Robert Elsmere

She nodded lightly, dropped her lovely eyes with a sudden embarra.s.sment, 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 afternoon. 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 dropping on the lawn.

Elsmere 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 s.h.i.+ning twisted river, and commanding from all its highest points a heathery world of distance, now turned a stormy purple under the drooping 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-architecture. 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 n.o.ble, genius had hit the general proportions so finely, that no effect of stateliness or grandeur had been missed through all the acc.u.mulation 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 breathlessness 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 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 perfecting the craft of its most delicate fingers, the love of its most fanciful and ingenious spirits.

Overhead, the stucco-work ceiling, 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. Between 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 relieved 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 refractory, Elsmere with a smile took his guest silently back into the hall, and opened a carved door behind a curtain. Pa.s.sing through, they found themselves in a long pa.s.sage lighted by small windows on the left-hand side.

'This pa.s.sage, 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 pa.s.sage the ceiling seemed to descend upon their heads, the flooring became uneven and woodwork and walls showed that they had pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sage they had just quitted. The long diamond-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 cla.s.sical 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 dignity and impressiveness of the room beneath him; while on the window side

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, challenging 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 Cha.s.seresse' of the Louvre, by the Hermes of Praxiteles smiling with immortal kindness on the child enthroned upon his arm, and by a Donatello figure of a woman in marble, its subtle sweet austerity 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 acc.u.mulations, 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.'

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 t.i.tle-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 finding 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 pa.s.sion hot within him. That glazed case was indeed a storehouse of treasures. Ben Jonson's _Underwoods_ with his own corrections; a presentation copy of Andrew Marvell's _Poems_, with autograph notes; ma.n.u.script 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 conscious 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 Memoires d'Outre-Tombe_ presented by Chateaubriand to Madame Recamier, or to a dainty ma.n.u.script 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 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 attachment to him, is always hinting at mysterious excuses. Whenever 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 inclined,' 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, pa.s.sing through, they found themselves in a continuation of the library totally different in character 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 of 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 t.i.tle-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.

Robert nodded. 'But look at them! There are the Tracts, all the Fathers, all the Councils, and ma.s.ses, as you see, of Anglican 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 bookcase 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 Sch.e.l.ling.' The next bore the autograph of Alexander von Humboldt, the next that of Boeckh, the famous cla.s.sic, and so on. Close by was Niebuhr's History, in the t.i.tle-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 t.i.tle-page was covered with minute writing, which, when examined, 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 personal knowledge, and often seasoned with a subtle causticity and wit. A history of modern thinking Germany, of that 'unextinguished 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 autobiographical 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, another, which he was reading, in his hand.

'This is _my_ corner,' he said, smiling and flus.h.i.+ng 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 everybody write books? It was absurd! The scholar who knows what toll scholars.h.i.+p 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 a.s.sumption that any one _d'un coeur 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 bringing 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.