Robert Elsmere

But after the first painful impression he could not help losing himself in the pleasure of the familiar face, the Murewell a.s.sociations.

'How is the village, and the Inst.i.tute? And what sort of man is my successor--the man, I mean, who came after Armitstead?'

'I had him once to dinner,' said the squire briefly; 'he made a false quant.i.ty, 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 Inst.i.tute, I believe. He wanted to turn out the dissenters.

Bateson came to me, and we circ.u.mvented him, of course. But the man's an a.s.s. 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 Inst.i.tute, the ardour of his boys. He asked a few questions about individuals, but soon gave it up as hopeless. The squire neither 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 ma.n.u.script in my will, to do what you like with.'

'Squire!'

'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 att.i.tude, 'why can't you do your work and let the preaching alone?'

'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 chimneypiece 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 life 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 life 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 beginning 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 professorial nose.'

Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many feelings--perhaps in subtle striving against her own pa.s.sionate 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 m.u.f.fled 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

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 Catherine's 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 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, s.h.i.+ning 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 engagements 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 preoccupation 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 occupations 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 n.o.bleness 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.

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 household, 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, a.s.suming, 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 tendency 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 admiration. _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 a.s.sembled company 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 irrepressible 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.'

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 discomfort 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.