be ; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a pro- 
 fessor of the College de France, as good as any at Etretat, a 
 tired journalist or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of busi- 
 ness. Robert soon made friends among them, more suo, by dint 
 of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most unblushing 
 accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through many 
 an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new 
 acquaintances. 
 
 But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded 
 beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high 
 plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure 
 of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the bean- 
 stalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all 
 round them the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white- 
 flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees 
 which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a 
 height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too 
 thin and barren even for French cultivation, there was a wild 
 belt, half heather, half tangled grass and flower-growth, which 
 the English pair loved for their own special reasons. Bathed in 
 light, cooled by the evening wind, the patches of heather glow- 
 ing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze, there were moments 
 when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them poignantly, 
 and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded 
 happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses. 
 
 One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge 
 of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when 
 suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night- jar, and 
 immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it 
 disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the 
 characteristic click of the wing. 
 
 Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The 
 sudden tears dropped on to her cheeka 
 
 ' Did you hear it, Robert ? '
 
 558 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding 
 pain in her always smote him to the heart. 
 
 ' I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 
 ' No ; if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. 
 It is not for myself, but ' 
 
 For what then ? Merely the touchingness of mortal things 
 as such ? of youth, of hope, of memory ? 
 
 Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling 
 flame-coloured waves, while he held her hand close and tenderly. 
 No she was not unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone for 
 ever out of that early joy. Her life had been caught and nipped 
 in the great inexorable wheel of things. It would go in some 
 sense maimed to the end. But the bitter self-torturing of that 
 first endless year was over. Love, and her husband, and the 
 thousand subtle forces of a changing world had conquered. 
 She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her 
 present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early 
 married life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the 
 Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious 
 of change, but change there was. She had, in fact, undergone 
 that dissociation of the moral judgment from a special series of 
 religious formulae which is the crucial, the epoch-making fact of 
 our day. ' Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher, ' is sin, and 
 implies it ' : and while he speaks, the saint in the unbeliever 
 gently smiles down his argument, and suddenly, in the rebel of 
 yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow. 
 
 CHAPTER XLVH 
 
 MEANWHILE the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose's 
 summer, indeed, was much varied by visits to country houses 
 many of them belonging to friends and acquaintances of the 
 Flaxman family by concerts, and the demands of several new 
 and exciting artistic friendships. But she was seldom loth to 
 come back to the little bare valley and the gray- walled house. 
 Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed 
 by any consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as 
 intolerable to her as in past days. 
 
 The girl was not herself ; there was visible in her not only 
 that general softening and deepening of character which had 
 been the consequence of her trouble in the spring, but a painful 
 ennui she could hardly disguise, a longing for she knew not 
 what. She was beginning to take the homage paid to her gift 
 and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was in no sense false 
 modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision, curious and 
 disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when she 
 came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long
 
 CHAP, xrvii GAIN AND LOSS 559 
 
 walks, breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to 
 their austerest solitudes alone, as though haunted by that pro- 
 found saying of Obermann, 'Man is not made for enjoyment 
 only la tristesse fait aussi partie de ses vastes besoins.' 
 
 What, indeed, was it that ailed her ? In her lonely moments, 
 especially in those moments among the high fells, beside some 
 little tarn or streamlet, while the sheets of mist swept by her, 
 or the great clouds dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she 
 thought often of Langham of that first thrill of passion which 
 had passed through her, delusive and abortive, like one of those 
 first thrills of spring which bring out the buds, only to provide 
 victims for the frost. Now with her again ' a moral east wind 
 was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought of Lang- 
 ham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her heart- 
 strings. But was it really she, really this very Rose, who had 
 rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast ? She felt 
 a sort of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She 
 must surely be a poor creature, else how could such a thing 
 have befallen her and have left so little trace behind 1 
 
 And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised to 
 the blind friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far afield. 
 Little vignettes of London would come and go on the inner 
 retina ; smiles and sighs would follow one another. 
 
 ' How kind he was that time I how amusing this ! ' 
 
 Or, ''How provoking he was that afternoon/ how cold that 
 evening ! ' 
 
 Nothing else the pronoun remained ambiguous. 
 
 ' I want a friend ! ' she said to herself once as she was sitting 
 far up in the bosom of High Fell, ' I want a friend badly. Yet 
 my lover deserts me, and I send away my friend ! ' 
 
 One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the vicar, and Rose were 
 wandering round the churchyard together, enjoying a break of 
 sunny weather after days of rain. Mrs. Thornburgh's personal 
 accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps a little more defined, a 
 little more emphatic even, than when we first knew her. The 
 vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle grayer, a trifle more sub- 
 missive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal contest of 
 life, he was getting clearly worsted as the years went on. But 
 the performance through which his wife was now taking him 
 tried him exceptionally, and she only kept him to it with 
 difficulty. She nad had an attack of bronchitis in the spring, 
 and was still somewhat delicate a fact which to his mind gave 
 her an unfair advantage of him. For she would make use of it 
 to keep constantly before him ideas which he disliked, and in 
 which he considered she took a morbid and unbecoming 
 pleasure. The vicar was of opinion that when his latter end 
 overtook him he should meet it on the whole as courageously 
 as other men. But he was altogether averse to dwelling upon 
 it, or the adjuncts of it, beforehand. Mrs. Thornburgh, how- 
 ever, since her illness had awoke to that inquisitive affectionate
 
 560 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 interest in these very adjuncts which many women feel. And 
 it was extremely disagreeable to the vicar. 
 
 At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the 
 precise spots in the little churchyard where it seemed to her it 
 would be pleasant to rest. There was one corner in particular 
 which attracted her, and she stood now looking at it with 
 measuring eyes and dissatisfied mouth. 
 
 ' William, I wish you would come here and help me ! ' 
 
 The vicar took no notice, but went on talking to Rose. 
 
 ' William ! ' imperatively. 
 
 The vicar turned unwillingly. 
 
 ' You know, William, if you wouldn't mind lying with your 
 feet that way, there would be just room for me. But, of course, 
 
 if you will have them the other way ' The shoulders in the 
 
 old black silk mantle went up, and the gray curls shook dubi- 
 ously. 
 
 The vicar's countenance showed plainly that he thought the 
 remark worse than irrelevant. 
 
 ' My dear,' he said crossly, ' I am not thinking of those things, 
 nor do I wish to think of them. Everything has its time and 
 place. It is close on tea, and Miss Rose says she must be going 
 home.' 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a 
 disapproving sigh. 
 
 ' You talk, William,' she said severely, c as if you were a young 
 man, instead of being turned sixty-six last birthday.' 
 
 And again she measured the spaces with her eye, checking 
 the results aloud. But the vicar was obdurately deaf. He 
 strolled on with Rose, who was chattering to him about a visit 
 to Manchester, and the little church gate clicked behind them. 
 Hearing it, Mrs. Thornburgh relaxed her measurements. They 
 were only really interesting to her after all when the vicar was 
 by. She hurried after them as fast as her short squat figure 
 would allow, and stopped midway to make an exclamation. 
 
 ' A carriage ! ' she said, shading her eyes with a very plump 
 hand, ' stopping at Greybarns ! ' 
 
 The one road of the valley was visible from the churchyai'd, 
 winding along the bottom of the shallow green trough, for at 
 least two miles. Greybarns was a farmhouse just beyond 
 Burwood, about half a mile away. 
 
 Mrs. Thornburgh moved on, her matronly face aglow with 
 interest. 
 
 ' Mary Jenkinson taken ill ! ' she said. ' Of course, that's 
 Doctor Baker ! Well, it's to be hoped it won't be twins t his 
 time. But, as I told her last Sunday, " It's constitutional, my 
 dear." I knew a woman who had three pairs ! Five o'clock 
 now. Well, about seven it'll be worth while sending to inquire.' 
 
 When she overtook the vicar and his companion, she began 
 to whisper certain particulars into the ear that was not on 
 Rose's side. The vicar, who, like Uncle Toby, was possessed of
 
 CHAP. XLVII GAIN AND LOSS 561 
 
 a fine natural modesty, would have preferred that his wife 
 should refrain from whispering on these topics in Rose's pre- 
 sence. But he submitted lest opposition should provoke her 
 into still more audible improprieties ; and Rose walked on a 
 step or two in front of the pair, her eyes twinkling a little. At 
 the vicarage gate she was let off without the customary final 
 gossip. Mrs. Thornburgh was so much occupied in the fate 
 hanging over Mary Jenkinson that she, for once, forgot to 
 catechise Rose as to any marriageable young men she might 
 have come across in a recent visit to a great country-house of 
 the neighbourhood : an operation which formed the invariable 
 pendant to any of Rose's absences. 
 
 So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned home- 
 wards. As she did so she became aware of a man's figure 
 walking along the space of road between Greybarns and 
 Burwood, the western light behind it. 
 
 Dr. Baker? But even granting that Mrs. Jenkinson had 
 brought him five miles on a false alarm, in the provoking 
 manner of matrons, the shortest professional visit could not be 
 over in this time. 
 
 She looked again, shading her eyes. She was nearing the 
 gate of. Burwood, and involuntarily slackened step. The man 
 who was approaching, catching sight of the slim girlish figure 
 in the broad hat and pink and white cotton dress, hurried up. 
 The colour rushed to Rose's cheek. In another minute she and 
 Hugh Flaxman were face to face. 
 
 She could not hide her astonishment. 
 
 ' Why are you not in Scotland 1 ' she said after she had given 
 him her hand. ' Lady Helen told me last week she expected 
 you in Ross-shire.' 
 
 Directly the words left her mouth she felt she had given him 
 an opening. And why had Nature plagued her with this trick 
 of blushing ? 
 
 ' Because I am here ! ' he said smiling, his keen dancing eyes 
 looking down upon her. He was bronzed as she had never seen 
 him. And never had he seemed to bring with him such an 
 atmosphere of cool pleasant strength. ' I have slain so much 
 since the first of July that I can slay no more. I am not like 
 other men. The Nimrod in me is easily gorged, and goes to 
 sleep after a while. So this is Burwood 1 
 
 He had caught her just on the little sweep leading to the 
 gate, and now his eye swept quickly over the modest old house, 
 with its trim garden, its overgrown porch and open casement 
 windows. She dared not ask him again why he was there. 
 In the properest manner she invited him ' to come in and see 
 mamma.' 
 
 ' I hope Mrs. Ley burn is better than she was in town 1 I 
 shall be delighted to see her. But must you go in so soon ? I 
 left my carriage half a mile below, and have been revelling in 
 the sun and air. I am loth to go indoors yet awhile. Are you 
 
 2o
 
 562 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 busy ? Would it trouble you to put me in the way to the head 
 of the valley ? Then, if you will allow me, I will present myself 
 later.' 
 
 Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of 
 things as his appearance. But she turned and walked beside 
 him, pointing out the crags at the head, the great sweep of High 
 Fell, and the pass over to Ullswater, with as much sangfroid 
 as she was mistress of. 
 
 He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland he 
 had bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, that 
 he had stopped at Whinborough, was bent on walking over the 
 High Fell pass to Ullswater, and making his way thence to 
 Ambleside, Grasmere, and Keswick. 
 
 ' But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater ? ' cried 
 Rose incautiously. 
 
 ' Certainly. You see my hotel,' and he pointed, smiling, to a 
 white farmhouse standing just at the bend of the valley, where 
 the road turned towards Whinborough. ' I persuaded the good 
 woman there to give me a bed for the night, took my carriage 
 a little farther, then, knowing I had friends in these parts, I 
 came on to explore.' 
 
 Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper. . 
 
 'You are the first tourist,' she said coolly, 'who has ever 
 stayed in Whindale.' 
 
 ' Tourist ! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the 
 shrine of Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago 
 denned a tourist as a being with straps. I defy you to discover 
 a strap about me, and I left my Murray in the railway carriage.' 
 
 He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection 
 of his strong sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had 
 been so easy to stand on her dignity, to remember whenever he 
 was friendly that the night before he had been distant. In 
 these green solitudes it was not 'easy to be anything but natural 
 the child of the moment ! 
 
 'You are neither more practical nor more economical than 
 when I saw you last,' she said demurely. ' When did you leave 
 Norway 1 ' 
 
 They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flax- 
 man, who had been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by 
 Lord Waynflete, was giving her an amusing account of the sus- 
 ceptibility to titles shown by the primitive democrats of Norway. 
 As they passed a gap in the vicarage hedge, laughing and chat- 
 ting, Rose became aware of a window and a gray head hastily 
 withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash, in- 
 stantly suppressed, that shot across her face. 
 
 Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the 
 house where Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and 
 the poor bedridden Jim still lived. They mounted the path 
 behind it, and plunged into the hazel plantation which had 
 sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable night. But
 
 CHAP. XLVII GAIN AND LOSS 563 
 
 when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a 
 scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of 
 High Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it 
 seemed to Rose that when she had once let him help her over a 
 rock her hand was never her own again. He kept it an almost 
 constant prisoner on one pretext or another till they were at 
 the top. 
 
 Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside 
 her, lifting his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below 
 had been warm and relaxing. Here it played upon them both 
 with a delicious life-giving freshness. He looked round on the 
 great hollow bosom of the fell, the crags buttressing it on either 
 hand, the winding greenness of the valley, the white sparkle of 
 the river. 
 
 ' It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and 
 frugal beauty the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no 
 peaks, no fiords ! ' 
 
 ' No ! ' said Rose scornfully, ' we are not Norway, and we are 
 not Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at once 
 inform you that we have no glaciers, and that there is perhaps 
 only one place in the district where a man who was not an idiot 
 could succeed in killing himself.' 
 
 He looked at her, calmly smiling. 
 
 1 You are angry,' he said, ' because I make comparisons. You 
 are wholly on a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in the world 
 that pleased me half as much as this bare valley, that gray roof ' 
 and he pointed to Burwood among its trees 'and this knoll 
 of rocky ground.' 
 
 His look travelled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. 
 He threw himself down on the short grass beside her. 
 
 'It rained this morning,' she still had the spirit to murmur 
 under her breath. 
 
 He took not the smallest heed. 
 
 'Do you know,' he said and his voice dropped 'can you 
 guess at all why I am here to-day ? ' 
 
 ' You had never seen the Lakes,' she repeated in a prim voice, 
 her eyes still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitching. 
 ' You stopped at Whinborough, intending to take the pass over 
 to Ullswater, thence to make your way to Ambleside and Kes- 
 wick or was it to Keswick and Ambleside ? ' 
 
 She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met 
 abashed her again. 
 
 ' Taquine ! ' he said, ' but you shall not laugh me out of coun- 
 tenance. If I said all that to you just now, may I be forgiven. 
 One purpose, one only, brought me from Norway, forbade me to 
 go to Scotland, drew me to Whinborough, guided me up your 
 valley the purpose of seeing your face ! ' 
 
 It could not be said at that precise moment that he had at- 
 tained it. Rather she seemed bent on hiding that face quite 
 away from him. It seemed to him an age before, drawn by the
 
 564 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 magnetism of his look, her hands dropped, and she faced him, 
 crimson, her breath fluttering a little. Then she would have 
 spoken, but he would not let her. Very tenderly and quietly 
 his hand possessed itself of hers as he knelt beside her. 
 
 ' I have been in exile for two months you sent me. I saw 
 that I troubled you in London. You thought I was pursu- 
 ing you pressing you. Your manner said "Go !" and I went. 
 But do you think that for one day, or hour, or moment I have 
 thought of anything else in those Noi'way woods but of you and 
 of this blessed moment when I should be at your feet, as I am 
 now?' 
 
 She trembled. Her hand seemed to leap in his. His gaze 
 melted, enwrapped her. He bent forward. In another moment 
 her silence would have so answered for her that his covetous 
 arms would have stolen about her for good and all. But sud- 
 denly a kind of shiver ran through her a shiver which was half 
 memory, half shame. She drew back violently, covering her 
 eyes with her hand. 
 
 ' Oh no, no ! ' she cried, and her other hand struggled to get 
 free, ' don't, don't talk to me so I have a a confession.' 
 
 He watched her, his lips trembling a little, a smile of the 
 most exquisite indulgence and understanding dawning in his 
 eyes. Was she going to confess to him what he knew so well 
 already ? If he could only force her to say it on his breast. 
 
 But she held him at arm's length. 
 
 ' You remember you remember Mr. Langham 1 ' 
 
 ' Remember him ! ' echoed Mr. Flaxman fervently. 
 
 ' That thought-reading night at Lady Charlotte's, on the way 
 home, he spoke to me. I said I loved him. I did love him ; I 
 let him kiss me ! ' 
 
 Her flush had quite faded. He could hardly tell whether she 
 was yielding or defiant as the words burst from her. 
 
 An expression, half trouble, half compunction, came into his 
 face. 
 
 ' I knew,' he said very low ; ' or rather, I guessed.' And for 
 an instant it occurred to him to unburden himself, to ask her 
 pardon for that espionage of his. But no, no ; not till he had 
 her safe. ' I guessed, I mean, that there had been something 
 grave between you. I saw you were sad. I would have given 
 the world to comfort you.' 
 
 Her lip quivered childishly. 
 
 ' I said I loved him that night. The next morning he wrote 
 to me that it could never be.' 
 
 He looked at her a moment embarrassed. The conversation 
 was not easy. Then the smile broke once more. 
 
 ' And you have forgotten him as he deserved. If I were not 
 sure of that I could wish him all the tortures of the Inferno ! 
 As it is, I cannot think of him ; I cannot let you think of him. 
 Sweet, do you know that ever since I first saw you the one 
 thought of my days, the dream of my nights, the purpose of my
 
 CHAP. XLVII GAIN AND LOSS 565 
 
 whole life, has been to win you 1 There was another in the 
 field; I knew it. I stood by and waited. He failed you I 
 knew he must in some form or other. Then I was hasty, and 
 you resented it. Little tyrant, you made yourself a Rose with 
 many thorns ! But, tell me, tell me, it is all over your pain, 
 my waiting. Make yourself sweet to me ! unfold to me at last ? ' 
 
 An instant she wavered. His bliss was almost in his grasp. 
 Then she sprang up, and Flaxman found himself standing by 
 her, rebuffed and surprised. 
 
 ' No, no ! ' she cried, holding out her hands to him though all 
 the time. ' Oh, it is too soon ! I should despise myself, I do 
 despise myself. It tortures me that I can change and forget so 
 easily ; it ought to torture you. Oh, don't ask me yet to to 
 
 ' To be my wife,' he said cahnly, his cheek a little flushed, his 
 eye meeting hers with a passion in it that strove so hard for self- 
 control it was almost sternness. 
 
 ' Not yet ! ' she pleaded, and then, after a moment's hesitation, 
 she broke into the most appealing smiles, though the tears were 
 in her eyes, hurrying out the broken, beseeching words. ' I want 
 a friend so much a real friend. Since Catherine left I have had 
 no one. I have been running riot. Take me in hand. Write 
 to me, scold me, advise me, I will be your pupil, I will tell you 
 everything. You seem to me so fearfully wise, so much older. 
 Oh, don't be vexed. And and in six months ' 
 
 She turned away, rosy as her name. He held her still, so 
 rigidly, that her hands were almost hurt. The shadow of the 
 hat fell over her eyes ; the delicate outlines of the neck and 
 shoulders in the pretty pale dress were defined against the green 
 hill background. He studied her deliberately, a hundred different 
 expressions sweeping across his face. A debate of the most 
 feverish interest was going on within him. Her seriousness at 
 the moment, the chances of the future, her character, his own 
 all these knotty points entered into it, had to be weighed and 
 decided with lightning rapidity. But Hugh Flaxman was born 
 under a lucky star, and the natal charm held good. 
 
 At last he gave a long breath ; he stooped and kissed her 
 hands. 
 
 'So be it. For six months I will be your guardian, your 
 friend, your teasing implacable censor. At the end of that time 
 I will be well, never mind what. I give you fair warning.' 
 
 He released her. Rose clasped her hands before her and stood 
 drooping. Now that she had gained her point, all her bright 
 mocking independence seemed to have vanished. She might 
 have been in reality the tremulous timid child she seemed. His 
 spirits rose ; he began to like the role she had assigned to him. 
 The touch of unexpectedness, in all she said and did, acted with 
 exhilarating force on his fastidious romantic sense. 
 
 ' Now, then,' he said, picking up her gloves from the grass, 
 'you have given me my rights ; I will begin to exercise them 
 at once. I must take you home, the clouds are coming up
 
 566 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 again, and on the way will you kindly give me a full, true, and 
 minute account of these two months during which you have 
 been so dangerously left to your own devices 1 ' 
 
 She hesitated, and began to speak witli difficulty, her eyes 
 on the ground. But by the time they were in the main Shan- 
 moor path again, and she was not so weakly dependent on his 
 physical aid, her spirits too returned. Pacing along with her 
 hands behind her, she began by degrees to throw into her 
 accounts of her various visits and performances plenty of her 
 natural malice. 
 
 And after a bit, as that strange storm of feeling which had 
 assailed her on the mountain-top abated something of its be- 
 wildering force, certain old grievances began to raise very 
 lively heads in her. The smart of Lady Fauntleroy's ball was 
 still there ; she had not yet forgiven him all those relations ; 
 and the teasing image of Lady Florence woke up in her. 
 
 ' It seems to me,' he said at last dryly, as he opened a gate 
 for her not far from Burwood, 'that you have been making 
 yourself agreeable to a vast number of people. In my new 
 capacity of censor I should like to warn you that there is no- 
 thing so bad for the character as universal popularity.' 
 
 ' / have not got a thousand and one important cousins ! ' she 
 exclaimed, her lip curling. 'If I want to please, I must take 
 pains, else " nobody minds me." ' 
 
 He looked at her attentively, his handsome face aglow with 
 animation. 
 
 ' What can you mean by that ? ' he said slowly. 
 
 But she was quite silent, her head well in air. 
 
 ' Cousins 1 ' he repeated. ' Cousins ? And clearly meant as a 
 taunt at me ! Now when did you see my cousins ? I grant 
 that I possess a monstrous and indefensible number. I have 
 it. You think that at Lady Fauntleroy's ball I devoted my- 
 self too much to my family, and too little to ' 
 
 ' Not at all ! ' cried Hose hastily, adding, with charming 
 incoherence, while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in her 
 restless fingers, ' Some cousins of course are pretty.' 
 
 He paused an instant : then a light broke over his face, and 
 his burst of quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. 
 Rose got redder and redder. She realised dimly that she was 
 hardly maintaining the spirit of their contract, and that he 
 was studying her with eyes inconveniently bright and pene- 
 trating. 
 
 ' Shall I quote to you,' he said, ' a sentence of Sterne's 1 If 
 it violate our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. 
 Sterne is admonishing a young friend as to his manners in 
 society : " You are in love," he says. " Tant mieux. But do not 
 imagine that the fact bestows on you a licence to behave like a 
 bear towards all the rest of the world. Affection may surely 
 conduct tkee through an avenue of women to her who possesses thy 
 heart without tearing the flounces of any of their petticoats "-
 
 CHAP. XLVIII GAIN AND LOSS 567 
 
 not even those of little cousins of seventeen ! I say this, you 
 will observe, in the capacity you have assigned me. In another 
 capacity I venture to think 1 could justify myself still better.' 
 
 ' My guardian and director,' cried Rose, ' must not begin his 
 functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from the 
 classics ! ' 
 
 He did not answer for a moment. They were at the gate of 
 Burwood, under a thick screen of wild cherry trees. The gate 
 was half open, and his hand was on it. 
 
 ' And my pupil,' he said, bending to her, ' must not begin by 
 challenging the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he will 
 not answer for the consequences ! ' 
 
 His words were threatening, but his voice, his fine expressive 
 face, were infinitely sweet. By a kind of fascination she never 
 afterwards understood, Hose for answer startled him and her- 
 self. She bent her head : she laid her lips on the hand which 
 held the gate, and then she was through it in an instant. He 
 followed her in vain. He never overtook her till at the drawing- 
 room door she paused with amazing dignity. 
 
 'Mamma,' she said, throwing it open, 'here is Mr. Flaxman. 
 He is come from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I 
 will go and speak to Margaret about tea.' 
 
 CHAPTER XLVIII 
 
 AFTER the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding 
 chapter, Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home 
 along the valley that night towards the farmhouse where he 
 had established himself, he entertained a very comfortable 
 scepticism as to the permanence of that curious contract into 
 which Rose had just forced him. However, he was quite mis- 
 taken. Rose's maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on 
 Hugh Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of 
 Langham. The restraints, the anomalies, the hairsplittings of 
 the situation delighted her ingenuous youth. ' I am free lie is 
 free. We will be friends for six months. Possibly we may not 
 suit one another at all. If we do then ' 
 
 In the thrill of that then lay, of course, the whole attraction 
 of the position. 
 
 So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was 
 to be scrupulously kept up. It required a tolerably strong 
 masculine certainty at the bottom of him to enable him to 
 resign himself once more to his part. But he achieved it, and 
 being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of half-shades 
 and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy it, 
 and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection. 
 
 How Rose got through Agnes's cross -questioning on the 
 matter history sayeth not. Or one thing, however, a conscien-
 
 568 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 tious historian may be sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in 
 knowing as much as she wanted to know. Mrs. Leyburn was 
 a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr. Flaxman's journeys. 
 It was, as she said, curious that a man should start on a tour 
 through the Lakes from Long Whindale. 
 
 But she took everything naively as it came, and as she was 
 told. Nothing with her ever passed through any changing 
 crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. 
 Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impres- 
 sions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. He liked 
 them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative scantiness 
 of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have 
 come put of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested 
 anything else to her, her mind worked no further, and she was 
 as easily beguiled after his appearance as before it by the 
 intricacies of some new knitting. 
 
 Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thorii- 
 burgh had interfered again ; but, as we know, poor Catherine's 
 sorrows had raised a whole odd host of misgivings in the mind 
 of the vicar's wife. She prowled nervously round Mrs. Ley- 
 burn, filled with contempt for her placidity ; but she did not 
 attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on Rose and Agnes, but 
 long practice had made them adepts in the art of baffling her ; 
 and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the vicarage in their 
 company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, 
 which caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of 
 tea-cakes, she was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar after- 
 wards that ' no one could tell what a man like that was after. 
 She supposed his manners were very aristocratic, but for her 
 part she liked plain people.' 
 
 On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman's stay in the valley he 
 entered the Burwood drive about eleven o'clock, and Rose 
 came down the steps to meet him. For a moment he nattered 
 himself that her disturbed looks were due to the nearness of 
 their farewells. 
 
 ' There is something wrong,' he said, softly detaining her hand 
 a moment so much, at least, was in his right. 
 
 ' Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Petites Dalles. 
 He has been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a 
 few days. Catherine writes bravely, but she is evidently very 
 low.' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman's face fell. Certain letters he had received 
 from Elsrnere in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so 
 pitiful was the half -conscious revelation in them of an inces- 
 sant physical struggle. An accident ! Elsmere was in no state 
 for accidents. What miserable ill-luck ! 
 
 Rose read him Catherine's account. It appeared that on a 
 certain stormy day a swimmer had been observed in difficulties 
 among the rocks skirting the northern side of the Petites Dalles 
 bay. The old baigneur of the place, owner of the still primitive
 
 CHAP. XLVIII GAIN AND LOSS 569 
 
 Jtablissement des bains, without stopping to strip, or even to 
 take oft' his heavy boots, went out to the man in danger with a 
 plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to the 
 people watching, it became evident that the baigneur himself 
 was in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the water, 
 and the cry rose that he was sinking. Robert, who happened 
 to be bathing near, ran off to the spot, jumped in, and swam 
 out. By this time the old man had drifted some way. Robert 
 succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid an 
 excited crowd, heaaed by the baigneur's wailing family, they 
 carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere 
 was certain life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. 
 Meanwhile no one seemed to have any common sense, or any 
 knowledge of how to proceed, but himself. For two hours he 
 stayed on the beach in his dripping bathing -clothes, a cold 
 wind blowing, trying every device known to him : rubbing, hot 
 bottles, artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too old 
 and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed 
 his last, amid the wild and passionate grief of wife and children. 
 
 Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk 
 to the doctor, to carry one of the baigneur's sobbing grand- 
 children to its mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine 
 got hold of him, and he submitted to be taken home, shivering, 
 and deeply depressed by the failure of his efforts. A violent 
 gastric and lung chill declared itself almost immediately, and 
 for three days he had been anxiously ill. Catherine, miser- 
 able, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how to get 
 hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. ' I had 
 not the heart to write even to you,' she wrote to her mother. 
 ' I could think of nothing but trying one thing after another. 
 Now he has been in bed eight days, and is much better. He 
 talks of getting up to-morrow, and declares he must go home 
 next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay here another 
 fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so much 
 that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the jour- 
 ney. He is not fit for it in any way.' 
 
 Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly 
 gravity. Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, 
 his hands on his sides, considering. 
 
 ' I shall not go on to Scotland,' he said ; ' Mrs. Elsmere must 
 not be left. I will go off there at once.' 
 
 In Rose's soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman 
 saw for an instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it 
 was delicate, not the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but 
 his wife that was to be. And yet she held him to his bargain. 
 All that his lips touched as he said good-bye was the little 
 bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him from her belt. 
 
 Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from 
 Sassetdt to Petites Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A 
 chilly west wind blew up the dust before him and stirred the
 
 570 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 parched leafage of the valley. He knocked at the door, of 
 which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered by the sun. 
 Catherine herself opened it. 
 
 ' This is kind this is like yourself ! ' she said, after a first 
 stare of amazement, when he had explained himself. ' He is in 
 there, much better.' 
 
 Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. 
 But he sprang up with his old brightness. 
 
 ' Well, this is friendship ! What on earth brings you here, 
 old fellow ? Why aren't you in the stubbles celebrating St. 
 Partridge ? ' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so 
 as to make Robert's eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with 
 a sort of caressing touch upon Flaxman's shoulder. 
 
 ' I shan't try to thank you Catherine can if she likes. How 
 relieved she will be about that bothering journey of ours ! How- 
 ever, I am really ever so much better. It was very sharp while 
 it lasted ; and the doctor no great shakes. But there never 
 was such a woman as my wife ; she pulled me through ! And 
 now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself a little more plainly. 
 What brought you and my sisters-in-law together ? You need 
 not try and persuade me that Long Whindale is the natural 
 gate of the Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from 
 London to Scotland, though I have no doubt you tried that little 
 fiction on them.' 
 
 Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down very deliberately. 
 
 ' I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that per- 
 spicacity for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the 
 day before yesterday I asked your sister Rose to marry me. 
 She ' 
 
 ' Go on, man,' cried Robert, exasperated by his pause. 
 
 ' I don't know how to put it,' said Flaxman calmly. ' For 
 six months we are to be rather more than friends, and a good 
 deal less than fiances. I am to be allowed to write to her. You 
 may imagine how seductive it is to one of the worst and laziest 
 letter-writers in the three kingdoms that his fortunes in love 
 should be made to depend on his correspondence. I may scold 
 her if she gives me occasion. And in six months, as one says to 
 a publisher, " the agreement will be open to revision." ' 
 
 Robert stared. 
 
 ' And you are not engaged ? ' 
 
 ' Not as I understand it,' replied Flaxman. ' Decidedly 
 not ! ' he added with energy, remembering that very platonic 
 farewell. 
 
 Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating. 
 
 ' A fantastic thing, the modern young woman ! Still I think 
 I can understand. There may have been more than mere caprice 
 in it.' 
 
 His eye met his friend's significantly. 
 
 ' I suppose so,' said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert's
 
 CHAP. XLVIII GAIN AND LOSS 571 
 
 hem-fit was he going to reveal any details of that scene on High 
 Fell. 'Never mind, old fellow, I am content. And, indeed, 
 faute de mieux, I should be content with anything that brought 
 me nearer to her, were it but by the thousandth of an inch.' 
 
 Robert grasped his hand affectionately. 
 
 'Catherine,' he called through the door, 'never mind the 
 supper ; let it burn. Flaxman brings news.' 
 
 Catherine Listened to the story with amazement. Certainly 
 her ways would never have been as her sister's. 
 
 ' Are we supposed to know ? ' she asked, very naturally. 
 
 'She never forbade me to tell,' said Flaxmaii smiling. 'I 
 think, however, if I were you, I should say nothing about it 
 yet. I told her it was part of our bargain that she should ex- 
 plain my letters to Mrs. Leyburn. I gave her free leave to 
 invent any fairy tale she pleased, but it was to be her invention, 
 not mine.' 
 
 Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But 
 there was something reasuring as well as comic in the stoicism 
 with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter 
 must be left to manage itself. 
 
 Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand 
 on Flaxman's arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched 
 him critically, did not like some of his symptoms, but thought 
 on the whole he must be recovering at the normal rate, con- 
 sidering how severe the attack had been. 
 
 ' What do you think of him 1 ' Catherine asked him next day, 
 with all her soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established 
 in a sunny nook, and were strolling on along the sands. 
 
 ' I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, 
 and keep him quiet,' said Flaxman. 'He will be all right 
 presently.' 
 
 ' How can we keep him quiet ? ' said Catherine, with a mo- 
 mentary despair in her fine pale face. ' All day long and all 
 night long he is thinking of his work. It is like something fiery 
 burning the heart out ot him.' 
 
 Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days 
 of calm autumn weather he spent with them before the return 
 journey. Robert would talk to him for hours, now on the 
 sands, witli the gray infinity of sea before them, now pacing 
 the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him drop 
 heavily into his long chair ; and the burden of it all was the 
 religious future of the working-class. He described the scene 
 in the Club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, 
 presenting them for Flaxman's criticism, and dealing with them 
 himself, with that startling mixture of acute common-sense and 
 eloquent passion which had always made him so effective as an 
 initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously at first, as he generally 
 listened to Elsmere, and then was carried away, not by the 
 beliefs, but by the man. He found his pleasure in dallying 
 with the in;iuificent possibility of the Church ; doubt with him
 
 572 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 applied to all propositions, whether positive or negative ; and 
 lie had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for 
 the provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or 
 social reform was another matter. Since the Revolution, every 
 generous child of the century has been open to the fascination 
 of political or social Utopias. But religion ! What what is 
 truth ? Why not let the old things alone 1 
 
 However, it was through the social passion, once so real in 
 him, and still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, 
 that Robert caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining pos- 
 session of him all these months. 
 
 'Well,' said Flaxman one day, 'suppose I grant you that 
 Christianity of the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, 
 even in England, and in spite of the Church expansion we hear 
 so much about ; and suppose I believe with you that things will 
 go badly without religion what then ? Who can have a re- 
 ligion for the asking ? ' 
 
 ' But who can have it without 1 Seek, that you may find. 
 Experiment ; try new combinations. If a thing is going that 
 humanity can't do without, and you and I believe it, what duty 
 is more urgent for us than the effort to replace it ? ' 
 
 Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 
 
 ' What will you gain ? A new sect ? ' 
 
 ' Possibly. But what we stand to gain is a new social bond,' 
 was the flashing answer ' a new compelling force in man and 
 in society. Can you deny that the world wants it ? What are 
 you economists and sociologists of the new type always pining 
 for ? Why, for that diminution of the self in man which is to 
 enable the individual to see the world's ends clearly, and to care 
 not only for his own but for his neighbour's interest, which is 
 to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and the poor 
 bear with the rich. If man only would, he could, you say, solve 
 all the problems which oppress him. It is man's will which is 
 eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great re- 
 ligions of the world are the stimulants by which the power at 
 the root of things has worked upon this sluggish instrument of 
 human destiny. Without religion you cannot make the will 
 equal to its tasks. Our present religion fails us ; we must, we 
 will have another ! ' 
 
 He rose and began to pace along the sands, now gently 
 glowing in the warm September evening, Flaxman beside 
 him. 
 
 A new religion I Of all words, the most tremendous ! Flax- 
 man pitifully weighed against it the fraction of force fretting 
 and surging in the thin elastic frame beside him. He knew 
 well, however few better that the outburst was not a mere 
 dream and emptiness. There was experience behind it a 
 burning, driving experience of actual fact. 
 
 Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, 'I must have 
 that whole block of warehouses, Flaxman.'
 
 CHAP. XLIX GAIN AND LOSS 573 
 
 ' Must you ? ' said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from specu- 
 lation to the practical. ' Why 1 ' 
 
 ' Look here ! ' And sitting down again on a sand-hill over- 
 grown with wild grasses and mats of sea-thistle, the poor pale 
 reformer began to draw out the details of his scheme on its 
 material side. Three floors of rooms brightly furnished, well 
 lit and warmed ; a large hall for the Sunday lectures, concerts, 
 entertainments, and story -telling ; rooms for the boys' club ; 
 two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate entrance ; 
 a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well stored with 
 books, and made beautiful by pictures three or four smaller 
 rooms to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the 
 Naturalist Club which had been started in May on the Mure- 
 well plan ; and, if possible, a gymnasium. 
 
 ' Money ! ' he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. 
 ' There's the rub, of course. But I shall manage it.' 
 
 To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely 
 that he would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere's stick 
 had made in the sand for a minute or two ; then he said dryly, 
 ' I will take the first expense : and draw on me afterwards up 
 to five hundred a year, for the first four years.' 
 
 Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand. 
 
 ' I do not thank you,' he said quietly, after a moment's pause ; 
 ' the work itself will do that.' 
 
 Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till 
 Flaxman's pulse beat as fast as Robert's ; so full of infectious 
 hope and energy was the whole being of the man before him. 
 
 I can take in the women and girls now,' Robert said once. 
 ' Catherine has promised to superintend it all.' 
 
 Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he 
 stood an instant looking at his companion. It was the first 
 time he had mentioned Catherine's name in connection with 
 the North R work. Flaxman could not mistake the emo- 
 tion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned away, 
 nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. . But the two 
 men understood each other. 
 
 CHAPTER XLIX 
 
 Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great 
 deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. 
 All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere's irrationality 
 was an aversion to doctors, from the point of view of his own 
 ailments. He had an unbounded admiration for them as a 
 class, and would have nothing to say to them as individuals 
 that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic ; Cath- 
 erine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating 
 himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his
 
 574 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 way. And for a time the stimulus of London and of his work 
 seemed to act favourably upon him. After his first welcome at 
 the Club he came home with bright eye and vigorous step, de- 
 claring that he was another man. 
 
 Flaxman established himself in St. James's Place. Town was 
 deserted ; the partridges at Greenlaws clamoured to be shot ; 
 the head -keeper wrote letters which would have melted the 
 heart of a stone. Flaxman replied recklessly that any decent 
 fellow in the neighbourhood was welcome to shoot his birds a 
 reply which almost brought upon him the resignation of the 
 outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and 
 remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner's duties, 
 inquiring at the same time what he meant to do with regard 
 to ' that young lady.' To which Flaxman replied calmly that 
 he had just come back from the Lakes, where he had done, not 
 indeed all that he meant to do, but still something. Miss Ley- 
 burn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation for six 
 months, and found London the best place for getting through it. 
 
 ' So far,' he said, ' I am getting on well, and developing an 
 amount of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, 
 which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations 
 of an idle man. But we must be left " to dream our dream unto 
 ourselves alone." One word from anybody belonging to me to 
 anybody belonging to her on the subject, and But threats 
 are puerile. For the present, dear aunt, I am your devoted 
 nephew, HUGH FLAXMAN.' 
 
 ' On probation I ' 
 
 Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter. 
 
 He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, 
 and because he loved the Elsmeres for Rose's sake and his own. 
 He thought moreover that a cool-headed friend with an eye for 
 something else in the world than religious reform might be 
 useful just then to Elsmere, and he was determined at the same 
 time to see what the reformer meant to be at. 
 
 In the first place, Robert's attention was directed to getting 
 possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing 
 school and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This 
 was a matter of some difficulty, for the floors above were em- 
 ployed in warehousing goods belonging to various minor import 
 trades, and were held on tenures of different lengths. However, 
 by dint of some money and much skill, the requisite clearances 
 were effected during September and part of October. By the 
 end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which 
 refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere's hands. 
 
 Meanwhile, at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture a 
 meeting composed mainly of artisans of the district, but includ- 
 ing also Robert's helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling 
 of persons interested in the man and his work from all parts
 
 CHAP. XT.IX GAIN AND LOSS 575 
 
 the details of 'The New Brotherhood of Christ' were being 
 hammered out. Catherine was generally present, sitting a 
 little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew her 
 well, was always trying to decipher afresh a sort of sweet 
 aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw, down the vistas 
 of the future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to 
 endure the present. Murray Edwardes too was always there. 
 It often struck Flaxman afterwards that in Robert's attitude 
 towards Edwardes at this time, in his constant desire to bring 
 him forward, to associate him with himself as much as possible 
 in the government and formation of the infant society, there 
 was a half -conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none 
 knew, not even the tender wife, the watchful friend. 
 
 The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the 
 great majority of whom had been disciplined and moulded 
 for months by contact with Elsmere's teaching and Elsmere's 
 thought, showed a responsiveness, a receptivity, even a power 
 of initiation which often struck Flaxman with wonder. Were 
 these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of 
 Robert's address sour, stolid, brutalised, hostile to all things 
 in heaven and earth ? 
 
 'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the 
 r61e of the individual lessening day by day ! Fool ! go and be 
 a saint, go and give yourself to ideas ; go and live the life hid 
 with Christ in God, and see,' so would run the quick comment 
 of the observer. 
 
 But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and 
 play of feeling between Robert and the wide following growing 
 up around him, it was plain to Flaxman that although he never 
 moved a step without carrying his world with him, he was 
 never at the mercy of his world. Nothing was ever really left 
 to chance. Through all these strange debates, which began 
 rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more and 
 more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that 
 hardly any rule or formula of- the new society was ultimately 
 adopted which had not been for long in Robert s mind thought 
 out and brought into final shape, perhaps, on the Petites Dalles 
 sands. It was an unobtrusive art, his art of government, but a 
 most effective one. 
 
 At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the 
 early meetings, the discussions as to the religious practices 
 which were to bind together the new association might have 
 passed the line, and become puerile or grotesque. At any 
 moment the jarring characters and ambitions of the men 
 Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate 
 atmosphere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole 
 new birth seemed to have been conceived, and upon the main- 
 tenance of which its fruition and development depended. But 
 as soon as Elsmere appeared, difficulties vanished, enthusiasm 
 sprang up again. The rules of the new society came simply
 
 576 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 and naturally into being, steeped and haloed, as it were, from 
 the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart. 
 The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no 
 less than the sour, half -educated analysis of such a man as 
 Lestrange. 
 
 In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside 
 him. There were some painful things connected with the new 
 departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, 
 refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable 
 reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the 
 strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had 
 begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, 
 who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert 
 was bent on attaching to the society, had times when the things 
 he was half inclined to worship one day he was much more 
 inclined to burn the next in the sight of all men, and when the 
 smallest failure of temper on Robert's part might have entailed 
 a disagreeable scene, and the possible formation of a harassing 
 left wing. 
 
 But Robert's manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful 
 younger brother. It was clear that the Comtist could not 
 formally join the Brotherhood. But all the share and influence 
 that could be secured him in the practical working of it was 
 secured him. And what was more, Robert succeeded in infus- 
 ing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the subject, into 
 the men and youths who had profited in the past by Warcllaw's 
 rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on 
 now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed 
 to feel himself an alien or forgotten. 
 
 As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh 
 as to preach, and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a 
 saving sense of the whimsical in life and character, cynicism 
 and vanity seemed to have no case. Robert's quick temper had 
 been wonderfully disciplined by life since his Oxford days. He 
 had now very little of that stift-neckedness, so fatal to the aver- 
 age reformer, which makes a man insist on all or nothing from 
 his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, 
 he made it almost seem as though the grudging support of 
 Lestrange, or the critical half - patronising approval of the 
 young barrister from the West who came down to listen to 
 him, and made a favour of teaching in his night-school, were 
 as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, the self-abandoning 
 veneration, which the majority of those about him had begun 
 to show towards the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, 
 they had ' seen God.' 
 
 At last by the middle of November the whole great building, 
 with the exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for 
 use. Robert felt the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the half- 
 filled shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the 
 walls ready to be hung, the rolls of bright -coloured matting
 
 CHAP. XLIX GAIN AND LOSS 577 
 
 ready to be laid down, as he had felt in the Murewell Institute. 
 He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of men, worked 
 at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever per- 
 suade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself. 
 
 Then came the day when the building was formally opened, 
 when the gilt letters over the door, ' The New Brotherhood of 
 Christ,' shone out into the dingy street, and when the first 
 enrolment of names in the book of the Brotherhood took place. 
 
 For two hours a continuous stream of human beings sur- 
 rounded the little table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing 
 their names, and receiving from him the silver badge, bearing 
 the head of Christ, which was to be the outward and conspic- 
 uous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts : the intel- 
 ligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant, 
 stalwart warehousemen, huge carters and draymen, the boy 
 attached to each by the laws of the profession often straggling 
 lumpishly behind his master. Women were there : wives who 
 came because their lords came, or because Mr. Elsmere had been 
 ' that good ' to them that anything they could do to oblige him 
 ' they would, and welcome ' j prim pupil- teachers, holding them- 
 selves with straight superior shoulders ; children, who came 
 trooping in, grinned up into Robert's face and retreated again 
 with red cheeks, the silver badge tight clasped in hands which 
 not even much scrubbing could make passable. 
 
 Flaxman stood and watched it "from the side. It was an 
 extraordinary scene : the crowd, the slight figure on the plat- 
 form, the two great inscriptions, which represented the only 
 ' articles ' of the new faith, gleaming from the freshly coloured 
 walls 
 
 1 In Thee, Eternal, have 1 put my trust ; ' 
 
 ' This do in remembrance of Me ; ' 
 
 the recesses on either side of the hall lined with white marble, 
 and destined, the one to hold the names of the living members 
 of the Brotherhood, the other to commemorate those who had 
 passed away (empty this last save for the one poor name of 
 ' Charles Richards ') ; the copies of Giotto's Paduan Virtues 
 faith, fortitude, charity, and the like which broke the long 
 wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker tried to assert 
 itself against the feeling with which the air seemed overcharged. 
 In vain. 
 
 ' Whatever comes of it,' Flaxman said to himself with strong 
 involuntary conviction, ' whether he fails or no, the spirit that 
 is moving here is the same spirit that spread the Church, the 
 spirit that sent out Benedictine and Franciscan into the world, 
 that fired the children of Luther, or Calvin, or George Fox ; the 
 spirit of devotion, through a man, to an idea ; through one 
 much-loved, much-trusted soul to some eternal verity, newly 
 caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no approaching 
 the idea for the masses except through the human life ; there
 
 578 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the 
 idea ! ' 
 
 A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not 
 write to her of Rose, he did not care to write of himself, and he 
 knew that Elsmere's club address had left a mark even on her 
 restless and overcrowded mind. Moreover, he himself was 
 absorbed. 
 
 ' We are in the full stream of religion-making. I watch it 
 with a fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, 
 even when my judgment demurs, and my intelligence protests 
 that the thing cannot live without Elsmere, and that Elsmere's 
 life is a frail one. After the ceremony of enrolment which I 
 described to you yesterday the Council of the New Brotherhood 
 was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an address. 
 Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are working-men, the 
 rest of the upper class ; Elsmere, of course, president. 
 
 ' Since then the first religious service under the new consti- 
 tution has been held. The service is extremely simple, and the 
 basis of the whole is "new bottles for the new wine." The 
 opening prayer is recited by everybody present standing. It 
 is rather an act of adoration and faith than a prayer, properly 
 so called. It represents, in fact, the placing of the soul in the 
 presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal ; the ignor- 
 ant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge 
 and perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere's drawing up, I 
 imagine at any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the 
 modern spirit, answering to modern need, as I imagine the first 
 Christian prayers expressed the spirit and answered to the 
 need of an earlier day. 
 
 ' Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere 
 reads it and expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might 
 expound a passage of Tacitus, historically and critically. His 
 explanation of miracle, his efforts to make his audience realise 
 the germs of miraculous belief which each man carries with him 
 in the constitution and inherited furniture of his mind, are 
 some of the most ingenious perhaps the most convincing I 
 have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very 
 much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvellous 
 clement in religion. 
 
 ' But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer 
 begins. Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another 
 matter ; but that the Christ he preaches moves the human 
 heart as much as and in the case of the London artisan, more 
 than the current orthodox presentation of him, I begin to 
 have ocular demonstration. 
 
 ' I was present, for instance, at his children's Sunday class 
 the other day. He had brought them up to the story of the 
 Crucifixion, reading from the Revised Version, and amplifying 
 whereA r er the sense required it. Suddenly a little girl laid her 
 head on the desk before her, and with choking sobs implored
 
 CHAP. XLIX GAIN AND LOSS 579 
 
 him not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to do the 
 same. The pure human pity of the story the contrast between 
 the innocence and the pain of the sufferer seemed to be more 
 than they could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a 
 jugglery by which the suffering was not real after all, and the 
 sufferer not man but God. 
 
 'He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console 
 them. But there is something piercingly penetrating and 
 austere even in the consolations of this new faith. He did but 
 remind the children of the burden of gratitude laid upon them. 
 " Would you let him suffer so much in vain ? His suffering has 
 made you and me happier and better to-day, at this moment, 
 than we could have been without Jesus. You will understand 
 how, and why, more clearly when you grow up. Let us in 
 return keep him in our hearts always, and obey his words ! It 
 is all you can do for his sake, just as all you could do for a 
 mother who died would be to follow her wishes and sacredly 
 keep her memory." 
 
 ' That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little scene, 
 wonderfully suggestive and pathetic. 
 
 ' But a few more words about the Sunday service. After the 
 address came a hymn. There are only seven hymns in the 
 little service book, gathered out of the finest we. have. It is 
 supposed that in a short time they will become so familiar to 
 the members of the Brotherhood that they will be sung readily 
 by heart. The singing of them in the public service alternates 
 with an equal number of psalms. And both psalms and hymns 
 are meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the 
 members, and to become part of the everyday life of the 
 Brotherhood. They have been most carefully chosen, and a sort 
 of ritual importance has been attached to them from the begin- 
 ning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn or psalm. 
 
 'Then the whole wound up with another short prayer, also 
 repeated standing, a commendation of the individual, the 
 Brotherhood, the nation, the world, to God. The phrases of it 
 are terse and grand. One can see at once that it has laid hold 
 of the popular sense, the popular memory. The Lord's Prayer 
 followed. Then, after a silent pause of " recollection," Elsmere 
 dismissed them. 
 
 ' " Go in peace, in the love of God, and in the memory of His 
 servant, Jesus." 
 
 ' I looked carefully at the men as they were tramping out. 
 Some of them were among the Secularist speakers you and I 
 heard at the club in April. In my wonder, I thought of a say- 
 ing of Vinet's : " C'est pour la religion que le peupte a le plus de 
 talent ; c'est en religion gu'il montre le j)lus d'esprit." ' 
 
 In a later letter he wrote 
 
 ' I have not yet described to you what is perhaps the most 
 characteristic, the most binding practice of the New Brother- 
 hood. It is that which has raised most angry comment, cries of
 
 580 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vil 
 
 " profanity," " wanton insult," and what not. I came upon it 
 yesterday in an interesting way. I was working with Elsmere 
 at the arrangement of the library, which is now becoming a 
 most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian 
 chosen from the neighbourhood, when he asked me to go and 
 take a message to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary 
 help in the evenings after his clay's work. He thought that as 
 it was the dinner hour, and the man worked in the dock close 
 by, I might find him at home. I went off to the model lodging- 
 house where I was told to look for him, mounted the common 
 stairs, and knocked at his door. Nobody seemed to hear me, 
 and as the door was ajar I pushed it open. 
 
 ' Inside was a curious sight. 
 
 ' The table was spread with the midday meal. Round the table 
 stood four children, the eldest about fourteen, and the youngest 
 six or seven. At one end of it stood the carpenter himself in 
 his working apron, a brawny Saxon, bowed a little by his trade. 
 Before him was a plate of bread, and his horny hands were 
 resting on it. The street was noisy ; they had not heard my 
 knock ; and as I pushed open the door there was an old coat 
 hanging over the corner of it which concealed me. 
 
 ' Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, 
 kept me where I was, silent. 
 
 ' The father lifted his right hand. 
 
 ' " The Master said, ' This do in remembrance of Me ! ' " 
 
 'The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the 
 youngest said slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that 
 touched me extraordinarily, 
 
 ' " Jesus, we remember Thee always ! " 
 
 ' It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected 
 the child perfectly at Elsmere's class. I also remembered that 
 she had no mother ; that her mother had died of cancer in June, 
 visited and comforted to the end by Elsmere and his wife. 
 
 ' Well, the great question of course remains is there a 
 sufficient strength of. feeling and conviction behind these things? 
 If so, after all, everything was new once, and Christianity was 
 but modified Judaism.' 
 
 ' December 22. 
 
 ' I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. 
 In Elgood Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. 
 But it will be a new sort of Christmas. We shall hear very 
 little, it seems, of angels and shepherds, and a great deal of the 
 humble childhood of a little Jewish boy whose genius grown to 
 maturity transformed the Western world. To see Elsmere, with 
 his boys and girls about him, trying to make them feel them- 
 selves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make them 
 understand something of the lessons that child must have learnt, 
 the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that must have 
 come to him, is a spectacle of which I will not miss more than I 
 can help. Don't imagine, however, that I am converted exactly !
 
 CHAP, xux GAIN AND LOSS 581 
 
 but only that I am more interested and stimulated than I 
 have been for years. And don't expect me for Christmas. I 
 shall stay here. 
 
 ' New Year's Day. 
 
 ' I am writing from the library of the New Brotherhood. The 
 amount of activity, social, educational, religious, of which this 
 great building promises to be the centre is already astonishing. 
 Everything, of course including the constitution of the infant 
 society, is as yet purely tentative and experimental. But for a 
 scheme so young, things are falling into working order with 
 wonderful rapidity. Each department is worked by committees 
 under the central council. Elsmere, of course, is ex-officio chair- 
 man of a large proportion ; Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a few 
 other fellows " run " the rest for the present. But each com- 
 mittee contains woi'king-men ; and it is the object of everybody 
 concerned to make the workman element more and more real 
 and efficient. What with the "tax" on the members which was 
 fixed by a general meeting, and the contributions from outside, 
 the society already commands a fair income. But Elsmere is 
 anxious not to attempt too much at once, and will go slowly 
 and train his workers. 
 
 'Music, it seems, is to be a great feature in the future. I 
 have my own projects as to this part of the business, which, 
 however, I forbid you to guess at. 
 
 'By the rules of the -Brotherhood, every member is bound to 
 some work in connection with it during the year, but little or 
 much, as he or she is able. And every meeting, every under- 
 taking of whatever kind, opens with the special "word" or 
 formula of the society, " This do in remembrance of Me." ' 
 
 ' January 6. 
 
 ' Besides the Sunday lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on 
 Saturday evenings at " The History of the Moral Life in Man." 
 It is a remarkable course, and very largely attended by people 
 of all sorts. He tries to make it an exposition of the leading 
 principles of the new movement, of " that continuous and only 
 revelation of God in life and nature," which is in reality the 
 basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters that are 
 pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They 
 show an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind 
 which are surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not 
 surprised says he always expected it and that there are 
 thousands who only want a rallying-point. 
 
 ' His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the passion 
 and energy of the nature never has our generation seen any- 
 thing to equal it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it 
 all seriously, and don't know what to make of him or myselt. 
 
 1 She, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with 
 him day after day, and works away. She no more believes in
 
 582 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 his ideas, I think, than she ever did ; but all her antagonism is 
 gone. In the midst of the stir about him her face often haunts 
 me. It has changed lately ; she is no longer a young woman, 
 but so refined, so spiritual ! 
 
 'But he is ailing and fragile. There is the one cloud on a 
 scene that fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.' 
 
 CHAPTER L 
 
 ONE cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descending 
 the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a young 
 Dr. Edmondson, an able young physician, just set up for 
 himself as a consultant, who had only lately attached himself to 
 Elsmere, and was now helping him with eagerness to organise 
 a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman exchanged a 
 few words on Elsmere's lecture, and then the doctor said 
 abruptly, 
 
 ' I don't like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been 
 hoarse like that ? ' 
 
 1 More or less for the last month. He is very much worried 
 
 it himself, and talks of clergyman's throat. He had a touch 
 
 it, it appears, once in the country.' 
 
 ' Clergyman's throat ?' Edmondson shook his head dubiously. 
 ' It may be. I wish he would let me overhaul him.' 
 
 ' I wish he would ! ' said Flaxman devoutly. ' I will see what 
 I can do. I will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.' 
 
 Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. 
 As they entered the study she caught his hands, a suppressed 
 and exquisite passion gleaming in her face. 
 
 ' You did not explain Him ! You never will ! ' 
 
 He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an 
 instant his face changed, blanched before her he seemed to 
 gasp for breath she was only just able to save him from 
 falling. It was apparently another swoon of exhaustion. As 
 she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him all she 
 could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine's look 
 would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are 
 some natures which are never blind, never taken blissfully 
 unawares, and which taste calamity and grief to the very dregs. 
 
 ' Robert, to-morrow you will see a doctor ? ' she implored him 
 when at last he was safely in bed white, but smiling. 
 
 He nodded. 
 
 ' Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,' 
 he said, in a voice that was little more than a tremulous 
 whisper. 
 
 Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the 
 house, seemed to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by 
 
 by i 
 of it
 
 CHAP. L GAIN AND LOSS 583 
 
 ill luck, with the morning came a long expected letter, not 
 indeed from the squire, but about the squire. Robert had been 
 for some time expecting a summons to Murewell. The squire 
 had written to him last in October from Clarens, on the Lake 
 of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing 
 Elsmere any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the 
 New Brotherhood had absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries 
 which should have been sent to Murewell had been postponed. 
 The letter which reached him now was from old Meyrick. ' The 
 squire has had another bad attack, and is much weaker. But 
 his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you. If 
 you can, come to-morrow.' 
 
 ' His mind is clear again ! ' Horrified by the words and by 
 the images they called up, remorseful also for his own long 
 silence, Robert sprang up from bed, where the letter had been 
 brought to him, and presently appeared downstairs, where 
 Catherine, believing him safely captive for the morning, was 
 going through some household business. 
 
 ' I must go, I must go ! ' he said as he handed her the letter. 
 ' Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end ! ' 
 
 Catherine looked at him in despair. 
 
 'Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for 
 Dr. Edmondson.' 
 
 'Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, 
 listen ; my voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do 
 me good.' She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then 
 she tried fresh persuasions, but it was useless. His look was 
 glowing and restless. She saw he felt it a call impossible to 
 disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and Robert 
 drove off to Waterloo. 
 
 Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter's day. 
 Robert breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took 
 note of every landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty 
 eagerness. It was a year and a half since he had travelled it. 
 He forgot his weakness, the exhausting pressure and publicity 
 of his new work. The past possessed him, thrust out the 
 present. Surely he had been up to London for the day and 
 was going back to Catherine ! 
 
 At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen. 
 
 'Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then 
 you may drive on my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the 
 common.' 
 
 The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the 
 streets of the little town Robert saw several acqaintances who 
 stopped and stared at the apparition. Were the houses, the 
 people real, or was it all a hallucination his flight and his 
 return, so unthought of yesterday, so easy and swift to-day 1 
 
 By the time they were out on the wild ground between the 
 market town and Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as 
 thistle-down. He and the driver kept up an incessant gossip
 
 584 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 over the neighbourhood, and he jumped down from the carriage 
 as the man stopped with the alacrity of a boy. 
 
 ' Go on, Tom ; see if I am not there as soon as you.' 
 
 ' Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself 
 as his horse shambled off. ' Seems as spry as a lark all the same.' 
 
 Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January ! and the 
 thrushes were singing as though it were March. Robert 
 stopped opposite a bush covered with timid half -opened 
 blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so beautiful since 
 he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he was in 
 the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confes- 
 sion to Catherine ; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the 
 brink of the ridge. A winter world lay before him ; soft brown 
 woodland, or reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the 
 sun, clothing the earth's bareness everywhere curling mists 
 blue points of distant hill a gray luminous depth of sky. 
 
 The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of 
 his old anguish he stood and blessed God ! not for any personal 
 happiness, but simply for that communication of Himself which 
 may make every hour of common living a revelation. 
 
 Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he 
 hurried up the lane leading to the vicarage. One look ! he 
 might not be able to leave the squire later. The gate of the 
 wood-path was ajar. Surely just inside it he should find 
 Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked child dragging 
 behind her ! And there was the square stone house, the brown 
 cornfield, the red-brown woods ! Why, what had the man been 
 doing with the study ? White blinds showed it was a bedroom 
 now. Vandal ! Besides, how could the boys have free access 
 except to that ground-floor room ? And all that pretty stretch 
 of grass under the acacia had been cut up into stiff little lozenge- 
 shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer with the properest 
 geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to Catherine. 
 
 He stood and watched the little significant signs of change 
 in this realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied 
 mouth, his undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearn- 
 ing and affection. In that upper room he had lain through that 
 agonised night of crisis ; the dawn-twitterings of the summer 
 birds seemed to be still in his ears. And there, in the distance, 
 was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile End. Ah ! 
 the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did 
 not lie in the wet any longer thank God ! Was there time 
 just to run down to Irwin's cottage, to have a look at the 
 Institute ? 
 
 He had been standing on the farther side of the road from 
 the rectory that he might not seem to be spying out the land 
 and his successor's ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself 
 clinging to a gate near him that led into a field. He was shaken 
 by a horrible struggle for breath. The self seemed to be 
 foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a drowning thing.
 
 CHAP. L GAIN AND LOSS 585 
 
 When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered, 
 drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black 
 the sun seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds 
 of children's voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart or was 
 it all, sight and sound alike, mirage and delirium ? 
 
 With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man 
 of seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank 
 down, still gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars 
 near the gate. After a while the attack passed off and he 
 found himself able to walk on. But the joy, the leaping pulse 
 of half an hour ago, were gone from his veins. Was that the 
 river the house ? He looked at them with dull eyes. All the 
 light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the 
 familiar things. 
 
 However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will 
 and nature had reasserted themselves, and he knew where he 
 was and what he had to do. 
 
 Vincent flung the door open with his old lorldly air. 
 
 ' Why, sir ! Mr. Elsmere ! ' 
 
 The butler's voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding 
 at once into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of 
 the old rector. 
 
 Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into 
 the dining-room and give him some wine before announcing 
 him. Vincent ministered to him with a long face, pressing all 
 the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon him in turn. The 
 squire was much better, he declared, and had been carried down 
 to the library. 
 
 'But, lor, sir, there ain't much to be said for your looks 
 neither seems as if London didn't suit you, sir.' 
 
 Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from 
 his throat, and had overtired himself by walking over the 
 common. Then, recognising from a distorted vision of him- 
 self in a Venetian mirror hanging by that something of his 
 natural colour had returned to him, he rose and bade Vincent 
 announce him. 
 
 'And Mrs. Darcy?' he asked, as they stepped out into the 
 hall again. 
 
 ' Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she's very well,' said the man, but, as 
 it seemed to llobert, with something of an embarrassed air. 
 
 He followed Vincent down the long passage haunted by old 
 memories, by the old sickening sense of mental anguish to the 
 curtained door. Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir 
 of feet, and a voice, but at first he saw nothing. The room 
 was very much darkened. Then Meyrick emerged into dis- 
 tinctness. 
 
 ' Squire, here is Mr. Elsmere ! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I'm 
 sure we're very much obliged to you for meeting the squire's 
 wishes so promptly. You'll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but 
 mending oh yes, mending, sir no doubt of it.'
 
 586 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vil 
 
 Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand 
 was advanced to him out of the gloom. 
 
 ' That'll do, Meyrick. You won't be wanted till the evening.' 
 
 The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden 
 sense of relief. After all, the squire was still capable of tramp- 
 ling on Meyrick. 
 
 In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and 
 the two men were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to 
 the dim light. Out of it the squire's face gleamed almost as 
 whitely as the tortured marble of the Medusa just above their 
 heads. 
 
 'It's some inflammation in the eyes,' the squire explained 
 briefly, ' that's made Meyrick set up all this d d business of 
 blinds and shutters. I don't mean to stand it much longer. 
 The eyes are better, and I prefer to see my way out of the 
 world, if possible.' 
 
 ' But you are recovering ?' Robert said, laying his hand affec- 
 tionately on the old man's knee. 
 
 ' I have added to my knowledge,' said the squire drily. ' Like 
 Heine, I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignor- 
 ance of doctors on earth. And I am not in bed, which I was 
 last week. For Heaven's sake don't ask questions. If there is 
 a loathsome subject on earth it is the subject of the human 
 body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you away 
 from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you 
 so hoarse for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of 
 "the people," who wouldn't even subscribe to bury you ? Have 
 you been working up the Apocrypha as I recommended you last 
 tune we met ? ' 
 
 Robert smiled. 
 
 'For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two 
 things with neither of which had you much sympathy in old 
 days holiday-making and " slumming." ' 
 
 'Oh, I remember,' interrupted the squire hastily. 'I was 
 low last week, and read the Church papers by way of a counter- 
 irritant. You have been starting a new religion, I see. A new 
 religion ! Humph ! ' 
 
 The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert 
 caught the sarcastic gleam of the eyes. 
 
 'You are hardly the man to deny,' he said, undisturbed, 
 ' that the old ones laissent a desirer.' 
 
 ' Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you 
 should go and set up a brand-new one an ugly anachronism 
 besides,' retorted the squire. 'However, you and I have no 
 common ground never had. I say know, you say feel. Where 
 is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the 
 lot ? Well, how is Madame de Netteville ? ' 
 
 ' I have not seen her for six months,' Robert replied, with 
 equal abruptness. 
 
 The squire laughed a little under his breath.
 
 OH A p. L GAIN AND LOSS 587 
 
 ' What did you think of her ? ' 
 
 ' Very much what you told me to think intellectually,' re- 
 plied Robert, facing him, but flushing with the readiness of 
 physical delicacy. 
 
 ' Well, I certainly never told you to think anything morally,' 
 said the squire. 'The word moral has no relation to her. 
 Whom did you see there 1 ' 
 
 The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, 
 but Elsmere went through with it, the squire watching him for 
 a while with an expression which had a spark of malice in it. 
 It is not unlikely that some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had 
 reached him. Elsmere had always seemed to him oppressively 
 good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had tried her arts 
 upon him was not without its piquancy. 
 
 But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of 
 a subtle change in the squire's attitude a relaxation of his 
 own sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering 
 through the darkness. The squire's head had fallen back, his 
 mouth was slightly open, and the breath -came lightly, quiver - 
 ingly through. The cynic of a moment ago had dropped sud- 
 denly in^ a sleep of more than childish weakness and defence- 
 lessness. 
 
 Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who 
 had once meant so much to him. 
 
 Strange white face, sunk in the great chair ! Behind it 
 glimmered the Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a 
 glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. 
 All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had 
 nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken they re- 
 mained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so a river 
 lost in the sands ! 
 
 Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping 
 squire. 
 
 ' A bad sign ! a bad sign ! ' he said, and shook his head 
 mournfully. 
 
 After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent 
 pressed upon him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical 
 malaise than had ever vet tormented him, was crossing the 
 hall again, when he suddenly saw Mrs. Darcy at the door of a 
 room which opened into the hall. He went up to her with a 
 warm greeting. 
 
 ' Are you going in to the squire ? Let us go together.' 
 
 She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen 
 him the day before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into 
 the room behind her, a curious film, so it seemed to him, dark- 
 ening her small gray eyes. 
 
 ' the squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen 
 my white mice ? Oh, they are such darlings ! Only, one of 
 1 liciu is ill, and they won't let me have the doctor.' 
 
 Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She
 
 588 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 stood in the middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger 
 to a large cage of white mice which stood in the window. The 
 room seemed full besides of other creatures. Robert stood 
 rooted, looking at the tiny withered figure in the black dress, 
 its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in lace, with a per- 
 plexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver. Sud- 
 denly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent, strong- 
 looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their 
 eyes met ; her expression and the little jerk of her head to- 
 wards Mrs. Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing 
 the mice with the weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert 
 turned, and went out sick at heart. The careful exquisite 
 beauty of the great hall struck him as something mocking 
 and anti-human. 
 
 No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. 
 In the evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in 
 another key. He insisted on a certain amount of light, and, 
 leaning on Robert's arm, went feebly round the bookshelves. 
 He took out one of the volumes of the Fathers that Newman 
 had given him. 
 
 ' When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rub- 
 bish,' he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindict- 
 ively, ' and of the other hours I maundered away in services 
 and self-examination ! Thank Heaven, however, the germ of 
 revolt and sanity was always there. And when once I got to 
 it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick.' 
 
 Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the 
 shrunken squire. 
 
 ' Oh, not one you have any chance of learning, my good 
 friend,' said the other aggressively. ' And after all it's simple. 
 Go to your grave with your eyes open that's all. But men don't 
 learn it, somehow. Newman was incapable so are you. All 
 the religions are nothing but so many vulgar anaesthetics, which 
 only the few have courage to refuse. 
 
 ' Do you want me to contradict you ? ' said Robert, smiling ; ' I 
 am quite ready.' 
 
 The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his 
 chair again, he said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau 
 in the window, 'The book is all there both parts, first and 
 second. Publish it if you please. If not, throw it into the fire. 
 Both are equally indifferent to me. It has done its work ; it 
 has helped me through half a century of living.' 
 
 ' It shall be to me a sacred trust,' said Elsmere with emotion. 
 ' Of course if you don't publish it, I shall publish it.' 
 
 'As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more 
 rational to tell me about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood 
 of yours.' 
 
 Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The 
 words would not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the 
 middle that strange creeping sleep overtook the squire again.
 
 CHAP. L GAIN AND LOSS 589 
 
 Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been 
 coming in and out through the evening, eyeing Elsmere, now 
 that there was more light on the scene, with almost as much 
 anxiety and misgiving as the squire, was summoned. The 
 squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a male 
 attendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick 
 peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a 
 tinger to the performance. They took him up the library stairs, 
 through the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which had 
 been his fathers, and so into his own. By the time they set 
 him down he was quite awake and conscious again. 
 
 ' It can't be said that I follow my own precepts,' he said to 
 llobert grimly as they put him down. ' Not much of the open 
 eye about this. I shall sleep myself into the unknown as 
 sweetly as any saint in the calendar.' 
 
 Robert was going when the squire called him back. 
 
 ' You'll stay to-morrow, Elsmere ? ' 
 
 ' Of course, if you wish it.' 
 
 The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently. 
 
 ' Why did you ever go ? ' 
 
 ' As 1 told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else 
 for an honest man to do.' 
 
 The squire turned round with a frown. 
 
 ' What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson ? Give me 
 my stick and get me out of this.' 
 
 By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Out- 
 side, the night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over 
 the sloping reaches of the park ; the trees shone silverly in the 
 cold light, their black shadows cast along the grass. Robert 
 found himself quartered in the Stuart room, where James II. 
 had slept, and where the tartan hangings of the ponderous 
 carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls and 
 ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the 
 loyal preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was 
 mortally tired, but by way of distracting his thoughts a little 
 from the squire, and that other tragedy which the great house 
 sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took from his coat-pocket a 
 French Anthologie which had been Catherine's birthday gift to 
 him, and read a little before he fell asleep. 
 
 Then he slept profoundly the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly 
 lie found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffoca- 
 tion, strange noises in his ears. 
 
 A cry ' Help ! ' resounded through the wide empty galleries. 
 
 He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction 
 of the squire's room. 
 
 The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he 
 reached it. At that moment Benson, the man who had helped 
 to carry the squire, ran up. 
 
 ' My God, sir ! ' he said, deadly white, 'another attack ! ' 
 
 The squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-
 
 590 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 room adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through 
 it. 
 
 They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a 
 white figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the 
 grip of a tiger. Those old bloodshot eyes those wrinkled hands 
 on the throat of the doctor horrible ! 
 
 They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the 
 squire's room. Then Robert and Benson got the squire back by 
 main force. The whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken 
 limbs rigid as iron. Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a 
 superhuman effort of will mastered himself enough to give 
 directions for a strong opiate. Benson managed to control the 
 madman while Robert found it. Then between them they got 
 it swallowed. 
 
 But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate 
 could have had time to work, the squire shrank together like a 
 puppet of which the threads are loosened, and fell heavily side- 
 ways out of his captors' hands on to the bed. They laid him 
 there, tenderly covering him from the January cold. The 
 swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white visible under- 
 neath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed ; the loud breathing 
 seemed to be the breathing of death. 
 
 Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound 
 up, threw himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast 
 a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, emphasising, as though 
 in mockery, the long straight back, the ragged whiskers, the 
 strange ends and horns of the bandage. But the passion in the 
 old face was as purely tragic as any that ever spoke through the 
 lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester. 
 
 ' The last the last ! ' he said, choked, the tears falling down 
 his lined cheeks on to the squire's hand. ' He can never rally 
 from this. And I was fool enough to think yesterday I had 
 pulled him through ! ' 
 
 Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief ; then he looked up at 
 Robert. 
 
 'He wouldn't have Benson to-night. I slept in the next 
 room with the door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him mov- 
 ing. I was up in an instant, and found him standing by that 
 door, peering through, bare-footed, a wind like ice coming up. 
 He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. " My father" he 
 said " my father he went that way what do you want here? 
 Keep back ! " I threw myself on him : he had something sharp 
 which scratched me on the temple ; I got that away from him, 
 but it was his hands 'and the old man shuddered. ' I thought 
 they would have done for me before any one could hear, and 
 that then he would kill himself as his father did.' 
 
 Again he hung over the figure on the bed his own withered 
 hand stroking that of the squire with a yearning affection. 
 
 ' When was the last attack ? ' asked Robert sadly. 
 
 ' A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere.
 
 CHAP. L GAIN AND LOSS 591 
 
 he suffered. And he's been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no 
 one to please him with his food to put his cushions right to 
 coax him up a bit, and that and his poor sister too, always 
 there before his eyes. Of course he would stand to it he liked 
 to be alone. But I'll never believe men are made so unlike one 
 to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a wife or a 
 child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir, 
 when you went away. Not that he'd say a word, but he moped. 
 His books didn't seem to please him, nor anything else. I've 
 just broke my heart over him this last year.' 
 
 There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round 
 with the shapes of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken 
 effect. The squire's countenance was no longer convulsed. 
 The great brow was calm ; a more than common dignity and 
 peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert bent over him. 
 The madman, the cynic, had passed away : the dying scholar 
 and thinker lay before him. 
 
 ' Will he rally ? ' he asked, under his breath. 
 
 MeyrifcB shook his head. 
 
 ' I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. 
 The heart is failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, 
 Mr. Elsmere, you go go and sleep. Benson and I '11 watch. 
 Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir. I'm used to a rough-and-turnble 
 life. But you go. If there's a change we'll wake you.' 
 
 Elsmere bent down and kissed the squire's forehead tenderly, 
 as a son might have done. By this time lie himself could hardly 
 stand. He crept away to his own room, his nerves still quiver- 
 ing with the terror of that sudden waking, the horror of that 
 struggle. 
 
 It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. 
 He drew back the curtains, made up the fire, and, wrapping 
 himself in a fur coat which Flaxman had lately forced upon 
 him, sat where he could see the moonlit park, and still be within 
 the range of the blaze. 
 
 As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weak- 
 ness set in. The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through 
 him in the darkness, suggested very often by the figures on the 
 seventeenth - century tapestry which lined the walls. Were 
 those the trees in the wood-path ? Surely that was Catherine's 
 figure, trailing and that dome strange ! Was he still walking 
 in Grey's funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking sadly 
 clown ? Death here ! Death there ! Death everywhere, yawn- 
 ing under life from the beginning ! The veil which hides the 
 common abyss, in sight of which men could not always hold 
 themselves and live, is rent asunder, and he looks shuddering 
 into it. 
 
 Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar 
 imam' of the river of Death took possession of him. He stood 
 himself on the brink; on the other side were Grey and the 
 squire. But he felt no pang of separation, of pain ; for he him-
 
 592 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 self was just about to cross and join them ! And during a 
 strange brief lull of feeling the mind harboured image and ex- 
 pectation alike with perfect calm. 
 
 Then the fever-spell broke the brain cleared and he was 
 terribly himself again. Whence came it this fresh inexorable 
 consciousness ? He tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling 
 blindly, without thought, to God's love and Catherine's. But 
 the anguish mounted fast. On the one hand, this fast-growing 
 certainty, urging and penetrating through every nerve and 
 fibre of the shaken frame : on the other, the ideal fabric of his 
 efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith ; 
 the poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein ! 
 
 ' My God ! my God ! no time, no future ! ' 
 
 In nis misery he moved to the uncovered window, and stood 
 looking through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, 
 just filmed with ice, shone under the moon ; over it bent the 
 trees, laden with hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an 
 instant, beyond the bridge, in the unearthly blue ? 
 
 And quietly heavily like an irrevocable sentence, there 
 came : breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and 
 loneliness, words that he had read an hour or two before, in the 
 little red book beside his hand words in which the gayest of 
 French poets has fixed, as though by accident, the most tragic 
 of all human cries 
 
 ' Quittez le long espoir, et les vastes pensees.' 
 
 He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the 
 bitter longing for life, and the same words rang through him, 
 deafening everv cry but their own. 
 
 ' Quittez quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees I ' 
 
 CHAPTER LI 
 
 THERE is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast 
 was no long time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in 
 all else. 
 
 The day after Elsmere's return from Murewell, where he left 
 the squire still alive (the telegram announcing the death 
 reached Bedford Square a few hours after Robert's arrival), 
 Edmondson came up to see him and examine him. He discovered 
 tubercular disease of the larynx, which begins with slight 
 hoarseness and weakness, and develops into one of the most 
 rapid forms of phthisis. In his opinion it had been originally 
 set up by the effects of the chill at Petites Dalles acting upon 
 a constitution never strong, and at that moment peculiarly sus- 
 ceptible to mischief. And of course the speaking and preaching 
 of the last four months had done enormous harm. 
 
 It was with great outward composure that Elsmere received
 
 r 
 
 CHAP. LI GAIN AND LOSS 593 
 
 his arret de mort at the hands of the young doctor, who an- 
 nounced the result of his examination with a hesitating lip and 
 a voice which struggled in vain to preserve its professional 
 calm. He knew too much of medicine himself to be deceived 
 by Edmondson's optimist remarks as to the possible effect of a 
 warm climate like Algiers on his condition. He sat down, 
 resting his head on his hands a moment ; then, wringing Ed- 
 mondson's hand, he went out feebly to find his wife. 
 
 Catherine had been waiting in the dining-room, her whole 
 soul one dry tense misery. She stood looking out of the window 
 taking curious heed of a Jewish wedding that was going on in 
 the square, of the preposterous bouquets of the coachman and 
 the gaping circle of errand-boys. How pinched the bride 
 looked in the north wind ! 
 
 When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come 
 in her young husband, to whom she had been married not yet 
 four years with that indescribable look in the eyes which 
 seemed to divine and confirm all those terrors which had been 
 shaking her during her agonised waiting, there followed a 
 moment between them which words cannot render. When it 
 ended that half -articulate convulsion of love and anguish she 
 found herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on her 
 breast, his hand clasping hers. 
 
 ' Do you wish me to go, Catherine ? ' he asked her gently, 
 'to Algiers?' 
 
 Her eyes implored for her. 
 
 ' Then I will,' he said, but with a long sigh. ' It will only 
 prolong it two months,' he thought ; ' and does one not owe it to 
 the people for whom one has tried to live, to make a brave end 
 among them ? Ah, no ! no ! those two months are hers I ' 
 
 So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary 
 preparations be made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could 
 not wring hers by staying. 
 
 After his interview with Robert, and his further interview 
 with Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommenda- 
 tions and directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed 
 kto make the true state of the case more ghastly plain to the 
 wife than ever, Edmondson went off to Flaxman. 
 
 Flaxman heard his news with horror. 
 
 ' A bad case, you say advanced ? ' 
 
 ' A bad case ! ' Edmondson repeated gloomily. ' He has been 
 fighting against it too long under that absurd delusion of 
 clergyman's throat. If only "men would not insist upon being 
 their own doctors ! And, of course, that going down to Mure- 
 well the other day was madness. I shall go with him to Algiers, 
 and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, that 
 career, cut short ! This is a queer sort of world ! ' 
 
 When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the after- 
 noon, he went like a man going himself to execution. In the 
 hall he met Catherine. 
 
 2Q
 
 594 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 'You have seen Dr. Edmondsqn ? ' she asked, pale and still, 
 except for a little nervous quivering of the lip. 
 
 He stooped and kissed her hand. 
 
 'Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come 
 after if you will have me. The climate may do wonders.' 
 
 She looked at him with the most heart-rending of smiles. 
 
 ' Will you go in to Robert ? He is in the study.' 
 
 He went, in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up 
 011 the sofa, apparently reading. 
 
 ' Don't don't, old fellow,' he said affectionately, as Flaxman 
 almost broke down. 'It comes to all of us sooner or later. 
 Whenever it comes we think it too soon. I believe I have been 
 sure of it for some time. We are such strange creatures ! It 
 has been so present to me lately that life was too good to last. 
 You remember the sort of feeling one used to have as a child 
 about some treat in the distance that it was too much joy 
 that something was sure to come between you and it ? Well, 
 in a sense, I have had my joy, the first-fruits of it at least.' 
 
 But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on 
 them, Flaxman saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish 
 mouth contract, and knew that under all these brave words 
 there was a heart which hungered. 
 
 ' How strange ! ' Robert went on reflectively ; ' yesterday I 
 was travelling, walking like other men, a member of society. 
 To-day I am an invalid ; in the true sense, a man no longer. 
 The world has done with me ; a barrier I shall never recross 
 has sprung up between me and it. Flaxman, to-night is the 
 story- telling. Will you read to them ? I have the book here 
 prepared some scenes from David Copperfield. And you will 
 tell them?' 
 
 A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he for- 
 get the scene. Some ominous rumour had spread, and the New 
 Brotherhood was besieged. Impossible to give the reading. 
 A hall full of strained upturned faces listened to Flaxman's 
 announcement, and to Elsrnere's messages of cheer and exhorta- 
 tion, and then a wild wave of grief spread through the place. 
 The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each 
 other's eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, 
 all feeling themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When 
 Elsmere heard the news of it, he turned on his face, and asked 
 even Catherine to leave him for a while. 
 
 The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood 
 had just become the subject of an animated discussion in the 
 press, and London was touched by the news of its young 
 founder's breakdown. Catherine found herself besieged by 
 offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded 
 her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill 
 above Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resi- 
 dent on the spot was to take all trouble off their hands ; they 
 were to find servants ready for them, and every comfort.
 
 CHAP. LI GAIN AND LOSS 595 
 
 Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness, with 
 a self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to Flax- 
 man that her heart was broken that half of her, in feeling, 
 was already on the other side of this horror which stared them 
 all in the face. Was it his perception of it which stirred Robert 
 after a while to a greater hopefulness of speech, a constant 
 bright dwelling on the flowery sunshine for which they were 
 about to exchange the fog and cold of London 1 The moment- 
 ary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than his 
 first quiet resignation. 
 
 He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters ! 
 in which the feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery 
 under-current through all the sad brotherly record of the 
 invalid's doings and prospects. There was deep trouble in 
 Long Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and hysterical, 
 and wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote 
 in distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing 
 her own inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only 
 be an extra burden on the Elsmeres if the journey were 
 achieved. Rose wrote asking to be allowed to go with them 
 to Algiers ; and after a little consultation it was so arranged, 
 Mrs. Leyburn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself writing, 
 to stay where she was. 
 
 The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert 
 sent for Murray Edwardes. They were closeted together for 
 nearly an hour. Edwardes came out with the look of one who 
 has been lifted into ' heavenly places.' 
 
 ' I thank God,' he said to Catherine, with deep emotion, ' that 
 I ever knew him. I pray that I may be found worthy to carry 
 out my pledges to him.' 
 
 When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gaz- 
 ing into the fire with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up 
 to her with a smile. 
 
 ' Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to 
 the work. If necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it 
 on. But we hope it will be possible to work them together. 
 What a brick he is ! What a blessed chance it was that took 
 me to that breakfast party at Flaxman's ! ' 
 
 The rest of the time before departure he spent almost 
 entirely in consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It 
 was terrible how rapidly worse he seemed to grow directly the 
 situation had declared itself, and the determination not to be 
 ill had been perforce overthrown. But his struggle against 
 breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms of 
 his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day 
 of all, by his own persistent wish, a certain number of members 
 of the Brotherhood came to say good-bye to him. They came 
 in one by one, Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, from the 
 height of his sixty years of tough weather-beaten manhood, 
 looked down on Robert witli a fatherly concern.
 
 596 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 ' Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it's a fine place yur gawin' tu, they 
 say. Ye'll do weel there, sir ye'll do weel. And as for the 
 wark, sir, we'll keep it oop we'll not let the Deil mak' hay o' 
 it, if we knaws it the auld leer ! ' he added, with a phrase- 
 ology which did more honour to the Calvinism of his blood 
 than the philosophy of his training. 
 
 Lestrange came in, with a pale sharp face, and said little in 
 his ten minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed 
 curiosity and excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his 
 feverish eyes towards le grand secret. 'You, who preached to 
 us that consciousness, and God, and the soul are the only 
 realities are you so sure of it now you are dying, as you were 
 in health ? Are your courage, your certainty, what they were?' 
 These were the sort of questions that seemed to underlie the 
 man's spoken words. 
 
 There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best to 
 put aside his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his help 
 in the past, and implored him to stand by the young society 
 and Mr. Edwardes. 
 
 ' I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one 
 man matter 1 One soldier falls, another presses forward.' 
 
 The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush passing 
 over him. 
 
 ' We can't stand without you ! ' he said abruptly ; then, see- 
 ing Robert's look of distress, he seemed to cast about for some- 
 thing reassuring to say, but could find nothing. Robert at 
 last held out his hand with a smile, and he went. He left 
 Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible depression. In 
 reality there was no man who worked harder at the New 
 Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. 
 He worked under perpetual protest from thefrondeur within 
 him, but something stung him on on till a habit had been 
 formed which promises to be the joy and salvation of his later 
 life. Was it the haunting memory of that thin figure the 
 hand clinging to the chair the white appealing look ? 
 
 Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the conse- 
 quences. She herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, 
 comforting the sobbing creatures afterwards with a calmness 
 born of her own despair. Robson, in the last stage himself ; sent 
 him a grimly characteristic message. ' I shall solve the riddle, 
 sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days. For the first 
 time in my life, I shall know what you are still guessing at. 
 May the blessing of one who never blessed thing or creature 
 before he saw you go with you ! ' 
 
 After it all Robert sank on the sofa with a groan. 
 
 ' No more ! ' he said hoarsely ' no more ! Now for air the 
 sea ! To-morrow, wife, to-morrow ! Cras inqens iterabimus 
 cequor. Ah me ! I leave my new Salamis behind ! ' 
 
 But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to 
 Langham and Newcome.
 
 CHAP. LI GAIN AND LOSS 597 
 
 ' I will spare Langham the sight of me,' he said, smiling sadly. 
 ' And I will spare myself the sight of Newcome I could not 
 bear it, I think ! But I must say good-bye for I love them 
 both.' 
 
 Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a 
 cab drove up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome 
 descended from it. ' Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the house- 
 maid, and the priest turned away with an involuntary gesture 
 of despair. To his dying day the passionate heart bore the 
 burden of that ' too late,' believing that even at the eleventh 
 hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He 
 might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for 
 clergy he. was just on the point of conducting made it im- 
 possible. 
 
 Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst 
 of all her new and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was 
 very sweet to him. In any other circumstances, he told himself, 
 he could easily have broken down the flimsy barrier between 
 them, but in those last twenty-four hours he could press no 
 claim of his own. 
 
 When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, 
 stood watching the tall figure on the pier against the gray 
 January sky. Catherine caught her look and attitude, and 
 could have cried aloud in her own gnawing pain. 
 
 Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their 
 arrival. Their journey had gone well ; even the odious passage 
 from Marseilles had been tolerable little Mary had proved a 
 model traveller ; the villa was luxurious, the weather good. 
 
 ' I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' 
 wrote Edmondson. 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving 
 London in a January fog, finding yourself tramping over wild 
 marigolds and mignonette, under a sky and through an air as 
 balmy as those of an English June when an English June 
 behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the bay, the great 
 plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range 
 of the Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell 
 from the clouds. His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in 
 the history of Algiers, raving about one Fromentin, learning 
 Spanish even ! The wonderful purity and warmth of the air 
 seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He breathes and 
 speaks much more easily than when we left London. I some- 
 times feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he 
 were unlike the common sons of men as though to him it might 
 be possible to subdue even this fell disease.' 
 
 Elsmere himself wrote 
 
 " I had not heard the half " O Flaxman ! An enchanted 
 land air, sun, warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, 
 green peas, veiled Eastern beauties, domed mosques and preach- 
 ing Mahdis everything that feeds the outer and the inner man. 
 To throw the window open at waking to the depth of sunlit air
 
 598 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 between us and the curve of the bay, is for the moment heaven ! 
 One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous 
 blue of the morning. I am better I breathe again. 
 
 ' Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, 
 and has been adopted by sixty nuns who inhabit the convent 
 over the way, and sell us the most delicious butter and cream. 
 I imagine, if she were a trifle older, her mother would hardly 
 view the proceedings of these dear berosaried women 'with so 
 much equanimity. 
 
 ' As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and re- 
 ceives more than an editor of the Times. I have the strongest 
 views, as you know, as to the vanity of letter-writing. There . 
 was a time when you shared them, but there are circumstances 
 and conjunctures, alas ! in which no man can be sure of his friend 
 or his friend's principles. Kind friend, good fellow, go often to 
 Elgood Street. Tell me everything about everybody. It is 
 possible, after all, that I may live to come back to them.' 
 
 But a week later, alas ! the letters fell into a very different 
 strain. The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp and 
 rainy, the natives of course declaring that such gloom and storm 
 in January had never been known before. Edmondson wrote in 
 discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch of cold, had been 
 confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter was full of 
 medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that, in spite of 
 the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the disease was 
 attacking constantly fresh tissue. ' He is very depressed too,' 
 said Edmondson ; 'I have never seen him so yet. He sits and 
 looks at us in the evening sometimes with eyes that wring one's 
 heart. It is as though, after having for a moment allowed him- 
 self to hope, he found it a doubly hard task to submit.' 
 
 All, that depression ! It was the last eclipse through which 
 a radiant soul was called to pass ; but while it lasted it was 
 black indeed. The implacable reality, obscured at first by the 
 emotion and excitement of farewells, and then by a brief spring 
 of hope and returning vigour, showed itself now in all its stern 
 nakedness sat down, as it were, eye to eye with Elsmere im- 
 movable, ineluctable. There were certain features of the disease 
 itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The long 
 silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to with- 
 draw him so pitifully from their yearning grasp ! In these dark 
 days he would sit crouching over the wood fire in the little salon, 
 or lie drawn to the window looking out on the rainstorms bow- 
 ing the ilexes or scattering the meshes of clematis, silent, almost 
 always gentle, but turning sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary 
 playing at his feet, eyes which, as Edmondson said, ' wrung the 
 heart.' 
 
 But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the 
 wife's inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which 
 reached no third person, but was throughout poignant and 
 tragic to the highest degree. Catherine was making her last
 
 CHAP. LI GAIN AND LOSS 599 
 
 effort, Robert his last stand. As we know, ever since that pas- 
 sionate submission of the wife which had thrown her morally at 
 her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of her heart 
 one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type 
 attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While 
 the man of science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of 
 certain intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends be- 
 forehand that he is to be judged by the utterances of health and 
 not by those of physical collapse, the Christian believes that on 
 the confines of eternity the veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows 
 thin and transparent, and that the glories and the truths of 
 Heaven are visible with a special clearness and authority to the 
 dying. It was for this moment, either in herself or in him, that 
 Catherine's unconquerable faith had been patiently and dumbly 
 waiting. Either she would go first, and death would wing her 
 poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own ; 
 or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away 
 perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal 
 light, the light of the Crucified, shine through. 
 
 Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert's serenity, 
 Catherine's poor last effort would have been much feebler, 
 briefer, more hesitating. But when she saw him plunged for a 
 short space in mortal discouragement, in a sombreness that as 
 the days went on had its points and crests of feverisli irritation, 
 her anguished pity came to the help of her creed. Robert felt 
 himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being urging, 
 grappling with his. In little half -articulate words and ways, in 
 her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious 
 books and prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her 
 maintaining at night beside him, he felt a persistent attack 
 which nearly in his weakness overthrew him. 
 
 For ' reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves. 
 Some of the greatest and most daring thinkers of the world 
 have felt this pitiful longing to be at one with those who love 
 them, at whatever cost, before the last farewell. And the 
 simpler Christian faith has still to create around it those 
 venerable associations and habits which buttress individual 
 feebleness and diminish the individual effort. 
 
 One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert 
 stretched out his hand for his wife and found her kneeling 
 beside him. The dim mingled light showed him her face 
 vaguely her clasped hands, her eyes. He looked at her in 
 silence, she at him ; there seemed to be a strange shock as of 
 battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him. 
 
 ' Catherine,' he said to her in a feeble intense whisper, ' would 
 you leave me without comfort, without help, at the end ? ' 
 
 ' Oh, my beloved ! ' she cried, under her breath, throwing her 
 arms round him, ' if you would but stretch out your hand to 
 the true comfort the true .help the Lamb of God sacrificed 
 for us ! '
 
 600 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 He stroked her hair tenderly. 
 
 ' My weakness might yield my true best self never. I know 
 Whom I have believed. Oh, my darling, be content. Your 
 misery, your prayers hold me back from God from that truth 
 and that trust which can alone be honestly mine. Submit, my 
 wife ! Leave me in God's hands.' 
 
 She raised her head. His eyes were bright with fever, his 
 lips trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself 
 again with a quiet burst of tears, and an indescribable self- 
 abasement. They had had their last struggle, and once more 
 he had conquered ! Afterwards the cloud lifted from him. 
 Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her often 
 as though he lay already on the breast of God ; even her wifely 
 love grew timid and awestruck. 
 
 Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was 
 like a scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more 
 than its father has allowed it to know. At the same time, it 
 was plain to those about him that the only realities to him in a 
 world of shadows were God love the soul. 
 
 One day he suddenly caught Catherine's hands, drew her 
 face to him, and studied it with his glowing and hollow eyes, 
 as though he would draw it into his soul. 
 
 ' He made it,' he said hoarsely, as he let her go ' this love 
 this yearning. And in life He only makes us yearn that He 
 may satisfy. He cannot lead us to the end and disappoint the 
 craving He Himself set in us. No, no ^could you could I do 
 it 1 And He, the source of love, of justice : 
 
 Flaxman arrived a few days afterwards. Edmondson had 
 started for London the night before, leaving Elsmere better 
 again, able to drive and even walk a little, and well looked 
 after by a local doctor of ability. As Flaxman, tramping up 
 behind his carriage, climbed the long hill to El Biar, he saw the 
 whole marvellous place in a white light of beauty the bay, the 
 city, the mountains, oliveyard and orange-grove, drawn in pale 
 tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a steep 
 and narrow lane, he noticed a slight figure standing a parasol 
 against the sun. 
 
 ' We thought you would like to be shown the short cut up 
 the hill,' said Rose's voice, strangely demure and shy. 'The 
 man can drive round.' 
 
 A grip of the hand, a word to the driver, and they were alone 
 in the high-walled lane, which was really the old road up the 
 hill, before the French brought zigzags and civilisation. She 
 gave him news of Robert better than he had expected. Under 
 the influence of one of the natural reactions that wait on illness, 
 the girl's tone was cheerful, and Flaxman's spirits rose. They 
 talked of the splendour of the day, the discomforts of the 
 steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing of anything and 
 everything but the hidden something which was responsible for
 
 CHAP. LI GAIN AND LOSS 601 
 
 the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occasional swift veiling 
 of her own. 
 
 Then, at an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool 
 and brown into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke 
 joyously through the gray cloud of olive-wood, where not a 
 sight or sound was to be heard of all the busy life which hides 
 and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his hands seizing hers. 
 
 ' How long ? ' he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling back 
 from his strong, well-made frame ; ' from August to February 
 how long ? ' 
 
 No more ! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the 
 moment death stood aside and love asserted itself. But this is 
 no place to chronicle what it said. 
 
 And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, before 
 the same misgiving, the same shrinking, seized on the lovers 
 themselves. They sped up the hill, they crept into the house, 
 far apart. It was agreed that neither of them should say a 
 word. 
 
 But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that some- 
 times goes witli such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the 
 position of things before he and Flaxman had been half an hour 
 together. He took a boyish pleasure in making his friend con- 
 fess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at once sent for 
 Catherine and told her. 
 
 Catherine, coming out afterwards, met Flaxman in the little 
 tiled hall. How she had aged and blanched ! She stood a 
 moment opposite to him, in her plain long dress with its white 
 collar and cuffs, her face working a little. 
 
 ' We are so glad ! ' she said, but almost with a sob ' God 
 bless you ! ' 
 
 And, wringing his hand, she passed away from him, hiding 
 her eyes, but without a sound. When they met again she was 
 quite self-contained and bright, talking much both with him 
 and Rose about the future. 
 
 And one little word of Rose's must be recorded here, for 
 those who have followed her through these four years. It was 
 at night, when Robert, with smiles, had driven them out of 
 doors to look at the moon over the bay, from the terrace just 
 beyond the windows. They had been sitting on the balustrade 
 talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had lost 
 her mocking ways ; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman 
 felt it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much. 
 
 When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little 
 white suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder. 
 
 ' You won't you won't ever be angry with me for making 
 you wait like that ? It was impertinent it was like a child 
 playing tricks !' 
 
 Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He
 
 602 ROBERT. ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 was terribly emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals 
 in the day, and it was clear that his nights were often one long 
 struggle for breath. But his spirits were extraordinarily even, 
 and his days occupied to a point Flaxman could hardly have 
 believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven, read his Eng- 
 lish letters (among them always some from Elgood Street), 
 write his answers to them those difficult scrawls are among 
 the treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to 
 itself some of the best life in England then often fall asleep 
 with fatigue. After food there would come a short drive, or, 
 if the day was very warm, an hour or two of sitting outside, 
 generally his best time for talking. He had a wheeled chair in 
 which Flaxman would take him across to the convent garden 
 a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy leaf and 
 blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection ; under- 
 neath a revel of every imaginable flower narcissus and ane- 
 mones, geraniums and clematis ; and all about, hedges of 
 monthly roses, dark red and pale alternately, making a roseleaf 
 carpet under their feet. Through the tree -trunks shone the 
 white sun-warmed convent, and far beyond were glimpses of 
 downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea. 
 
 Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank 
 in beauty and delight ; talking, too, whenever it was possible 
 to him, of all things in heaven and earth. Then, when he came 
 home, he would have out his books and fall to some old critical 
 problem his worn and scored Greek Testament always beside 
 him, the quick eye making its way through some new mono- 
 graph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then 
 to call Flaxman's attention to some fresh light on an obscure 
 point only to relinquish the effort again and again with an 
 unfailing patience. 
 
 But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not 
 keep his attention fixed to these things very long. Then it 
 would be the turn of his favourite poets Wordsworth, Tenny- 
 son, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most frequently. Flaxman would 
 read the vEneid aloud to him, Robert following the passages he 
 loved best in a whisper, his hand resting the while in Catherine's. 
 And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie watching 
 her while she played. 
 
 ' I have had a letter,' he said to Flaxman one afternoon, ' from 
 a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me 
 to be still militant in London, protesting against the " absurd 
 and wasteful isolation" of the New Brotherhood. He asks me 
 why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church 
 Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church 
 from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in 
 organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement in 
 East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp 
 letter ; I could not help it. It was borne in on me to tell him 
 that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the
 
 CHAP. LI GAIN AND LOSS 603 
 
 muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our time what the law 
 was to the early Christians. We must make up our minds about 
 it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as 
 Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There 
 is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect 
 sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be 
 cleared ; then may come the re-building. Religion itself, the 
 peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait 
 indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we 
 have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or 
 playing the part assigned us.' 
 
 On another occasion, in the convent garden, be broke out 
 with 
 
 ' I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which 
 men become the slaves of some metaphysical word personality, 
 or intelligence, or what not ! What meaning can they have as 
 applied to God ? Herbert Spencer is quite right. We no sooner 
 attempt to define what we mean by a Personal God than we 
 lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic. But why 
 attempt it at all ? I like that French saying, " Quand on me 
 demande ce que c'est que Dieu, je Fianore ; quand on ne me le 
 demande pas, je le sais tres-bien!" No, we cannot realise Him 
 in words we can only live in Him, and die to Him ! ' 
 
 On another occasion, he said, speaking to Catherine of the 
 squire and of Meyrick's account of his last year of life 
 
 ' How selfish one is, always when one least thinks it ! How 
 could I have forgotten him so completely as I did during all 
 that New Brotherhood time ? Where, what is he now ? Ah ! if 
 somewhere, somehow, one could ' 
 
 He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of 
 his look finished it for him. 
 
 But the days passed on, and the voice grew rarer, the strength 
 feebler. By the beginning of March all coming downstairs was 
 over. He was entirely confined to his room, almost to his bed. 
 Then there came a horrible week, when no narcotics took effect, 
 when every night was a wrestle for life, which it seemed must 
 be the last. They had a good nurse, but Flaxman and Catherine 
 mostly shared the watching between them. 
 
 One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. 
 Catherine was sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn- 
 world of sun which reminded her of the summer sunrises at 
 Petites Dalles. She looked the shadow of herself. Spiritually, 
 too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was no longer her 
 own : she lived in him in every look of those eyes in every 
 movement of that wasted frame. 
 
 As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unseeing 
 gaze resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of hallucination 
 took possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw the form 
 of the Son of man passing over the misty slope in front of her, 
 that the dim majestic figure turned and beckoned. In her half-
 
 604 ROBERT ELSMERE BOOK vn 
 
 dream she fell on her knees. ' Master ! ' she cried in agony, ' I 
 cannot leave him ! Call me not ! My life is here. I have no 
 heart it beats in his.' 
 
 And the figure passed on, the beckoning hand dropping at its 
 side. She followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed to 
 her as though mind and body were alike incapable of moving 
 that she would not if she could. Then suddenly a sound from 
 behind startled her. She turned, her trance shaken off in an 
 instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed. 
 
 For a moment her lover, her husband, of the early days was 
 before her as she ran to him. But he did not see her. 
 
 An ecstasy of joy was on his face; the whole man bent 
 forward listening. 
 
 ' The child's cry ! thank God ! Oh I Meyrick Catherine 
 thank God I ' 
 
 And she knew that he stood again on the stairs at Murewell 
 in that September night which gave them their first-born, and 
 that he thanked God because her pain was over. 
 
 An instant's strained looking, and, sinking back into her 
 arms, he gave two or three gasping breaths, and died. 
 
 Five days later Flaxman and Rose brought Catherine home. 
 It was supposed that she would return to her mother at Bur- 
 wood. Instead, she settled down again in London, and not one 
 of those whom Robert Elsmere had loved was forgotten by his 
 widow. Every Sunday morning, with her child beside her, she 
 worshipped in the old ways ; every Sunday afternoon saw her 
 black-veiled figure sitting motionless in a corner of the Elgood 
 Street Hall. In the week she gave all her time and money to 
 the various works of charity which he had started. But she 
 held her peace. Many were grateful to her ; some loved her ; 
 none understood her. She lived for one hope only ; and the 
 years passed all too slowly. 
 
 The New Brotherhood still exists, and grows. There are 
 many who imagined that as it had been raised out of the earth 
 by Elsmere's genius, so it would sink with him. Not so ! He 
 would have fought the struggle to victory with surpassing 
 force, with a brilliancy and rapidity none after him could rival. 
 But the struggle was not his. His effort was but a fraction of 
 the effort of the race. In that effort, and in the Divine force 
 behind it, is our trust, as was his. 
 
 ' Others, I doubt not, if not we, 
 The issue of our toils shall see ; 
 And (they forgotten and unknown) 
 Young children gather as their own 
 The harvest that the dead had sown. 
 
 THK END
 
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