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Title: Robert Elsmere

Author: Mrs. Humphry Ward

Release Date: August, 2005 [EBook #8737]
[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
[This file was first posted on August 6, 2003]

Edition: 10

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ROBERT ELSMERE ***




Produced by Andrew Templeton




[Italics are indicated by underscores.]

[Transcriber's note: In one section, marked by **, two Greek letters,
delta and epsilon, are transcribed as de. The allusion is to a poem by
Browning -- 'A Grammarian's Funeral']

---------------------------------------------------------------------

                     Robert Elsmere

                          by

                   Mrs. Humphrey Ward

               Author of "Miss Bretherton"





                        BOSTON:
                 DeWOLFE, FISKE & CO.,
                 365 Washington Street



                Dedicated to the memory
                          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 SNINING
          ONES OF THE PAST, BY THE LOVE OF GOD
                 AND THE SERVICE OF MAN:

                    THOMAS HILL GREEN

(LAYE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD)

                   Died March 26, 1882

                         AND

              LAURA OCTAVIA MARY LYTTELTON

                  Died Easter Eve, 1886
---------------------------------------------------------------------




BOOK I.

WESTMORELAND.



CHAPTER I.

It was a brilliant afternoon toward 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 penetrated 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 farm-houses sheltered by the crags at the
head of the valley, and those far away regions of town and civilization
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 books running down into
the main river and, many of the plantations round the farms were
gay with the same tree, so that the farm-houses, gray-roofed and
gray-walled, standing in the hollows of the fells, seemed here and
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 Whindale
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
by regular lines of grayish black.  But as the walker penetrates
further, 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 plantation, and the few farms stand more boldly
and conspicuously 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 Whindale 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 color 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, toward 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 splendor
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 farm-houses, with their rough serviceable
walls, of the same stone as the crags behind them, and the ravines
in which the shrunken brooks 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 himself against her, to live his own independent
life of labor and of will, and to develop that tenacity of hidden
feeling, that slowly growing intensity of purpose which is so often
wiled 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 clustered
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 fill
their little front enclosures, was trimly laid down in turf dotted
with neat flowerbeds, 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 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; curtains 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 quickened 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 vigor, 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
flourishes and the broad _cantabile_ passages of one of Spohr's
Andantes.  For a while, as the sun sank lower and lower toward 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?'

'Not that I know of.  Do come here and look at pussy; did you ever
see anything so comfortable?'

'You and she look about equally lazy.  What have you been doing all
the afternoon?'

'We look what we are, my dear.  Doing?  Why, I have been attending
to my domestic duties, arranging the flowers, mending 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, pussy and I have come out for a rest.  We've earned it, haven't
we, Chattie?  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-temperediness
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 fairy 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 administering 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 his going to
college, we had, let me see,--the spare room curtains, 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 out 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 got 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 color 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 perfections 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 reminding 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 dare say 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, 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 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 toward 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 has 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 experience, 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
complexion had caught the freshness and purity of Westmoreland air
and Westmoreland streams.  About face and figure there was a delicate
austere charm, something which harmonized 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 neighboring 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 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 paralyzed 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?'

'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 someone 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 toward 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.

A quarter of an hour afterward they were all gathered round the
supper-table, the windows open to the garden and the May twilight.
At Catherine's right hand 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 bear 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 associations.  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 farm-house
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 outline, 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 favorite 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 eldest sister, was, of all the persons
gathered in this little room, the most pronounced 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 thin 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 experiences 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, Roeschen?' 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. Thornburgh means to
let them loose on his devoted head to-morrow night.'

'Who are coming?' asked Mrs. Leyburn eagerly.  The occasional tea
parties of the neighborhood were an unfailing excitement 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 neighborhood on Rose's playing or Agnes's
conversation, or Catherine's practical 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
dryly.  'Dear mother, can't you by now make up a tea-party at the
Thornburghs out of your bead?'

'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 slyly.  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. Leyburn," 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. 'However,' 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?'

'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 color and meant to try oils, and she told me to
implore you not to, because "water color 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 _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 disappeared,
'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 tablecloth 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 drooping.
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 outline's of the fell the stars were just
twinkling in the pale blue.  Far away under the crag on the further
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, and 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
protectingness.

'What did you do with yourself all the afternoon, Roeschen?'

'I practised for two hours,' said the girl shortly, 'and two hours
this morning. My Spohr is nearly perfect.'

'And you didn't look into the school?' asked Catherine, hesitating;
'I know Miss Merry expected you.'

'No, I didn't.  When one can play the violin and can't teach, any
more than a cuckatoo, 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 Catherine
took up the subject with a zest which kept her mother happy till
bedtime.

'Why couldn't she take as much interest in my Spohr? 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 ordinary 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 neatness 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 ornaments.  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 information.
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 into the 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 mountains.  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 dryly.

'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 II.

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. Thornburgh'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 neighborhood of this
last enabled her to make an intermittent pretence of reading; but
in reality the energies of her house-wifely 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 savories, 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 of Long Whindale was particularly sensitive.  Was she not
expecting Mrs. Seaton, the wife of the Rector of Whinborough--odious
woman--to tea? Was it not incumbent on her 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 neighboring town of Whinborough till the shop window of a certain
newly arrived confectioner had been revealed to her, stored with
the most airy and appetizing trifles--of a make and coloring 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 Mr. 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 sustenance
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 two old men still lingering in the dale who could have
told him 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 childhood, dropping
in for his 'crack' and his glass of 'yale' at this or that farm-house
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, unremembered graves, and new
men of other ways and other modes of speech reign in their stead.
And as at Long Whindale, so almost everywhere, the change has been
emphasized by the disappearance of the old parsonage houses with
their stone floors, their parlors lustrous with oak carving on chest
or dresser, and their encircling farm-buildings and meadows, in
favor of an upgrowth of new trim mansions designed to meet the
needs, not of peasants, but of gentlefolks.

And naturally the churches too have shared in the process of
transformation.  The ecclesiastical revival of the last half-century
has worried its will even in the remotest corners of the Cambrian
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 generations 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 the results--namely, the new church, vicarage, and
school-house--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 influences, some social, some economical,
added to a certain amount of corrosion from within; and their place
had been taken by leaseholders, lets 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 Parsonage had got
themselves rebuilt, the parson had had his income raised, had let
off his glebe to a neighboring 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 unusual 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. Backbouse he niver found oot till
he'd got past t' bridge, and than it wur too late to go back.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stood transfixed, something of her fresh pink color
slowly deserting her face as she realized 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, undignified steps
across the front garden and down the steps to where Mr. Backhouse,
the carrier, stood, bracing himself for self-defense.

'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'?'

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 toward
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, but ya caan't help these things _sum_times--an' it's
naw gud 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 beast like onything.'

Mrs. Thornburgh stood aghast at the calmness of this audacious
recital.  As for John, he looked on, surveying his brother's
philosophical demeanor at first with speechless wrath, and then
with an inscrutable mixture of expressions, in which, however, 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, making little
incoherent laments and suggestions as she saw him about to depart,
of which John at last gathered the main purport 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 be 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 o' mice,' he raised his whip and the
clattering vehicle moved forward; Jim meanwhile preserving through
all his brother's wrath and Mrs. Thornburgh's wailings 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.

'He's sparin' ov 'is speach, is John Backhouse,' said Sarah grimly,
as her mistress returned to her.  'Maybe ee's aboot reet.  It's a
bad business au' 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.

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 consignment.  The thing was inconceivable.  Mrs.
Thornburgh was well aware of it.

Should William be informed?  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 perception 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?  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! 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-colored things, and do her hair fit to frighten the crows!
Agnes too--so ladylike 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 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 part of her
determination to move with the times, in spite the station to which
Providence had assigned her.

A minute afterward 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 talk 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.  Henceforth 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 shook 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 apologize, I apologize, 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 realized 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 _naivete_ 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.

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 infinitely 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 folks can
do perfectly well without'--et cetera, et cetera--the husband'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 windblown
streams, or the manners and customs of the inhabitants.  His cousin's
wife, in spite of her ambitious conventionalities, 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 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 neighboring 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 pointed
out Burwood among its trees.  Then with her eye eagerly fixed upon
him she fell into a more or less incoherent account of her favorites.
She laid on hot colors 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
surely, though you have one of the loveliest 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 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 way 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 persistent
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 triumphantly to Queen's College.

His family watched his progress with a gaping, half-contemptuous
amazement, till he announced himself as safely installed at Oxford,
having borrowed from a Whinborough patron the modest sum necessary
to pay his college valuation--a sum which wild horses could not
have dragged out of his father, now sunk over head and ears in debt
and drink.

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 necessities.  The money was promptly sent, together with
photographs 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.

'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 before 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 someone 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 Wordsworth, and cold donnish ways, except
to his children and the poor. I always thought his life had
disappointed him somehow.'

'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 inherited 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 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 lived there.  And then to see those three
delicately brought-up children going in and out of the parlor where
old Leyburn used to sit smoking and drinking; and Dick Leyburn
walking about in a white tie, and the same men touching their hats
to him who had belabored 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?'

'Yes, he died the year after he bought the place.  And perhaps 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, whiskey-drinking 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
expression.

'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 upper end of the valley--a bare
desolate recess filled 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 district.  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 farm-houses, the heckberry trees along the
river and the road, emphasized 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 Burwood, 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 neighboring valley
of Shanmoor, that the first _coup d'aeil_ was good.  The flowers
had been arranged in the afternoon by Rose; Sarah's exertions had
made the silver shine again; a pleasing odor of good food underlay
the scent of the bluebells and fern; and what with the snowy
table-linen, and the pretty dresses and bright faces of the younger
people, the room seemed to be full of an incessant play of crisp
and delicate color.

But just as the vicar's wife was sinking into her seat with 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. Thornburgh'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
neighbor--a grim uncommunicative person--in his own devotion to a
policy of silence.  Meanwhile the vicar was grappling on very unequal
terms with Mrs. Seaton.  Mrs. Leyburn had fallen to young Elsmere.
Catherine Leyburn was paired off with Mr. Baker, Agnes with Mr.
Mayhew'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 opening into the great
world should be discovered for him.

Rose was on Robert Elsmere's right.  Agnes had coaxed her into a
white dress as being the least startling garment she possessed, 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 Thornburgh's  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' conversation as above the average in point of
manners and talk.  As to Miss Leyburn, be 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 unusually
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!  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 amusement, wondering how she did it.
What?  Had she got him on carpentering, engineering--discovered his
weak point?  Water-wheels, investors, 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 neighbor with a bland majesty of eye, she
inquired of him if he were 'any relation of Sir Mowbray Elsmere?'
Robert replied that Sir Mowbray Elsmere was his 'father's cousin,
and the patron of the living to which be 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 Mowbray 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 intimacy to which she referred.
Mrs. Seaton's father, in his capacity of solicitor in a small country
town, had acted as electioneering 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 repetition 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 proceeding 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 the
Universities.  She and the Archdeacon conceived that the Oxford
authorities were mainly occupied in ruining the young men's health
by over-examination, and poisoning their minds by free-thinking
opinions.  In her belief, if it went on, the motherly of England
would refuse 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 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, ho 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 certain
truculent elements in one of the mildest of men.  So Robert was
free to turn to his girl neighbor and ask her what people meant by
calling the Lakes rainy.

'I understand it is pouring at Oxford.  To-day your sky 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 coloring, 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 promise 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. Thornburgh
stood in awe of Catherine and had given her up in despair.  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 anyone 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 allowable 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
exasperation.  Mrs. Seaton had just embarked upon an account of
'our charming time with Lord Fleckwood.'  Now Lord Fleckwood was a
distant cousin of Archdeacon Seaton, and the great magnate of the
neighborhood--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 neighbor'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 Randall'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 lip.  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 inconvenience
may have one good result.  You can now make an example of the
carrier.  It is our special business, as my husband 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 particular about trifles.'

'Trifles?' 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 established 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 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 them.  I don't believe he does
drink much, but if he does there is probably no amount of whiskey
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 temptation 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 denuding his face
of all expression.  John vow's he shall go to the "house;" he has
no legal share in the business; the house and the horse and cart
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 dryly.

'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 neighbor with a complete change of
expression, and a voice that had a new note in it of affectionate
respect.  Catherine colored 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 bilingual.  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 penetrate 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 afterward for each operation.  The pull was soon forgotten;
the sixpence lived on gratefully 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 storytelling, Miss Rose,'
said the doctor, lifting a finger at her.  'Every man is 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 got 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 ghost last Midsummer day, and Miss
Leyburn and I are now doing 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 seeing 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 unpleasant 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 fingertips 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 antiquarian 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 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 adoration.  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 anything 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 Leyburn'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 colorless 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 household 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
was, and more eager than I ever was, to got 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, 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 vigor.

'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 interrupt himself
for nothing.

'Really?  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; 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 forbade 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, bending 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 fibre in her
which for the moment chilled him.  But as he got her into talk about
the neighborhood, 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 attainments 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 meditative soul, had
taught her judgments and comments on her favorite 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 toward the later 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 big face and clerical dress seemed
somehow to reassure her, and she began again, though reluctantly.

'He used to say that it was all so changed.  The young fellows 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 Leyburn must have left Oxford about
the beginning of the Liberal reaction, which followed Tractarianism,
and in twenty years transformed the University.

'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 aroused 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 candies 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-sufficingness 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 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 neighborhood.  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 performing 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 countenance 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 half
a page behind, was left shrilly hanging, in mid-air, forsaken 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 be could answer, Mrs. Thornburgh called to the girl.

'Rose!  Rose!  Don't go out again!  It is your turn next!'

Rose advanced reluctantly, her head in air.  Robert, remembering
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 oldest 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.
Seaton 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-Stuecke_, 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 of her instrument?  He was not a musician, 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 _fillette_,
unformed, inexperienced, 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.  'Everyone 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 bar.  He was puzzled, but certainly not
repelled.

Twenty minutes later everybody was going.  The Seatons went first,
and the other guests lingered awhile afterward to enjoy the sense
of freedom left by their departure.  But at last the Mayews, 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 incredulous 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 manners would
disgrace a Whinborough shop-girl. She has none-positively none!'

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 Leyburns 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 fireplace 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 anybody 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 the 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 development 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
favorite 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 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 recollections.

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
fulfillment of his wishes.  And so it proved.  No sooner was his
father dead, than Sir Mowbray curtly communicated 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 hill covered by the new
school buildings, she was the helper, gossip, and confident of half
the parish.  Her vast hats, strange in fashion and inordinate in
brim, her shawls of many colors, 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 personality 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 vas 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-colored 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 pulse 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 overtaken by a fit of repentant watchfulness,
and for days together Robert would find her the most fascinating
playmate, storyteller, 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 giant,
or the defeat of the sorcerer, and now arguing and suggesting in
ways which gave perpetually fresh stimulus 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 quiet, 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 realize
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 Mowbray's offer.
Robert at the time was a boy of sixteen, doing very well at school,
a favorite 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 strong.
Her experience had not been large, but the feeling based on it
promised to have all the tenacity of a favorite 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 tolerable 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-woman's sense of humor 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 generalizations, 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 reflected
that it would certainly be better to Say nothing of it to Robert
until he should be at college.  His impressionable temperament, and
the power he had occasionally shown of absorbing himself in a subject
till it produced in him a fit of intense continuous brooding,
unfavorable 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 religiously 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 with her, and to feel that no reluctance or resistance
divided his heart from hers.  But there had been nothing specially
noteworthy 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 which he had already a marked and important
place was unbounded.  Very early in his school career the literary
instincts, which had 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 favorite tutor would probably have thrown
himself into it with the same exclusive passion as he had shown for
subject after subject in his eager a 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 be 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 keeping 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 satisfaction,
'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 Columbus, 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 Aeschylus
appealed to the same fibres, the same susceptibilities, as Milton
and Shakspeare, 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 his main objects in life
to keep the boy's aspiring nose to the grindstone of grammatical
_minutiae_, 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 his 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 privileges.  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 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 Mowbray,
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, steepest 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 complexity 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 fragmentary 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 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 coming to an end.
Had she loved him enough?  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?  And would her poor craving
heart bear to see him absorbed by fresh interests 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
crashed 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 his 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 fathers; 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 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 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 gayly
climbed innumerable stairs to inspect the garrets of which be 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 fervor 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 influence 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 struggles, 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 Sunday.  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 suggestive, so full of a rich and yet disciplined
experience, that they haunted her mind for weeks afterward--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; henceforth
she could but watch him from the shore.  Brought into contact with
this imposing University organization, 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 honorable 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 belonging 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
of 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 afterward dared to allude to the experience.  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 questions an exasperating degree of ignorance;
and the wags of 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 coloring 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-molded
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 movements
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 idiosyncrasies 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 brooding, gifted nature had
a moment of sudden and, as it seemed to the old people in Gainsborough,
most reprehensible expansion.  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 publication 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 fellowship.  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 be would not
be elected.

He left the college, took pupils for a while, then stood for a
vacant fellowship at St. Anselm's, the Liberal headquarters, and
got it with flying colors.

Thenceforward one would have thought that a brilliant and favorable
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 instinct--cold, critical,
reflective--had reasserted itself, condemning him and his censors
equally.  The uselessness of utterance, the futility of enthusiasm,
the inaccessibility of the ideal, the practical absurdity of trying
to realize any of the mind's inward dreams: these were the kind of
considerations which descended upon him, slowly and fatally, crushing
down the newly springing 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, he quarreled 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 provincial 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 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 possible 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 employment, 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 color 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 fortnight; 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 cheating 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 favorable 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, by weariness or shrinking,
as compared with the contemptuous tone of the college toward 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 curiosity, 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 the antidote which Elsmere's
main faults of haste and carelessness required.  He was always
holding up before him the inexhaustible patience and labor involved
in all true knowledge; and it was to the germs of critical judgment
so planted in him that Elsemere 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 talking afterward.  It was
a rainy, cheerless evening; the first contest of the Boats week had
been rowed in cold wind and sheet; 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 know 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 vibration,
which had in it a note of almost contemptuous irritation--'do you
think _I_ am the man to get and keep a hold on a rampageous class
of hundreds of Scotch lads?  Do you think _I_ am the man to carry
on what Reid began--Reid, that old fighter, that preacher of all
sorts of jubilant dogmas?'

He looked at Elsmere under his straight, black brows, imperiously.
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 University.  Why was he so self-distrustful, so
absurdly diffident of responsibility, so bent on hiding his great
gifts under a bushel?

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 toward a book which lay on a table near.  It was the
'Reveries' of Senancour.  'My answer is written _here_,' he said.
'It will seem to you now, Elsmere, mere Midsummer 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.  _I 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 realize 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 resounding 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 awhile 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 afterlife.

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 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 occasionally
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 afternoon 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
recognized the thickset 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 Elsmere.  There
was a curious struggle going on in the tutor's mind.

'Elsmere,' he said at last, abruptly, 'would you like to go tonight
and hear Grey preach?'

'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 layman, to carry on the practice.
It was an extraordinary effort, for he 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 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 afterward
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 fervor
and an admiration which he was too young and immature to analyze,
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?'  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 constituting 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, throughout 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, addressing 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 breathing 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 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 humor 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 interesting 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
labor, but still clearly, 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 him once or
twice, making Lagham 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 undercurrents 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 t ma4, and a man of
ardor 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 control
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 of
the paralysis of all natural ambitious in himself, he was illogically
keen that Elsmere should win the distinctions of the 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 restless, 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 popular 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 to 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 fervor, 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 passing 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 recognized with a great
burst of enthusiasm and astonishment, that, after all, Mill and
Herbert Spencer had not said the last word on all things in heaven
and earth.  And now there was exaggerated recoil.  A fresh wave of
religious romanticism 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
ones.

With this movement of opinion Robert had very soon found himself
in close and sympathetic contact.  The meagre impression left upon
his boyhood by the somewhat grotesque succession of the Harden
curates, and by his mother's shifts 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 organized 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 pulpit, and looked down on the crowded
building, full of grave black-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
experience 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 be 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 afterward, and turned his steps
homeward, 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 passageway 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 lucky.'

'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 pessimist 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 if 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, 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 infinity 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, 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?' he asked at last, with a
certain quick  brusqueness of manner.

'No,' said Robert, 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
toward 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 conscious 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 clericalisme, voila l'ennemi!_' 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 afterward, 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.

'Well, after all,' he said at last, very slowly,  'the difficulty
lies in preaching anything.  One may as well preach a respectable
mythology as anything else.'

'What do you mean by a mythology?' cried Robert, hotly.

'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 realized, 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, dryly.

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 Langham 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
conviction--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 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 now turn of her son's fortunes she
realized with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert
had been educating her as well as himself.  Her old rebellious 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 satisfaction 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 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 line 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 her, 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 relinquished 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 himself 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 instructions 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 completely by
winning a Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some
of the beat 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 postponing 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 afterward, 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 developed 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.  He became a stimulating and successful
teacher, and one of the most popular of men.  His passionate sense
of responsibility toward 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 instances, if one could have
unravelled it, would have been found to be one long string of acts
of kindness toward 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 Evangelical training
of him, and Mr. Grey's influence, together, perhaps, 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
fervor and passion of his Christian feeling.  At the same time he
did not know what rancor 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 Gray 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--not, perhaps, of great intellectual
advance, for other forces in him than those of the intellect were
mainly to the fore, but years certainly of continuous 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 Morton Street where she had established herself,
had watched her boy's meteoric career through those crowded months
with very frequent misgivings.  No one knew better than she that
Robert was constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she
realized 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 remonstrance, 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, in the
January of his fourth year, the collapse became so decided, 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 labor 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 1,200 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 beat the fates.  But, after a halcyon
time 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.

'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?
I 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?'

He turned to his mother with a sudden start of interest.

'So I hear,' said Mrs. Elsmere, dryly.  '_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 possessed 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 convalescent,
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.

'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 color 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.

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 indication 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 Rose, 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.  I 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 instructing 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 chevelure de poete_, the
eye 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, dryly.  'But you can't wonder if under the
circumstances I don't pine for a brother-in-law.  To return to the
subject, however, Catherine liked him.  She said so.'

'Oh, that doesn't count,' replied Rose, discontentedly.  Catherine
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 arguments 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 not 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 color than usual, and as Mrs. Leyburn shook hands with the
young clergyman her mother's eyes turned approvingly to her eldest
daughter.  'After all she is as handsome 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 favorite low seat beside her mother, clasping Mrs. Leyburn's
thin mittened hand a while tenderly in her 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 difference 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, Roeschen?'  Clearly, the strong
contemplative 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 godfather?

'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. S-- had
been extinct before his day.  But could they ask him any other
questions?  'Mrs. Leyburn became quite animated, and, diving into
her memory, produced a number of fragmentary reminiscences of her
husband's Queen's friends, asking him 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 returning 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 describing
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 prominent figure in the college; and
once embarked on this theme be 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 be 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 Catherine'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?'

'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 toward Elsmere with out-stretched hand.  But he also
sprang up.

'I too must be going,' he said;  'I have paid you an unconscionable
visit.  If you are going past the Vicarage, Miss Leyburn, may I
escort you so far?'

She stood quietly waiting while he made his farewells.  Agnes, 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 defined
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 retreated 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 toward
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 beautiful 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-example,' 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 conversation 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.

'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 favorite 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 seeing 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 some where near the school of which he was master--a
good family, I believe--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?'

'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 Wesleyans; but he was
very loyal to the Church all the same.  He regarded it as the golden
mean.  George Herbert was his favorite 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 all.  He would have had the
Church make peace with the Dissenters; he was all for up setting
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 his 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
about right,' said the vicar, with a sigh.  'We are all so halfhearted
nowadays.'

'Not he,' cried Robert, hotly.  'Who are we that because a man
differs from us in opinion who 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 children 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 opportunity 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 dinning-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 inconveniently high standards, and
her influence, surpassing his own, in his own domain.

'I should like to know the secret of the little musician's
independence,' said Robert, musing.  'There might be no tie of blood
at all between her and the elder, so far as I can see.'

'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 be  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 toward 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.
I see a touch of the old Leyburn recklessness in her; and then
there is the beauty and refinement of bar 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 a 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 I promised papa."  She makes herself miserable and it's
no use.  I wish the little wild thing would get herself 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 flutter.

'My dears, I have been looking out for you all the morning!  I
should have come over but for the stores coming, and a tiresome 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 between 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 ypu 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?' she inquired,
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 for 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.

Mrs. 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 backward or forward.

'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 plain as a pikestaff.  And, my dears, _nothing_
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 eloquence.  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 inconsistency,
'Oh, you can't know anything in two days.'

'That's just it,' said Agnes, intervening; 'we can't know anything
in two days.  No one ever will know anything about Catherine, if
she takes to anybody, till the list 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. Thornburgh.

'Well, _what_ 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 effervescence
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. Elsmere
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 grace_.  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 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 inconvenient 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 paralyzed for some time, under the weight, moreover, of a black
cloud of depression which seldom lifted.  Mrs. Tyson Kept her
talking in the room, and she never forgot the scene.  It showed her
a new aspect of a man whose intellectual 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 be said, and yet the reality and force of
them, struck her powerfully.  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 afterward for having juggled
in the matter.  Was it not her duty to manage a little society and
gayety for her sisters sometimes?  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 afterward
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
maneuvers of those about her.  It did not strike her that Mrs.
Thornburgh 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 analyze what would have been
the 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 learned 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 communication.  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 neighborhood, plunging into reports of agricultural
commissions, 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 anyone; 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-by!

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 toward 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, movements,
leaders, of the day--that she was often puzzled, sometimes 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 generation.

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 diffidences.  Once, after a long walk, as they were
lingering homeward 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 bow 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 implied in the pursuer
the emphasizing 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 work, 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 aptitudes to be explained unless the
Great Designer meant them to have a use and function in His world?
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 humanizing effect of
music on the poor.  He described to her the efforts of a London
society, of which he was a subscribing member, to popularize the
best music among the lowest class; he dwelt almost with passion on
the difference between the joy to be got out of such things and the
common brutalizing 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 Whinborough.  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 Westmoreland
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 sitting 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 oldest 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' marvellous,' he
heard her say, with uplifted hands and eyes, '"some-thin" marvellous.
The Lord has blessed him indeed!  It doesn't matter what it is,
whether it's meetin's, or sermons, or parlor work, or just faithful
dealin's with souls one by one.  Satan has no cleverer 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 road-side, 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, praying 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 ministers.  A bit farther
I met a boy carrying a load of turnips.  To him, too, I was faithful,
and he went on, taking without knowing 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 Nuneaton.  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 labors 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 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 oop 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 sense 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 mountain 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 fervors 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 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. Fleming's disappearance, 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 evening
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, be 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 realized 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 herself, 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 got our walk to Shanmnoor after all, and if we
don't, and if-if--' her cheek flashed with a 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 a while,' she thought, 'and if it rains later
we can get a carriage at Shanmoor and come back by the road.'

And she walked on homeward meditating, her thin fingers clasped
before her, the wind blowing her skirts, the blue ribbons on her
hat, the little gold curls on her temples, in an artistic many-colored
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 neighborhood, 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 musical, but a pictorial life
of its own; its young artists dub themselves '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 dear 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 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!_  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 surrender 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 in 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' '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.  Heigho!'

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, _I_ saw him gather up those
violets she threw away yesterday on Moor Crag.  And as for her, I
don't believe she has realized the situation a bit.  At least, if
she has she is as unlike other mortals in this as in everything
else.  But when she does--'

She frowned and meditated, but got no light on the problem.  Chattie
jumped up on the windowsill, 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 'll _only_ marry Mr. Elsmere, nay dear, and be happy ever
afterward, 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 forgot
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 movement, and the intoxication
of sound--the cat meanwhile following 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 braving 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 neighborhood 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 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 gayety 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 gayety 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 set the girls scoffing at the pretence of invalidism under
which he had foisted himself on Whindale.

'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?' 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 chattering.  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 neighborhood, 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 color was all
dark and rich, the white inn gleaming on a green and purple background.
He took it all into his heart, covetously, greedily, trying to fix
it there forever.

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. Thornburgh'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 afterward 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 onto the bridge.  There was to
be no long lingering, however.  The clouds were deepening, 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 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!  Friend,
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?' 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 off.  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 looking 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 descended earlier
in the afternoon.  Catherine for some little way walked last of the
party, the vicar in front of her.  Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop,
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.

'You have crushed me,' he said, laughing, as he put the flower
carefully into his pocketbook; 'but it is worth while to be crushed
by anyone 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 yon go on with that night school in Poll Ghyll, for instance?'
he said, with another note in his voice.

Catherine looked at him and  colored.  'Rose has been telling 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?'

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 company, your dog guarding you, and
all good Angels going with you.'

She blushed 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.
Elemere; 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 livid 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
homeward 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 around 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 with a 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 be 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 same shaft from Rose, more sarcastic than
grateful to judge by the tone of it.

'Miss Leyburn, 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 of 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 myself 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 he 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.

'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 butter-flies 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 individual lines!'

And he quoted line after line, lingering over the cadences.

'It was my father's favorite of all,' she said, in the low vibrating
voice of memory.  'He said the last verse to me the day before be
died.'

Robert 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?' 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 blaming, scourging himself.  And
all the time he was the noblest, purest, most devoted--'

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, despondent 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?

'Oh, I can understand!' he said, reverently--'I can understand.  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 eye's 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 hesitation 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 half 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 forever.  She
was wrapped up grotesquely 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.

'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 hold 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 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 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. EIsmere 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.

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 vindictive
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, Rose 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.  And beyond the vale, eastward and northward, Catherine
looked 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 absolutely 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 stores
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 Robert 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 have 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 realized 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 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?  She could see the
drawn face, the restless, melancholy eyes.  'Catherine, 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?  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, comfort, enjoyment.  The
girls are at the opening of life--Agnes twenty, Rose 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, Catherine 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 so
very much.  The time is so short--there is so little in her,
comparatively, to attract a man of such resource, such attainments,
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 bounding
heart that she cannot silence, do what she will, through all this
strenuous debate, no claim to satisfaction, to joy?

She locks here 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 thyself
of all created love, then should I be constrained to flow into thee
with greater abundance of grace._'

'_When thou lookest unto the creature the sight of the Creator is
withdrawn from thee._'

'_Learn in all things to overcome thyself for the love of thy Creator
. . ._'

She presses the sentences 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:

              '_Thy Saviour sentenced joy!_'

Ah, sentenced it forever--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
Rose.  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 the ladder--to have moved her
to bring her gifts to the altar?  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 of
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
up-stairs.  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, listening 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 backward and forward dreamily singing, and she started
up when she saw Catherine.

'Roeschen,' 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, Roeschen, 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,
Roeschen.  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 Catherine!  What did it mean?
Catherine withdrew her arms with a little sigh and moved away.

'I just came to tell you that, Roeschen,' 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?'

And she flung her strong young arms round Catherine with a passionate
strength.

The elder sister struggled to release herself.

'Let me go, Rose,' 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, sympathy--threw herself face
downward 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 neighborhood 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 lowering, but not
raining, and he represented to Mrs. Thornburgh, 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. T hen 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, whistling.
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 impossible 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 yesterday!'
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 for the orphan asylum, and
one or two other pieces of business, and she must go.'

'_Mrs. Thornburqh!_'  And not a word for him, for him to whom she
had given her promise?  She had gone to Whinborough 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?

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 afterward 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 clamoring to be done, and this morning 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 all be a
mistake, and tried hard to absorb himself in the consideration of
_2s. 8d. plus 2s. 11d. minus 9d_.

'And I suppose, William,' said his wife to hint at last, with
withering sarcasm, 'that you'd sit by and see Catherine break that
young man's heart, and send him back to big 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 _blasted_ 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
good did an outsider ever get by meddling in a love affair?  Take
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 saying
unutterable things.

'Doesn't care for him!' she echoed, in a tone which implied that
her husband's headpiece was past praying for.

'Yes, doesn't care for him!' said the vicar, nettled.  'What else
should make her give him a snub like this?'

Mrs. Thornburgh looked at him again with exasperation.  Then a
curious expression stole into her eyes.

'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 behavior.  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?  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 toward an elder male,
especially a male in love with someone 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?  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, however, 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 anyone 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 devotion 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
attention to anyone 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 sympathy, 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?  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.

'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 hint how the
land lay.

'I suppose she will spend the afternoon with Aunt Ellen.  Elsmere,
what do 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 Rose?'

'Oh dear, no!' she said, with a little face. 'I'm not a Leyburn; 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 housekeeping; and you can see for yourself what
she does for the neighbors 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 our 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.

They had reached the gate of the Vicarage.  Elsmere stopped and
looked at his companion with a singular lightening of expression.
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 feelings 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 meditatively 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 Catherine'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, childlike 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 recognizes 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 Christianized 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 developed 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 Roman
road which runs, with such magnificent disregard of the humors of
Mother Earth, over the very top of High Street toward Penrith and
Carlisle.

Next day it looked as though after many waverings, the characteristic
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 downward from the
rocks, water dripping steadily from the larches and sycamores and
the slate-eaves of 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 Leyburn might be doing that morning.
Judging a North countrywoman by the pusillanimous Southern standard,
be 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 herself 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 on the trees, that iridescent
beauty of distance and atmosphere which goes so far to make a
sensitive spectator forget the petulant abundance of mountain rain.
Elsmere passed Burwood with a thrill.  Should he or should he not
present himself?  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 steam 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 pursuer--a quick
change of expression.  She wore a close-fitting waterproof dress
and cap.  Her hair was 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, gayly.  '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.

'Look,' he said, pointing to the west; 'have you been watching 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, 'to 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 passionate 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 buoyancy 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, 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 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 now 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 working 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 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 himself 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 whirlwind of feeling
possessed him.  The strangeness, the unworldliness of what she had
done struck him singularly.  He realized 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 unlooked-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.  Robert 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, 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 honor of one, instead of knitting
the new ones to the old.  Is life to be allowed no natural expansion?
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 affection, 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.  On 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 anymore.  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
color 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
exhilaration, 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 good
women under the circumstances.  But as he met it for one passionate
instant, he recognized 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 forgot the
painful struggle of the face; 'good-by.'  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 weakness.

'I have been a long way, dear,' she said, as though in apology,
'and there is no air.  Yes, I will go up-stairs 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 color of the foam on the beck outside.  Agnes stood dumfounded.
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 up-stairs 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.

'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 role as this assigned 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 drawing 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 preferred 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 everyone else in Burwood, even the chafing, excited Rose,
was asleep, Catherine in her dimly lighted room, where the stormy
northwest 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 something 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 colors were breaking through.
All the sayings of Christ which had lain closest to her heart for
years, tonight 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 experience 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.  Yesterday a
sort of mystical exaltation upheld her.  What had broken it down?

Simply a pair of reproachful eyes, 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?' 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 miserable hour in the
vicar's study afterward, 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 incoherently put
it, might very well be rather braced than injured by the withdrawal
of her strong support.

But the obstacle of character--ah, there was a different matter!
He realized 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 realized 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
reproduced 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 looking 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 difficulty, 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.  Afterward,
when he and the vicar were smoking together, 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 1ast words
was not to be mistaken.  The vicar emitted a contented 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 dumfounded her.  A good time, indeed!
with everything begun and nothing finished: with two households
thrown into perturbation for a delusion, 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?'  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 breakfast
the vicar and Elsmere started off.  Robert turned back at the top
of the High Fell pass and stood leaning on his alpenstock, 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 appearance 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 traffic phase or other, and into
which Mrs. Thornburgh was allowed a more unencumbered view than she
was into Catherine Leyburn's.  Rose and Agnes dropped in now and
then and found her not 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
onslaught 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?'

She _had_ 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 drawing-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?'

For, though the rain had stopped, a boisterous northwest wind was
still rushing through the valley, and the trees round Burwood were
swaying and groaning under the force of its onslaught.

'Well, 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. Thornburgh,
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?' 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, wondering.

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 affect upon her.

'Have you guessed nothing?  have the girls told you anything?'

'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.  'William 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 afterward?  You think he proposed 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.  'Catherine'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.'

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 Burwood
living-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 favorable openings.  Mrs. Leyburn's
mind was just now playing the part of spillikins, and the vicar's
wife was shaking it viciously, though with occasional qualms as to
the lawfulness of the process.

'You think Catherine does care for him?' resumed Mrs. Leyburn
tremulously.

'Well isn't he just the kind of man one would suppose Catherine
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 candor.  '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 philosophy
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, energetically,
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!'

'_I!_' cried poor Mrs. Leyburn--'I stand in  the way!'  She was
getting tremulous and tearful, and Mrs. Thornburgh felt herself a
brute.

'Well,' she said, plunging on desperately, 'I have been thinking
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 together, 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 consequences 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 perhaps 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 unmistakable
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 Murewell 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 combinations 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 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 aggrieved
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 pensively 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 working the
while at railway speed on the facts presented to her.

'How do you get her home tomorrow night?' 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.

'Ten o'clock-moonlight,' said that contriving person to herself
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 confidence 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 at 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 difficulty 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 unweaned 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 her.

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. Leyburn 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 hag been talking to you about Mr. Elsmere and me?'
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 toward 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
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?  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 imaginations--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. Leyburn'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 pettishness.  '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!'

'And you, mother, without me?' cried poor Catherine, choked.

'Oh, I should come and see you,' said Mrs. Leyburn, brightening.
'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.

'Oh, 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 endearment 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 vulgarizing, 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 tonight, 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. Thornbourgh 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 honor.  And meanwhile half the tragedy of our
time lies in this perpetual clashing of two estimates of life--the
estimate which is the offspring of the scientific spirit, and which
is forever 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. Leyburn watched her
with anxious timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to
any one on the Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to
her.  She came home in the afternoon 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 toward sunset.  Catherine
walked on fast toward 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 housekeeping 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 has been, so shaken.  At present she is a
riddle to herself, invaded 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, toward 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 toward
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 northward 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
realize her mission afresh, and the scene which lay before her.



CHAPTER X.

Mary 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 Midsummer 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 favored,
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 were 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 neighbors with
whom the girl could fraternize, and Whinborough was too far off to
provide any adequate food for her vague hunger after emotion and
excitement.

In this dangerous morbid state she fell a victim to the very coarse
attractions of a young farmer in the neighboring 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 realized 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 recognized 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 Midsummer 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 neighborhood.
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 less from the shaft of the carrier's
cart; his absence of mind was for a time more marked, and excused
with less buoyancy and inventiveness 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 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 neighbor 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 and
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 ajar, 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 mothers favorite seat, sat
Mary Backhouse, her feet on the curved brass fender, her eyes staring
into the parlor 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 toward 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 up-stairs wi'
ye.'

And he pointed to a door in the wall concealing a staircase to the
upper story.

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 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 toward 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 lie 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 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 had 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 neighbor from next door, Jim got her up-stairs
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 down-stairs 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 parlor
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 quite as scornfully
ready to sacrifice his ghosts to the Time Spirit as any 'bold bad'
haunter of scientific associations 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 beard 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 imagination 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
toward 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 color 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 prolonged 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 toward the house she crept after him, passing
him into the parlor, where she sank down breathless on the settle
where she had been sleeping for the last few nights, rather than
face climbing the stairs.  For the first time he followed her,
watching her gasping struggle for breath, in spite of her impatient
motion to him 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 assistance 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 bidden 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 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 wandering, 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 of 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 something 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 state 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 unconsciousness 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 tomorrow,' 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 neighbor) 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 to 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 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 someone 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 woau'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 just call oot--sharp!  Mrs.
Irwin, she'll stay in wi' ye--she's not afeeard!'

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 agonized senses might
be relieved, and death come at last in softer, kinder guise.

'Has she been long like this?' she asked softly of the neighbor 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 sometime.  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, 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 neighboring 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 materialized 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?'

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 superhuman 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!' 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 gaoler, 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 to 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
rush to Catherine's check.  Her face, as the candle-light struck
it amid the shadows of the doorways 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.

'Doan't ye let 'ur, sir,' said the woman excitedly to Robert.
'One's eneuf oneut aa'm thinking.'  And she pointed with a meaning
gesture to the room behind her.

Robert looked at Catherine, who was moving toward 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 women 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 toward 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 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 toward 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 a 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 exhaustion,
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?'

'Oh dear, yes,' said Catherine, trying to smile, and could find
nothing else to say.  They walked on a few moments in silence,
splashes of rain breaking in their faces.  Robert's inward excitement
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 mountains
thinking it out for yourself and me.  Catherine, your mother has
no son, she would 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 without 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 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 imagination,
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 someone 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-sticken.

'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 awfa' 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 aw' but thrown hirsel' oot 'o' t' bed, an' aa
shooted for Tim, 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 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 toward 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 forever.  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 forever: 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 windowsill 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 larchwood, up to the top, where the stream goes
under the road.  And there he spoke to me, and I couldn't help it
any more.  And I promised 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 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, expectant 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 labored breath came more gently, and in a few more
minutes she slept.  Twilight was long over.  The ghost-hour was
passed, and the moon outside was slowly gaining a wider empire in
the clearing heavens.


It was a little after ten o'clock that Rose drew aside the curtain
at Burwood and looked out.

'There is the lantern,' she said to Agnes, 'just by the vicarage.
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 _Cornhill_ 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 door-way stood
Elsmere.  Rose caught a gray dress disappearing up the little stairs
behind him.

Elsmere's look was enough for the two girls.  They understood 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!'

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. Leyburn 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 _fiance_.'

Robert threw up his hands in mock terror at the name and departed.

'We are abandoned,' cried Rose, flitting herself into the chair
again--then with a little flash of half irresolute wickedness--'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 up-stairs.

There was indeed no prouder woman in the three kingdoms than Mrs.
Thornburgh that night. After all the agitation down-stairs 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.

SURREY.



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
live their life as they please, either ignorant of intruding man
or strangely little incommoded by his neighborhood.  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 farmhouses, so mellow in color,
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 abandonment, 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 toward 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 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 toward the village at its foot--a garden
chiefly noticeable for its grass walks, the luxuriance of the fruit
trees clinging to its old red wars, and the masses of pink and white
phloxes which now in August gave it the floweriness and the gayety
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 clay 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, 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 playground of heather and
wood and grassy common, in which the few work-a-day patches of hedge
and ploughed land seemed engulphed and lost.  Close under the rectory
windows, however, was a vast sloping cornfield, belonging to the
glebe, the largest and fruitfulest of the neighborhood.  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 bill, 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 honeymoon 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, where at the superabundance of food and the length of
time spent upon it made the Puritan Catherine uncomfortable; and
Langham, devoted himself to taking the wife through colleges and
gardens, schools and Bodleian, in most orthodox fashion, indemnifying
himself afterward for the sense of constraint her presence imposed
upon him by a talk and a smoke with Robert.

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, growing under it.  _Bien!_  sooner
he than!  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 whole-sale 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, Laugham's tone _a propos_ of Grey's politics and
Grey's dreams of Church Reform was as languidly sarcastic as it was
with regard to most of the strenuous 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 unworldiness 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 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 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 the 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 in the summer.  But it was now that for the first she realized
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 wowan'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
color and drawback.  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 humor.

'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 of
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 was more
often scandalized than impressed by her mother-in-law's charitable
performances.

Mrs. Elsmere's little cottage was filled with workhouse orphans
sent to her from different London districts.  The training 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 teaching 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 morning, 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 apologized for it.  On the contrary, as
she saw Catherine sweep a mass of miscellaneous _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 toward 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 longstanding delicacies of health
than she had ever allowed anyone 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 agonized
wrestling with that terror of death which had haunted the keen
vivacious soul from its earliest consciousness, ending in a glow
of spiritual victory--Robert found himself motherless.  He and
Catherine had never left her since the beginning of the illness.
In one of the intervals toward the end, when there was a faint power
of speech, she drew Catherine's cheek down to her and kissed her.

'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 with 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 visitors.
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 discontent 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 humored.  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 to 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 himself 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 capacities.
Mr. Wendover was not only the owner of Murewell, he was also the
owner of the whole land of the parish, where, however, by a curious
accident of inheritance, dating some generations 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 Order of the modern
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 laborers 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 dreaminess
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 awhile 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 tyrannize 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?'

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 dangerous
and ensnaring was deep ingrained in her.  It had no natural hold
on him.

They stood a moment hand in hand fronting the corn-field 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 Robert 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 art 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 Langham 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.

'Mr. Langham would never have found me,' said Rose, dryly, 'but I
pounced on him at last, just, I believe, as he was beginning 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 eye-glass apologetically; 'it was my
eyes, not my will, that were 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 conservative?  _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 toward 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.

'Oh 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 too, and began to catechize
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?  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 feel himself 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 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-colored garment,
cut very much in the fashion; her hair was closely rolled and twisted
about her lightly balanced head; everything about her was treat 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 restlessness, 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 forget 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 Market
Place"?'

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 possessed 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 certainty that this slim flashing creature must have
thought him a morbid idiot with as much _sang-froid_ as usual.

Robert interrupted his reflections by some Oxford question, and
presently Catherine carried off Rose to her room.  On their way
they passed a door, beside which Catherine paused hesitating, 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, 'Roeschen,' 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 we ever got what they want!
London has been good fun certainly--if one could get enough, of it.
Catherine, how long is that marvelous 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?
Heigho! what an age!'

'Be kind to him,' said Catherine, discreetly veiling her own feelings,
and caressing the curly golden head as they moved toward 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, starting.  '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 of it, etc.  During the last six weeks the colors 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 cassock 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 magnetic 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 himself.  'For her
there must neither be too much nor too little.  How can Elsmere
stand it?'

Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy.  He sat balancing 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 churchwardens, 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 Murewell, 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 apostalic-looking 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
Mottringhan, 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 meelee.  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 the 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
toward 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.  "Woo 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 concerned with
his 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 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 believe 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.  _I 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 himself,--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 color rushed 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 recognize.  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 our brother?'

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 of 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!'

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, conscious 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 lighter 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 presence 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 Elsmere's choice of
friends.  It was the eternal cry of the mystic of all ages.

'Scholarship! Learning!'  Eyes and lips flashed into a vehement
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 sympathy?  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, Newcome'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 opportunity.  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 forever flies them, is forever 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 toward 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, fatherhood, and all the sacred
education that flows from human joy; for ever self-forbidden, and
this grind creed for recompense!

He caught Newcome's hand with a kind 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 passionate 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 toward 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 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 comprehensive 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 afterward 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 neighborhood he made another serious effort
to get her to talk to him.  The Elsmeres had never seen him so
conversational.  He dropped his paradoxical 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 common-places
worthy of a bashful undergraduate on the subject of the boats and
Commemoration, had to beat a hasty retreat, so greatly did the
situation tickle his sense of humor.

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 suppose, _faute de mieux_.'

Long before the little party separated for the night, Langham 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 humors of a provoking 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 the 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 drawing-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?  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 skepticism.

Robert for awhile, 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 counsellor
as Langham.  Langham, indeed was but faintly interested 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 personalties
of English letters, and that moral condemnation of him as a man of
possessions and ordinary 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 accession
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 belabor 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 common report is that he walks,
at night; and he lives alone in that enormous house with his books.
The country 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 be
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 one 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.  However, 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 conversation
presented to him as an epicure treats food, 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 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 clearing 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 everyone 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 extraordinarily
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 anyone 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 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, accustomed 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!_  Langham lay awake for a time analyzing his impressions
of her with some gusto, and meditating, with a whimsical candor
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
preeminently 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.  Langham, whether he
liked it or not, had to face the parsonic breakfast 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 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 gayety and color 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 be 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 Rose'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, studying him out
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 afterward 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 in 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.  Langham, 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 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' heated atmosphere of passion
and crime to the quiet English rectory, its rural surroundings, and
the figures of the two Englishwomen advancing toward 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, stopping beside
him and retaining with slight, imperceptible force Rose'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 scandalized
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 everyone 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 protecting against Rose's dramatic instincts with
success.

'Dumas _fils_' said Langham dryly.  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.  Mr. Pierson lent me a volume.  And when I was
introduced to Madame Desforets 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.

'You were introduced to Madame Desforets?' 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 Rose proudly.  'Other people may think it a disgrace.
_I_ thought it an honor!'

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.

'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 celebres_ which were coursing 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 reading, he
suddenly heard the sound 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?  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 playing Wagner, Brahms, and Rubinstein,
interpreting all those passionate voices of the subtlest moderns,
through which the heart of our own day has expressed itself even
more freely and exactly than through the voice of literature.  Hans
Sachs' immortal 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 association
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 unknown 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?  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!



CHAPTER XIII.

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 investigation.  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 imagination, a power of
sketching in a background of circumstance, and of biting into the
mind of the listener, as it were, by a detail 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
neighborhood 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 achievement 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 labor 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 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
further on stood two large opera books, which served as records of
observations on the part of members of the Club.  In one, which was
scrawled over with mysterious hieroglyphs, anyone 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 Robert's 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
generalizations 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 plough-boys; 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,  'he's 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 dryly.  '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 side,
which counts for a great deal.  We turned him out of the Club for
brutality toward 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 bed-clothes, 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 afterward 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 recollections 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
storytelling.'

'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 somehow or other
getting at the _imagination_ of these rustics.  Force them for only
half an hour to live someone 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 Talisman."  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 something contagious in
so much youth and hopefulness.

The story-telling was hold 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'oeuvre 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
masterly expression of oneself' be the aim of life, Robert was
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 content--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
civilizing 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, less it should tax
his young energies too lightly, he was happy--deeply, abundantly
happy, at peace with God, at one with man.

_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 realization, 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 here 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 suffused with suggestions
of the pathetic expansiveness 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
confidence 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 dreamy
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 had 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 himself down into Robert's chair, with a sigh
of Sybaritic satisfaction.  '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 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
of the swing door which separated Robert's passage from the front
hall, opening and shutting.  Steps came quickly toward the study,
the handle was turned, and there on the threshold stood Rose.

He turned quickly round in his chair with a look of astonishment.
She also started as she saw him.

'I did not know anyone was in,' she said awkwardly, the color
spreading over her face.  'I came to look for a book.'

She made a delicious picture as she stood framed in the darkness
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; 'please let me.'

He was already beside her, and she gave way.

'I want "Charles Auchester,"' 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 upstretched.
'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.

'He 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 task 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 afterward.

'Do you think that we poor people at Oxford are always condemned
to works on the "enclitic de**"?' he asked, his fine eyes lit up
with gayety, and his head, of which the Greek outlines 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 Langham thought, bitterly.

'Except London, and the great world, and Madame Desforets!' he
answered, laughing.  'Is that so little?'

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 toward him.  What magic had passed over him?

'Do you know,' said Langham, moving, 'that you are standing 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 bookcase, 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 Langham 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, 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, 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 gayety--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?' 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
further from her hand, and her pretty head still lay lightly back
against the cushion.

'No, I don't find my wilds interesting at all,' she said forlornly.
 '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
toward 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?' he said.

'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 defiances 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?'

'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 be
thought the world was getting very wicked, and dangerous, and
irreligious, 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?'

Langham smiled.

'I like that little inconsequence,' he said.

'Then of course I took to it, like a cluck 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 around 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 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.'

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 colored 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 _role_ 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 pleasure 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?  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 impulsiveness--'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 fender--every
detail of the picture impressed itself once for all.  Langham will
carry it with him to his grave.

'Tell me,' she said again, smiling divinely, as though to encourage
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 approaching.
Rose sprang up, and for the first time during all the latter part
of their conversation felt a sharp sense of embarrassment.

'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 betraying
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, longing 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 Langham 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, unreasonable 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!'

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 toward Mr. Langham altogether.  Her
manner at breakfast was evidence 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 _tete-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-ease, 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?'

'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 vindictively--'that I hate so much!'

'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 afternoon.  I must
parochialize a bit afterward, but you shan't be much victimized.'

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 toward 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 drooping fringes of the rain clouds.  They walked
downward 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 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 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.  Over-head, 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 Hall 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 verses,
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 incrusted from top to bottom, were
masked and renewed here and there by the careless, easy splendor
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.  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 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 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 classical relief by what appeared to be a French
hand of the sixteenth century.  The checkered bindings of the books,
in which the creamy tints of vellum predominated, lined the whole
surface of the wall with a delicate sobriety of color; 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 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 sunflowers, 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 splendors 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 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 accumulations, the over-blown splendors 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 toward 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 title-page; you
will find Gabriel Harvey's name on it.  Here is a first edition of
"Astrophol 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 passion 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; 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
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 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 honor 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.
Everyone 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, passing 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 afterward.  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.

Robert nodded.  'But look at them!  There are the Tracts, all the
Fathers, all the Councils, and masses, 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 labor 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 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 further
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 bock seemed
to be full of paper marks; almost every title-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 be 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 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 everybody write books?  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 anyone _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.

'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 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 questions, and at the same time
to fix in speech a number of sentiments and impressions 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 accumulation 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 color, a passionate desire to rescue
something more of human life from the drowning, submerging past,
to realize 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 realized it so much as now, while he sat
listening to the vivid, many-colored 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 endeavoring to
describe to Langham the sort of book be 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 and heresy, with its strange political complications.  And
then, discontented still, as though the heart of the matter was
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 analyze 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 Frank
that they were but 'beggars hutting in a palace--the place had
harbored greater men than they!'

'There is one thing,' Langham said presently, in his slow, nonchalant
voice, when the tide of Robert's ardor 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 interest 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?  And
if not, what are the differences, and what are the deductions to
be made from them, if any?'  He fixed his keen look on Robert, who
was now lounging 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 myself.  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 labors.  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 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 encroaching
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,' pointing to a
door on the right, 'lies the way 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 around 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 great collection all around.  There
were innumerable volumes in frayed or broken bindings lying on the
ground.  A musty 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 Murewell 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--'I
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 Murewell 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.

'What's the matter with this particular place?' he asked languidly,
at last, raising his eyes toward 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 there has been both fever and
diphtheria there.  They are all crippled with rheumatism, but _that_
they think nothing of; the English laborer takes rheumatism as quite
in the day's bargain!  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 see
the place, and he behaved like a brute.  He scoffed at all my
complaints, said that no landlord would be such a fool as to build
fresh 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 these 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 labor is wanted, the laborer 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 northwest 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 _that_?'

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 between 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
neighbor.  The mud walls were stained with yellow patches of lichen,
the palings round the little gardens were broken and ruinous.  Close
beside them all 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 indescribable.

'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 brutalized 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 preventable 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 bitterness! "If Mr. 'Enslowe would just '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, bloodless
skin made 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 story, 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, accustomed to the odors 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
colors and delightful 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.  I Never seed 'im more'n once a year, and sometimes 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 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 _I_ 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 realized, 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 with 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.  Langham!' and he turned
passionately on his companion, 'what defence can be found for a man
who lives in a place like Murewell 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 dryly; '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.'

Robert 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 their various
visits, however, Langham remembered nothing afterward but a little
scene in a miserable cottage, where they found a whole family partly
gathered round the mid-day meal.  A band of puny 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
colorless mouths.  The father, a picturesque, handsome fellow,
looking as though he had gypsy 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 imagination 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 companion, 'Have
you heard my sister-in-law play yet, Langham?  What did you think
of it?'

'Extraordinary!' said Langham briefly.  'The most considerable gift
I ever came across in an amateur.'

His olive cheek flushed a little involuntarily.  Robert threw a
quick observant look at him.

'The difficulty,' 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?'

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, 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 experiences, 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, someone 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 slander figure suddenly refined 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 along 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 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 of 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
anyone 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 banteringly down upon
her.  'For the first time since you left the metropolis you have
walked yourself into a color.  It's becoming--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 Rose'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 mechanically 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 circumstance
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-consciousness
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 imagination
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 preposterous dream he was now too
self-contemptuous to analyze.  Pretty well for a philosopher, in
four days!  What a ridiculous business is life--what a contemptible
creature is man, how incapable 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 toward himself
personally, 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 Langham his
acquaintance with the Dissenting minister of the place--a strong,
coarse-grained fellow of sensuous, excitable temperament, 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 Dissenter'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 English-men, 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.

'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.'

There was a ray of defiance, of emotion, in his look.  Langham met
it in silence.

'I deny you nothing,' he said at last, slowly.  'On the contrary,
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 indescribable
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 pose as his scornful superior.
He stretched out his hand, and laid 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 yon 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?
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 colored 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 desperately 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.  Mr.
Thornburgh sees that it will 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 disproportionate
flash of impatience breaking through.  'Everyone 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?'

'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 suppose, 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 work-room 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 individuality, 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--'Do you
see they have come back?  We must go and dress.'

And as she spoke she was conscious of a new sensation altogether--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, be would fall to his book again, abominably
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 scrolling
arm in arm among the flowers.  Catherine's vague terrors of the
morning before had all taken to themselves wings.  It seemed to her
that Rose 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
toward 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 everybody in the group
was held by the Squire's sister.  She was very small, as thin and
light as thistledown, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling
child.  The face and all the features were extraordinarily minute,
and moreover, blanched and etherealized 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 coming 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 pleased.  My brother, you know, is very
clever; oh yes, frightfully clever!'

And then there was a long sigh, at which Elsmere cold 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.

'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 summerhouse.

'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?  When I was young--when I was Maid of
Honor'--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 you to-morrow, my dear--and 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?  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 someone had pricked her.
While Catherine and Elsmere escorted Mrs. Darcy to the gate she
turned to go in, her head thrown back staglike, 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 heading 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 opponent 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 intoxicating 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, round on the blue and white brilliance of the
sky, clear again after a night of rain; on the sloping garden, 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 Langham, with a kind of groan.  At Oxford?
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 wore 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!_  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 garden, 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 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 important
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?' 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 terrified 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 deference.
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-by 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?
She tried to shake it off.

'And _I_ 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?

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!  Realize 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?  Why should you talk so?  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 of 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 disorganized.  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?  What is there
to pity me for?  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 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 circumstance,
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 happiness
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 communicate 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
life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more powerless
to satisfy: all those 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 realized 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 analyze 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 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 conversation;
'all these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the most unfit man
in the world for a college tutor.  The undergraduates regard me as
a shilly-shallying pedant.  On my part,' he added dryly, '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 out, I am out 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 more 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 anyone happy?  Oh no, no!  Happiness is to be got from living,
seeing, experiencing, making friends, enjoying nature!  Look at the
world, Mr. Langham!' she, said with bright cheeks, half smiling at
her own magniloquence, 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 afterward 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 bears 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 oneself--it
just takes you and carries you away.'

Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious--probably 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 bit 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?'

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.

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
clamoring 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 toward 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 neighborhood 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.

Murewell 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 neighbors.

In the first place Catherine's terrors were all alive again.  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 himself a good deal of a
culprit, but inwardly conscious that he knew a great deal more about
Langham than she did.

'My dear wife,' 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 experience, 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 mistake 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
everything 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 Langham at the piano,
his head with its crown of glossy, curling black hair, and his eyes
lit with unwonted gleams of laughter and sympathy, turned toward
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 recognize 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, satirized, examined himself in the most approved
introspective style.  One half of him declared that scene to have
been the height of melodramatic absurdity; the other thought of it
with a thrill of tender gratitude toward 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 indulgent 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 interesting!  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 _role_ 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 background 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, fourteen more hours and she would have shut the Rectory gate
on this most unwelcome of intruders!  She had never, felt so
vindictively anxious to see the last of anyone 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 Henslowe 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 certainly 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.

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 recognized 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 toward himself
there had even been something more.  And not one of those phrases
which, under the circumstances, would have been so easy and so
gracious, as to Robert's childish connection with the place, or as
to the Squire's remembrance 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
had 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 reception 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 toward
the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover's grandmother, and was certain
when he stopped afterward 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; her dark,
thin, irritable-looking husband; two neighboring clerics--the first,
by name Longstaffe, 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 neighborhood--the wife
of a neighboring 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, crackbrained, 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,
accustomed to trouncing Mrs. Seaton, 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 distribution 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?' Langham said
to his neighbor 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-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 Rose carelessly.  'I 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 color 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 neighbor?' 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 neighbor?'

'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 toward 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 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, bewitching
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, apparently, to judge from the
radiant placidity of his look, to examine his wine, study his _menu_,
and enjoy the _entrees_ in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain
pleasures of conversation.

Robert, 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 Charlotte, 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 remarkable 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, 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
consciousness of birth and social importance, the gulf between him
and the ordinary English country gentleman could hardly have been
greater, whether in points of appearance or, as Robert very well
knew, in points of social conduct.  And as Robert watched 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 acquaintance with
the being who had just received him with such chilling, 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 precipitated 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 confessed 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 air and bridlings
infinitely diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most beguiling
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
neighborhood 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 Honor, you know.  No Maid of Honor had ever written
a novel before.  It was quite an event.  Dear 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, consented.

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, Sir. 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 Elsmere,
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 she 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?

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?  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 afterward.  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 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 Robert, 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 expression of
anxiety.  But just at that moment a loud wave of conversation 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 neighbors 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 Sutton,' 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 experience has 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 down enthusiasm!_"'

There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the Squire's look
as he told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Robert.  Robert
divined in a moment that the story had been retold for his special
benefit, and that in some unexplained way, the relations between
him and the Squire were already biased.  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 Catherine's neighborhood, turned back again toward 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 neighborhood generally called out 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 indifferently.
'But that is a pet saying of mine--the Church of England in a
nutshell.'

Robert 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
our generation--all your Kingsleys, and Maurices, and Ruskins--everyone
bent on making any sort of aimless commotion, which may serve him
both as an investment 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 dryly.

'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 with 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.

The Squire paused a moment before replying.

'It is not easy to put it tersely,' he said at last; 'but I may
define it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of your
right-hand neighbor with straw torn off the roof of your left-hand
neighbor; 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; sometimes you rob less
and propitiate more.  But the principle is always the same.'  And
mindful of all those intolerable evenings, 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 proportion 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 somewhat 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 civilization to the heart; that mankind has _felt_
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 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 interesting relish.
To her all society was a comedy played for her entertainment, 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 alarming 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.
Longstaffe, 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 disputants; 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 things the altruists talk
of, and you arrive one day at the condition of Louis XIV. after the
battle of Ramillies: "Dieu a donc oublie 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 made a quick, impatient movement.  Mr. Wynnstay looked
significantly at his wife, who dropped her eyeglass with a little
irrepressible smile.

As for Robert, leaning forward with hastened breath, it seemed to
him that his eyes and the Squire's crossed like swords.  In Robert's
mind there had arisen a sudden passion of antagonism.  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 splendor 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 philosophical.
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, impulsively, 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 me of?'

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 XVIII.

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?' 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.

'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 argumentative
brother-in-law.'

Rose said nothing, partly from awkwardness, partly from rising
antagonism.

'Did you agree with him?' 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 enthusiasms.  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--h'em--prettiness?' 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 to her conversation.
Socially she was absolutely devoid of weakness or of shame.  She
found society extremely interesting, and she always struck straight
for the desirable thing in it, making short work of all those
delicate tentative processes of acquaintanceship by which men and
women ordinarily sort themselves.  Roses brilliant, vivacious beauty
had caught her eye at dinner; she adored beauty as she adored
anything effective, 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
persuaded, and allowed herself many things in consequence.

'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 don'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 month twitching.

'Mrs. Darcy,' said her neighbor 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 information,
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 imagined 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 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 together.

'A village Norman-Neruda?' 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 musicians began, on
some Hungarian melodies put together by a younger rival of Brahms.
They had not played twenty bars before the attention of everyone
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 melancholies 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 picturelike distinctness.  There was jessamine 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?'
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 whereon she strummed
every morning with her tiny rheumatic fingers, and who had, as we
know, strange little veins of sentiment 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 feelings, Catherine realized 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. Longstaffe's questions on the same theme.

'Shall we?' 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; 'showing off, I mean.  I am quite ready to
stop.'

'Go 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 Beethoven.
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 vibrating!  Yet the art of 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 impressions 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 gift against those
dark powers which may invade and paralyze 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 Catherine 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 imagined that first
evening that you cared for music!'

'Or about anything else worth caring for?' he asked her, 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 dryly; 'we
murdered one or two passages in fine style.'

He looked at her, startled.  'But I go by the morning train!'  There
was an instant 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 tables 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 afterward 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 generalize, 'or we throw
them away wilfully, because we choose.'

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, instinctively 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 with me, will you?  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 humor 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 onto the music-bench obediently.  On any ordinary
occasion tortures could not have induced him to perform 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
endeavoring to joke himself into the good graces of the Duke of
Sedbergh's sister.  The din of conversation 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.  Saddenly, 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 tenderness.  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 pardon
before parting for ever!  But no--no more posing; no more dramatizing.
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 drawing-room,
doing the honors 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 could 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 the Rector
approached, were discussing some cases of common enclosure that had
just taken place in the neighborhood.  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 honor of Mr. Edward Elsmere's acquaintance,' said
the Squire frigidly. 'During the time of his occupation 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?'

'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 northeast corner of the park?'

Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the words
themselves.  The Squire had not yet addressed a single remark of
any kind about Murewell to him.  There was a deliberate 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 discomposure
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,' said she.  '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 way 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 waiting, while
lady Charlotte, in her loudest voice, was commanding Rose to come
and see her in London any Thursday after the first of November.
Robert was very sore.  Catherine passionately 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?'

'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; otherwise, no doubt,
being the devoted wife I am, I might try.  However, my dear, we
both have our fancies.  You collect Sevres china with or without a
pedigree,' and she coughed dryly; '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, murmuring under his mustache 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 that 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 Henslowe 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 receives me afterward as the
meddlesome, pragmatical priest he understands me to be; puts his
foot down to begin with; and, _hinc illae lacrymae_.  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, unmanageable, 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 check against his
arm in the darkness, consoling, remonstrating, 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 darkness, and
he and his neighbor 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 _role_ 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 he wished there
should be no mistake.

What a young smarting soul went through in that half mile of listening
is better guessed than analyzed.  There are certain 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
ran 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?'

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 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, a 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 analyze
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
band with avidity toward 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, had locked
the door, torn off her dress and her ornaments, and flung herself
on the edge of her 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 elan, 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 heart.

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 chiaroscuro 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, clenching 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 life and plundered the golden
mysteries behind it.

She rebels; she tries to see the cold alien nature which has laid
this paralyzing spell upon her as it is, to reason herself back to
peace--to indifference.  The poor child flies from her 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, inthrall her inmost 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-colored 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 colors 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 SQUIRE.



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 subsequent 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 toward
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 character by heart, had taken Time by the forelock.  For
fourteen years before Robert entered the parish he had been king
of it.  Mr. Preston, Robert's predecessor, had never given him a
moment's trouble.  The agent had developed a habit of drinking, had
favored his friends and spited his enemies, and he 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 neighborhood unless measures were taken to
prevent 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 indolence
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 became a point of
honor with the agent to let the place go to the devil, nay, to hurry
it there.  For some time notwithstanding, he avoided an open breach
with the Rector.  He met Elsmere'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 ultimate
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 Murewell 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 consigning other people!  It was not easy
to cheat the Squire out of money, but it was quite easy to play
upon him 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 be respected his own leisure, and was abnormally, irritably
sensitive as to any possible inroads upon it.

All these things Henslowe knew, and all these things be utilized.
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 colored with great skill, and he left the
Squire walking up and down his library, chafing alternately at the
monstrous fate which had planted this sentimental agitator at his
gates, and at the memory of his own misplaced civilities toward 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 unjust, avoidable suffering
weighed upon his nerves perpetually.  But he was conscious that
this state of feeling was one of tension, 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 impossibility of carrying his
wishes with regard to Mile End into 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 particular
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, air!' 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 Robert's temper gave way, and he turned upon the half-drunken
brute before him with a few home truths delivered with a rapier-like
force which for the moment staggered Henslowe, 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, Robert
strode off, 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 protracting 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 mentioned 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 stubble of the cornfield, the
answer came.

'Hm,' said Robert dubiously as he opened it, holding it up to the
moonlight: 'can't be said to be lengthy.'

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 rebuff that had ever
happened to him.  He could not but smart under it.

'Not a word,' he said, tossing his hair bank 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 of?'

'Does he believe you?' asked Catherine, bewildered.

'If not, one must try and make him,' he said energetically, after
a moments 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 magnificent
lacquered screen newly placed round the door, and found himself in
the Squire's presence.

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 odor 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 preferred 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 toward 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-humored 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 labor 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, 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 bidden 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 lectured 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 emphasis, '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 has 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 unmistakable--' 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 laborer.
That, however, is neither here nor there.  What is to the purpose
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 reward it as the object in life
of the English landowner to inspect the pigstyes and amend the
habits of the English laborer.  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 purpose 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 authorize me
to make one or two alterations most urgently necessary for the
improvement of the Mile End cottages?'

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.  I 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. Henslowe 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 dare say
I shall manage to put up with it.  Society, is 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 Robert
caught sight beside his shoulder of an antique, standing on the
mantel piece, 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 passionate regret:
'Shall I ever see this again?' 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 magnificent
pile, grander than ever in the sunny autumnal mist which unwrapped
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 awhile,' 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.'

'_I_ don't see it,' said Robert doubtfully.

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 studying 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 _bona 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 disagreeable
objects.

In the evening Rose was sitting listlessly in the drawing-room.
Catherine was not there, so her novel was on her lap 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 gypsy 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 be rode off.

Robert turned white.  Rose, watching the little scene with listless
eyes, saw him towering over the group like an embodiment 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'll 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.

'Aye, aye, 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 charing up at Mr. Carter's farm, and Mr. Dodson, him at the
further 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 further 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 winter.  A bold front,
and Mr. Henslowe must give way.  The law was on their side, and
every laborer 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 endurance 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 think.--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 inseparable companion 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 our 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 specialty 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.

'Ah, 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 appearance, Mrs.
Leyburn all in a flutter concerning the event over 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 where every soul in the quiet Rectory, even hot,
smarting Rose, was possessed by one thought though 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's, 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 ever-serious, oversensitive.  They had no
idea of minimizing 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 encroaching 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!_'

He shut the book he 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 suffer 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 nightmare--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 weakness 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 favorite 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, O Lord my God, and tell
me what art Thou to me!  Say unto my soul, "I am thy salvation."
Speak it that I may hear. Behold the ears of my heart, O Lord; open
them and say into my soul, "I am thy salvation!"  I will follow
after this voice of Thine, I will lay hold on Thee.  The temple of
my soul, wherein Thou shouldest enter, is narrow, do Thou enlarge
it.  It falleth into ruins--do Thou rebuild it!  . . .  Woe to that
bold soul which hopeth, if it do but let Thee go, to find something
better than 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,
mm soul!  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-contentedness 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 wondered on through the dusk, of his own lack of
inwardness: '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 passionate 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 imaginative than hers.  And
Christ the only clew, the only remedy--no other anywhere in this
vast Universe, where all men are under sentences 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 a 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
returned to weigh upon him--the hair-splitting superstition, the
selfish passion for power.  He recalled Gibbon's lamentation 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.

_O 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
common, 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 sunset 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 of 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 tutor's 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 bending over her, the sacrament of the Lord's death
in his hand.  The emotion, the intensity, the absolute self-surrender
of innumerable 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!_'



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 Catherine's 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 secondhand, Mrs. Leyburn's maxims
had been very much routed by the event.  The babe had ailments she
did not understand, 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 6as 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 saying 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 persons, she
kept things very much to herself.  It only made vexation 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.'

A few days afterward 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 leave
me out of your life, dear, though I am so stupid and unmusical.
You must write to me about all you do.  We must be in 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 torture 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 got 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 have _felt_ 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 others' 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?' She cried.  'Each one for himself.'

'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, imploring 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 bewildered, 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 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, softhearted 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 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 neighborhood would have hardly recognized 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, recognizing 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 harvest 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 beside 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 centralizing 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 stiff-backed inhabitants.

'Let them talk,' he would say brightly to Catherine.  'They will
come round; and talk is good.  Anything to make them think, to stir
the pool!'

Of course that old problem of the agricultural laborer 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 experiment, and engulfed the next
in all the moral and economical objections 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 an 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 districts 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 honorable 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 neighbors, and it began to be pretty widely
recognized that Elsmere was a young fellow of unusual promise and
intelligence, that his wife too was remarkable, 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 recovered
health, the lavish beauty of the country, Elsmere enjoyed with all
his heart.  But at the root of all there lay what gave value and
savor 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 afterward, in the fire-lit 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 civilization.  Then, when
the little restless 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
windswept round the house, and the owls hooted in the elms, they
would sit hand in hand, lost in love and fait--Christ near
them--Eternity, warm with God, enwrapping them.


So much for the man of action, the husband, the philanthropist.
In reality, great as was the moral energy of this period of Elsmere'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 his thinking, 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 Grey's
influence in all probability, perhaps, too, the training of an
earlier Langham, that saved for Elsmere the life of thought.

The form taken by this training of his own mind he 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 origins of
France which he had described to Langham.  It was to take him years,
of course, and meanwhile, in his first enthusiasm, 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 impression 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 himself is
almost always an extraordinarily sharp impression of _difference_,
of _contrast_.  Ultimately, of course, he sees that those 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 morals, what bizarre combinations of
ignorance and knowledge, of the highest sanctity with the lowest
credulity or falsehood; what extraordinary 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 represent 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 recognizes 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 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 Rome 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 biographer 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 contained 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, admonished 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!_"  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 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 impressions 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 awhile, 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 prophets--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, boylike, was ashamed of himself, and greeted
Catherine, with all the tenderer greeting.

Only on two occasions during three months could he be sure of having
seen the Squire.  Both were in the twilight, when, as the neighborhood
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 toward him.  It passed without recognition
of any kind, and for an instant Robert 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 imaginatively 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; somehow 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 not 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 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 and frankness
of the method sent a shook 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 analyzing 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 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 overshadowed 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, O 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 I
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 result 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 wet weather
returned.  Day after day rolling masses of southwest 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 peaks.'

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 him, 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 go for
Meyrick and a nurse, and we must isolate and make a fight for it.'

In a few days the diphtheria epidemic reached terrible proportion's.
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 backward and
forward 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 meanwhile 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 cottages, 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 Sharland'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 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
doglike 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 recognize.  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 oppression.  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.  And 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 deaths 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 toward her mother; the
moments when one pallid, 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 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 fee sortie d'un oeuf 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, reticences, 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 handsome; 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 was a
fairy, she was a fairy all 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 outward, 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?'

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 toward 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 cottages 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 notebooks and Robert was drawn into a list.  Then,
full of joyfulness at being allowed to help, she gathered up her
reins, she nodded her pretty little head at him, and was just
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 but talk
about your sister-in-law.  _Why_ did you keep her all to yourself?
Is it kind, is it neighborly, 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,
_I_ 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 patronizing.  But
Lady Helen was the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only highborn
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 favorite brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts
of him, must always have found life too romantic, too wildly and
delightfully interesting 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 check 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 mouth.  The county was roused.
The Radical newspaper came out on the Saturday with a flaming
article; Robert, much to his annoyance, 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.  Toward the evening, however, his
wife, a gaunt clever Scotchwoman, 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
toward morning, and with her hands on her hips she poured 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 suddenly 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 mechanically 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 neighborhood, which had so far found itself
unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene without old
Meyrick's assistance, was beginning to send notes to the house in
Charton High Street, whereon the superscription 'Dr. _Edward_
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.

Young Elsmere's behavior 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 toward his souls newfangled 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. Wendover 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 outbreak, 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 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?
Well, what sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents'--and
he smiled--'produce?'

'He talked of sending money,' said Meyrick doubtfully; he 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 to
discuss the matter.  But old Meyrick seemed to be laboring 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 afterward, when
no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the Hall, and old
Meyrick, directed at intervals 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 realizing the Squire from another man's
totally different point of view.  Evidently Meyrick 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
_naivete_ 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 presence, 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 resistance 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 dare say it's hard, it's hard,' he said with patient
acquiescence in his voice, 'to believe a man can't help himself.
I dare say 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 itself in all sorts
of antiquated locutions which were a torment to his son, had given
way to something still more deeply ingrained.  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 companion, 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'll 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, starting.  'I dare say 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.  Yon 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 of
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 aging 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 perhaps any other.
Mother and neighbors 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 sanatorium.  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 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 corner, and a woman sitting beside it.  The woman
glided away, the Rector looked carefully at the table of instructions
hanging over the bed, assured himself 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 laborer lay motionless beside him, the lines
of the long emaciated frame showing through the bedclothes.  The
night-light flickered on the broken, discolored 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 soberness, a new humility and patience entering
in.

And yet it was not Meyrick's facts exactly that had brought this
about.  Robert 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 further and further from man to God,
from human defect to the Eternal Perfectness.  Never once during
those hours did Elsmere's hand fail to perform its needed service
to the faint sleeper beside him, and yet 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 a while, and then prevailing.  And each golden moment of
certainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Robert 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 fears of
experience lay between him and the beginnings of his watch.

'It is by these moments we should date our lives' he murmured 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-by, 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 in 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 grass, till finally they climbed
into the pale all-completing blue.  In 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 toward the bridge, Robert's quick ear
distinguished that most wintry of all sounds--the cry of a flock
of field-fares 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 recognized the Squire.

He went up to him without an instant's slackening of his steady
step.  The Squire heard the sound of someone coming, turned, and
saw the Rector.

'I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover,' said Robert, stopping
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 instant.

'You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere,' he said, endeavoring
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 something 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 toward 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 someone 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 clearing 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 while 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, 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 holes in the roof where the plaster bulged
inward, as though a shake would bring it down; the coarse china
shepherdesses on the mantelshelf, 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 breakfast 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 corpselike, 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?'

'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 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
country-side.  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 toward 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 recognize 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 bitterness.  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 horse-back, 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 of 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 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 tenderness and joy. Of
course--of course, even that hard man must love him.  Who could
help it?  My Robert!'

And so now in this disguise, now in that, the supreme hour of
Catherine's life stole on and on toward her.



CHAPTER XXII.

As may be imagined, the 'Churton Advertiser' did not find its way
to Murewell.  It was certainly no pressure of social disapproval
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 neighbors' 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 afterward 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 super-structure of manners he had
built upon them.  It may be the part of a gentlemen and a scholar
to let the agent whom you have interposed 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
sentimentalism, but neither did he choose to cut an unseemly figure
in his own eyes.

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; 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.

'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 intimating
in the very briefest, dryest way that the cottages should be rebuilt
on a different site as soon as possible, and enclosing a liberal
contribution toward the expenses incurred in fighting the epidemic.
When the letter was gone he drew his books toward him with a sound
which was partly disgust, partly relief.  This annoying business
had  wretchedly interrupted 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 check 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 opportunity and walked off
to the Hall to acknowledge the gift in person.  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, indeed,
impatiently, all the time, whether he 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 his conscience sufficiently
to become the possessor of it.  He took it 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 labor, was stirring in him.  Occasionally he
had endeavored 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 realized 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_.

'Who would ever have thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes
of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?'  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 young parson, it was a curious
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 knowledge 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 time, he would shake his head and frown over the
three months which young Elsmere had already passed, grappling with
problems 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 wondering
to see the congregation so good on such a day, was suddenly 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 throughout the service showed a restlessness,
an excited tendency to peer round corners and pillars, that was not
favorable to devotion.

'Has he come to spy out the land?' the Rector thought to himself,
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 shockheaded 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 appearance
of the young Master in the synagogue at Nazareth:--

'_This day is this scripture fulfilled in your ears!_'

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 ceremoniously,--

'With your leave, Mr. Elsmere, I will walk with you to the rectory.'
Then, in another voice, 'Go home, Laetitia, 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 ever was.  He commented on the
congregation, even condescended to say something of the singing,
and passed over the staring of the choristers with a magnanimity
of silence which did him 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 hearthrug, 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, courtesied, 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 parlor-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 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 set of chemists and quill-drivers,' he said contemptuously; 'but
as Renan remarked to me, there is one thing to be said for a
government of that sort, "Ils 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 son 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 intellectual
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 house-wifely 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?'

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.

'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_,' 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 toward the Squire's book
on 'English Culture,' which stood in the book-case just above him.
The Squire, following the gesture, smiled too.  It was a faint,
slight illumining, but it changed the face agreeably.

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 favorite attitude, lounging
against the mantel-piece, 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!'

Mr. Wendover rose also, and resumed his ordinary manner.

'It is I who should apologize,' 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 Sharland 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?'

There was a sort of jealousy for his work within him contending
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
himself that 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 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 life-time.

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 one.  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 parlors.  The Squire submitted.
The neighborhood 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.

Rumors 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 toward them. The Squire put up his eye-glass.

'Humph!' he remarked; 'do you know this merryandrew, Elsmere?'

It was Newcome.  As they passed, Robert with slightly, heightened
color 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
then I once was?'  But if so, these moments never betrayed themselves
in word or act.  Her tender common sense, her sweet humility, made
her recognize at once Robert's need of intellectual comradeship,
isolated as he was in this remote rural district.  She knew perfectly
that a clergyman's life of perpetual giving forth becomes morbid
and unhealthy if there is not some corresponding taking in.

If only it had not been Mr. Wendover!  She marvelled over the
fascination Robert found in his dry cynical talk.  She wondered
that a Christian pastor could ever forget Mr. Wendover'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 book; 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.'

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.

In reality he had but been doing as the child does when it sets up
its sand-barrier against the tide.



CHAPTER XXIII.

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
lookout 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 Whindale 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 all be 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 attention.

'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 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 _Schwaermerei_
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 beginning; 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 bear 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?
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 astonishing!  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.  Yesterday
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 ribbons 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 _recherche_--which may be.  She talked
to Rose of nothing but acting, especially of Madame Desforets.  No
one, according to her, has anything to do with an actress' 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 Charlotte 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,
Lady Charlotte included.  The gentlemen stared at her a great deal,
and Lady Charlotte paid her one or two compliments on her looks,
which _I_ thought she would not have ventured to say to anyone 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 humdrum 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
districts."  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
sometime later in the year.  Rose said very decidedly she should
be in town for the winter.  Lady Charlotte 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 toward 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 profile.  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?  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.'

'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 clown
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 widowed 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 ungrateful
of me.  A pathetic life that, Catherine.  She seems to me, in her
odd way, perpetually hungering for affections 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 everything.  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 judgment he had always
shown of late toward Mr. Wendover.  And all his judgments of himself
and others were generally so quick, so uncompromising!

'On the second occasion we had Freake and Dashwood,' naming 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 afterward 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 problems 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 knowledge!'

He spoke in a glow of energy and enthusiasm.  Catherine sat 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
feel as 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 manoeuvres.  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 prepared 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 _naivete_ 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 intellectual 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, and Henslowe's 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
favor 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
realize 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 impatiently;
'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 defenseless 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 anything 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 make himself heard.  In vain.
Henslowe was physically incapable 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 churchwarden, 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 _was_ he always at work on?  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' labors 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 dikes, which
well-meaning people are trying to raise all round us against the
encroaching, devastating labor-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 now serenity, almost a peacefulness
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.'

And Elsmere's smile had in it a touch of most friendly reproach.
Fatigue had left the scholar relaxed, comparatively defenseless.
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 life-time.
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 Langham'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 scrutinizing 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 ardor
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 ardor 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 examination 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?'

'A giant's task!' cried Robert; 'hardly conceivable!'

The Squire smiled slightly--the smile of a man who looks back with
indulgent, half-melancholy satire on the rash ambitions of his
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--Sanscrit 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 Judaea.  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 labor for one end, one
cause!  In our hurried, fragmentary life, a purpose of this tenacity,
this power of realizing 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 dryly.

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
toward 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 dryly.  Then, as his companion still
seemed to wait, keenly expectant, he resumed, with something 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 misunderstanding.
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 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--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 subject 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 understand,
it is tolerably difficult to summarize 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 of 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 realized 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 himself 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 outporing 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 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 having 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 historian 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 preconceptions 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 favor 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 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; those, for instance, flowing from the pre-Christian,
apocalyptic literature of the Jews, taking the Maccabean legend of
Daniel 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 understanding 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. Wendover's hands, the religious passion in Elsmere
once more rose with sudden stubborn 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!'

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 awhile, 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.  Everything 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 sympathy.  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 humanized, influenced
by him--he knew that was the image in Meyrick's mind, he remembered
with a quiet scorn its presence in his own.  And never, never had
he felt his own weakness and the strength of that grim personality
so much as at that instant.

That evening Catherine noticed an unusual silence and depression
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 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 in the shrinking mind.  Suddenly, in his restless pain,
a thought occurred to him.  He had been much struck in the Squire's
conversation by certain allusions to arguments drawn from the Book
of Daniel. It was not a subject with which Robert had any great
familiarity.  Here 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 mistake; 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 Protestant
meets the critic with a flat _non possumus_. 'Your arguments 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
recognize its authority.  All-True and All-Knowing cannot have made
a mistake, nor can He have expressly led His disciples to reward
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 bow do you know that our Lord quoted it as _true_
in the strictest sense?  In fact He quoted it as literature, as 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 inspiration.  He
admits to himself that probably Christ was not correctly 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 Epiphanes. It had enormous vogue.
It inaugurated a new Apocalyptic 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--purely human, explicable, 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 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 resistance, 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, 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 impossible?--that
had placed him in this way at the Squire's disposal?  Half the world
would answer yes.  Might not the other half plead that in every
generation there is a minority of these mobile, impressionable,
defenseless 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?

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 Testament 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 of the true problems at issue.  As it was
the keen instrument he had sharpened so laboriously on indifferent
material, now ploughed its agonizing 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
awhile through the golden alleys of Mayfair; and Elsmere was left
once more in undisturbed possession of the Murewell library.  There
for a while on every day--oh, pitiful relief!--he could hide himself
from the eyes he loved.

But, after all, married love allows of nothing but the shallowest
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 agonized
energy.  'It is I who am timid, faithless!  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 delicate moral scruple warned her
she might easily allow her dislike of the Wendover friendship to
lead her into exaggeration and injustice.

But the stab of that moment recurred--dealt now by one slight
incident--now by another.  And after the Squire's departure Catherine
suddenly realized that the whole atmosphere of their home-life was
changed.

Robert was giving himself to his people with a more scrupulous
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 remorse, 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 irritability, 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 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 bear 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
recognized 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 pitifully 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 arm 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 mordent
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 tonight,' said Catherine softly,
'and of the walk to Shanmoor.  This evening in the 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.'

'Oh for a breath of the wind on High Fell!' cried Robert,--it was
so new to her, the dear voice with his accent in it, of yearning
depression!  'I 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 Shanmoor road to say good-by 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 Robert, 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
that anyone 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.

'Robert!' she cried, pressing her cheek against his temple, 'tell
me my dear, dear husband, what it is troubles you.  Something does--I
am certain--certain!'

'Catherine,--wife--beloved!' he said to her, after another pause,
in a tone of strange tension she never forgot; 'generations 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 solitariness itself--' and be 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, 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 defined 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 darkness 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 hopelessness,
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 fears 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 toward the man whom he conceived to be his Lord's adversary,
as contrasted with Robert's, filled her with a shrinking pain she
dare not analyze.

Still all through, her feeling toward her husband was in the main
akin to that of the English civilian at home toward 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 fall 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 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 she doubt the
return of daylight, as dream of any permanent eclipse descending
upon the faith which had shown 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 affection.  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 him much about his own influence,
his own effect, in the parish.  To the austerer Christian,
considerations 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 toward 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 wideawake drawn over them.  He and
Elsmere had scarcely met for 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 be 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 eager, 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 companion
closely.

'A great deal.'

Robert had at that moment under his arm a German treatise on the
history of the Logos doctrine, which afterward, looking back on the
little scene, he thought it probable Newcome recognized.  They
turned toward 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 number of his Sunday congregation, of his communicants, &c.
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 favor--' and suddenly 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 big 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 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, I am in trouble,' said Robert quietly.

'Opinions?'

'Opinions, I suppose--or facts,' said Robert, his arms dropping
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 his
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 by 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?  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--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!_'

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 responsive
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!  Newcome 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 honor rooted in dishonor
stands; such 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-by--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 afterward, or thereabout, 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 involuntary protest.  But their force
and vitality were gone.  Between 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 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 bran, 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 the polished 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 methodically 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 backward and forward 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 passing!  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 bidden
beneath the rank flower-growth, the tensy and willow-herb, the
luxuriant elder and trailing brambles of its August banks--and
thought 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.

CRISIS.



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 caddises, 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 toward 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 depth 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; 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 awhile.  My wife says I want a holiday; 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 splendor, 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
glory 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 homeward journey.  He was more brown, more
wrinkled, more shrunken; more full of force, of harsh epigram, of
grim anecdote 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 hid 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 without the appendage.
But Elsmere--pshaw! he will go muddling on to the end of the
chapter!'

The Squire, indeed, was like a hunter whose prey escapes him at the
very moment of capture, and there grew on him a mocking, 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. Wendover, 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,
and the poor people, I imagine, as a kind of ogre.  To me it doesn't
matter a two-penny damn--I apologize; it was the Duke of Wellington's
favorite 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 grudgingly 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 affect his
work.  Good God, what nonsense!  As if any one inquired what an
English parson believed nowadays, 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.'

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 be trudged through the
park he never once noticed the soft, sun-flooded distance, the
shining loops of the river, the feeding dear, or any of those natural
witcheries to which eye and sense were generally so responsive.
The laborers 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 laboring
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.  'Renan 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.
Receptiveness 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 honey-suckle, 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 recognized by him as a Fellow of the
Royal Society, a famous mathematician, 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 instantly recognized 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 appearance was
picturesqueness itself.  Her dress, a skilful mixture of black and
creamy yellow, laid about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly
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 singularly 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 neighborhood, his
parish, his work in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct
loftiness, 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 civilize your peasants,' she said at last.  'Does
it succeed--is it worth while?'

'That depends on 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 intellectual
and social assumption entrapped 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 maintaining that no
human being had ever really converted, transformed 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 organized knowledge in the field of religion, a science
like any other science!'

'Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,' said Mr. Spooner, leaning
forward, with his hands round his knees, and speaking with the most
elegant and good-humored _sang-froid_ 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 and 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-colored beard, and his Panama hat.  Madame de
Netteville surveyed him with cool, critical eyes.  Robert 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 unpardonably 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 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 be 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 apologize by manner,
if not by word.  Otherwise everything 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: 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 be 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 toward 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 I 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 this indeed
'_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 alterations of intellectual and spiritual debate,
the strange emerging sense of deliverance, gave way to a most bitter
human pang of misery.

'Oh God!  My wife--my work!'

. . . There was a sound of 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 toward 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 hurrying step.  And he felt he could
but just drag himself to meet her.

'Robert, how long you have been!  I thought you mast 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 toward 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.

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
blow 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 frame-work 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 favorite 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 conscience.

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 in 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?  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 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 dinning-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 color, its look of sure 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 arm-chair 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 neighborhood, 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 arrangements 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.

'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-by!
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 abandonment 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, just
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 brier cottages brought a remainder of man
and his world 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 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 quarrel of the water-fowl, the ways
of the birds, the alternations 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 of 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 formative 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 brutalized peasant whose
history he knew, whose tragic secrets he 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 with 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.  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 form of words.  So
henceforth he was on the same side with the Squire, held by an
indiscriminating world as bound to the same negations, the same
hostilities!  The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral
repugnance.  The Squire and Edward Langham--they were the only
sceptics of whom he had ever had close and personal experience.
And with all his old affection for Langham, all his frank sense of
pliancy in the Squire's hands,--yet in this strait of life how he
shrinks from them both!--souls at war with life and man, without
holiness, without perfume!

Is it the law of things?  'Once loosen a man's _religio_, once fling
away the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which
have made him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.'  How
often he has heard it said!  How often he has endorsed it!  Is it
true?  His heart grows cold within him.  What good man can ever
contemplate with patience the loss--not of friends or happiness,
but of his best self?  What shall it profit a man, indeed, if he
gain the whole world--the whole world of knowledge, and speculation,--and
_lose his own soul_?

And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward eye the
vision of an Oxford lecture room, of a short, sturdy figure, of a
great brow over honest eyes, of words alive with moral passion, of
thought instinct with the beauty of holiness.  Thank God for the
saint in Henry Grey!  Thinking of it, Robert felt his own self-respect
re-born.

Oh! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval!
Even though it was the depth of vacation, Grey was so closely
connected with the town, as distinguished from the university, life
of Oxford, it might be quite possible to find him at home.  Elsmere
suddenly determined to find out at once if he could be seen.

And if so, he would go over to Oxford at once. _This_ should be the
next step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till afterward.
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 waiting in the empty room, when still believing
it night, he had put out his hand for his wife, and with a superstitious
pang had found himself alone.  His heart torn with a hundred
inarticulate cries of memory and grief, he sat on beside the water,
unconscious of the passing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly
at the wood-pigeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash
of a kingfisher, at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the
trees opposite.

At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few
heavy drops of warm rain.  He looked at his watch.  It was nearly
four o'clock.  He rose, stiff and cramped with sitting and at the
same instant he saw beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of
common, a boy's figure, which, after a start or two, he recognized
as Ned Irwin.

'You here, Ned?' he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in him
reasserting itself at once.  'Why aren't you harvesting?'

'Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and Mr.
Carter's job don't begin till to-morrow.  He's got a machine coming
from Witley, he hev, and they won't let him have it till Thursday,
so I've been out after things for the club.'

And opening the tin box strapped on his back, he showed the day's
capture of butterflies, and some belated birds' eggs, the plunder
of a bit of common where the turf for the winter's burning was just
being cut.

Goatsucker, linnet, stonechat,' said the Rector, fingering them.
'Well done for August, Ned.  If you haven't got anything better to
do with them, give them to that small boy of Mr. Carter's that's
been ill so long.  He'd thank you for them, I know.'

The lad nodded with a guttural sound of assent.  Then his new-born
scientific ardor seemed to struggle with his rustic costiveness of
speech.

'I've been just watching a queer creetur,' he said at last hurriedly;
'I b'leeve he's that un.'

And he pulled out a well-thumbed handbook, and pointed to a cut of
the grasshopper warbler.

'Whereabouts?' asked Robert, wondering the while at his own start
of interest.

'In that bit of common t'other side the big pond,' said Ned pointing,
his brick-red countenance kindling into suppressed excitement.

'Come and show me!' said the Rector, and the two went off together.
And sure enough, after a little beating about, they heard the note
which had roused the lad's curiosity, the loud whirr of a creature
that should have been a grasshopper, and was not.

They stalked the bird a few yards, stooping and crouching, Robert's
eager hand on the boy's arm, whenever the clumsy rustic movements
made too much noise among the underwood.  They watched it uttering
its jarring imitative note on bush after bush, just dropping to the
ground as they came near, and flitting a yard or two farther, but
otherwise showing no sign of alarm at their presence.  Then suddenly
the impulse which had been leading him on died in the Rector.  He
stood upright, with a long sigh.

'I must go home, Ned,' he said abruptly.  'Where are you off to?'

'Please, sir, there's my sister at the cottage, her as married Jim,
the under-keeper.  I be going there for my tea.'

'Come along then, we can go together.'

They trudged along in silence; presently Robert turned on his
companion.

'Ned, this natural history has been a fine thing for you, my lad;
mind you stick to it.  That and good work will make a man of you.
When I go away----'

The boy started and stopped dead, his dumb animal eyes fixed on his
companion.

'You know I shall soon be going off on my holiday,' said Robert
smiling faintly; adding hurriedly as the boy's face resumed its
ordinary expression, 'but some day, Ned, I shall go for good.  I
don't know whether you've been depending on me--you and some of the
others.  I think perhaps you have.  If so, don't depend on me, Ned,
any more!  It must all come to an end--everything must--
_everything!_--except the struggle to be a man in the world, and not
a beast--to make one's heart clean and soft, and not hard and vile.
That is the one thing that matters, and lasts.  Ah, never forget
that, Ned!  Never forget it!'

He stood still, towering over the slouching thickset 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 eyes; he stood motionless, nervously fiddling with his
butterfly net--awkwardness, and, as it seemed, irresponsiveness,
in his whole attitude.

Robert gathered himself together.

'Well, good night, my lad,' he said with a change of tone.  'Good
luck to you; be off to your tea!'

And he turned away, striding swiftly over the short burnt August
grass, in the direction of the Murewell woods, which rose in a blue
haze of heat against the slumberous afternoon sky.  He had not gone
a hundred yards, before he heard a clattering after him.  He stopped
and Ned came up with him.

'They're heavy, them things,' said the boy, desperately blurting
it out, and pointing, with heaving chest and panting breath, to the
rod and basket.  'I am going that way, I can leave un at the rectory.'

Robert's eyes gleamed.

'They are no weight, Ned--'cause why?  I've been lazy and caught
no fish!  But there,'--after a moment's hesitation, he slipped off
the basket and rod, and put them into the begrimed hands held out
for them.  'Bring them when you like; I don't know when I shall
want them again.  Thank you, and God bless you!'

The boy was off with his booty in a second.

'Perhaps he'll like to think he did it for me, by-and-by,' said
Robert sadly to himself, moving on, a little moisture in the clear
gray eye.


About three o'clock next day Robert was in Oxford.  The night before,
he had telegraphed to ask if Grey was at home.  The reply had
been--'Here for a week on way north; come by all means.'  Oh! that
look of Catherine's when he had told her of his plan, trying in
vain to make it look merely casual and ordinary.

'It is more than a year since I have set eyes on Grey, Catherine.
And the day's change would be a boon.  I could stay at night at
Morton, and get home early next day.'

But as he turned a pleading look to her, he had been startled by
the sudden rigidity of face and form.  Her silence had in it an
intense, almost a haughty, reproach, which she was too keenly hurt
to put into words.

He caught her by the arm, and drew her forcibly to him.  There he
made her look into the eyes which were full of nothing but the most
passionate, imploring affection.

'Have patience a little more, Catherine!' he just murmured.  'Oh,
how I have blessed you for silence!  Only till I come back!'

'Till you come back,' she repeated slowly.  'I cannot bear it any
longer, Robert, that you should give others your confidence, and
not me.'

He groaned and let her go.  No--there should be but one day more
of silence, and that day was interposed for her sake.  If Grey from
his calmer standpoint bade him wait and test himself, before taking
any irrevocable step, he would obey him.  And if so, the worst pang
of all need not yet be inflicted on Catherine, though as to his
state of mind he would be perfectly open with her.

A few hours later his cab deposited him at the well-known door.
It seemed to him that he and the scorched plane-trees lining the
sides of the road were the only living things in the wide sun-beaten
street.

Every house was shut up.  Only the Greys' open windows, amid their
shuttered neighbors, had a friendly human air.

Yes; Mr. Grey was in, and expecting Mr. Elsmere.  Robert climbed
the dim, familiar staircase, his heart beating fast.

'Elsmere--this _is_ a piece of good fortune!'

And the two men, after a grasp of the hand, stood fronting each
other: Mr. Grey, a light of pleasure on the rugged, dark-complexioned
face, looking up at his taller and paler visitor.

But Robert could find nothing to say in return; and in an instant
Mr. Grey's quick eye detected the strained, nervous emotion of the
man before him.

'Come and sit down, Elsmere--there, in the window, where we can
talk.  One has to live on this east side of the house this weather.'

'In the first place,' said Mr. Grey, scrutinizing 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 shall describe
to you.  But before I act on the conclusion, 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 things 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 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 intrusions
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
neighbor.  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
practice to an every-day ministry to human need, for the intellectual
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
recognize 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 process
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.  _I_ 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 recognize in it merely a natural,
inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, in its pre-scientific
stages.  It has been all experimental, inductive.  I imagine'--he
looked up--'you didn't get much help out of the orthodox apologists?'

Robert shrugged his shoulders.

'It often seems 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 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 behind 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 destructive
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 convention which
those who hear you receive as literal truth,--and trusting the
maintenance of your position either to your neighbor'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 out ourselves off from common worship
is to lose that fellowship which is in itself a witness and vehicle
of God.'

But his tone had grown hesitating, and touched with melancholy.

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 awhile, before I take any overt step, I will wait--oh, God
knows I will wait!--my wife--' and his husky voice failed him
utterly.

'Your 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 character,--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
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 conditions, 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?  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 out 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 unaccustomed
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 forward, 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 temper of mind, which, while it gave a special force and
sacredness 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-by, good-by!  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 realize 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
urged.

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 moonrise, 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 simmer idlers,
and the lamps were twinkling 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, black and massive in
the twilight distance.  To the left, but on a nearer plane, the
undulating common stretching downward from where he stood, rose
suddenly toward a height crowned with a group of gaunt and jagged
firs--land-marks 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 network 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 color 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 neighboring pool.

The Rector felt himself alone on a wide earth.  It was almost with
a sort 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 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 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.  '_Either 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 toward 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 life He inspired; have become 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 heart 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; love, instead of weakening or forgetting,
if it be but faithful, shall find ever fresh power of realizing 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 moonrise, beside some of the first
cottages of Murewell, up the hill, 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 be had seen it in his waking dream on the common--the
lamp-light, 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 banging 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 outstretched 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 tenderness, which
seemed to rend his whole nature.

'Tell me--tell me--Robert!'

He guided her gently across the room, past the sofa over which her
work lay scattered, past the flower-table, now a many-colored mass
of roses, which was her especial pride, past the remains of a brick
castle which had delighted Mary's wondering 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 remember 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 up stairs
and prayed for me, my white-souled 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 conscience--to say and do the truth!'

'Robert,' she said piteously, deadly pale; 'I don't understand.'

'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 possible, 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 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, realizing 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, be 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 intimacy began, his influence hastened everything.  I
don't wish to minimize 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
lamp-light 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
realized the situation, and that blow after blow still remained to
him to deal.

'Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with 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 afterward, and of the months of feverish reading and wrestling
which had followed.  Half-way through it a new despair seized him.
What was the good of all he was saying?  He was speaking a language
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 protest 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, convincing 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 reproach, her jealousy.  He dared
not speak of what Mr. Grey had done for him, of the tenderness of
his counsel toward her specially.  He felt that everything he could
say would but torture the wounded heart still more.

But she did not notice the outstretched hands.  She covered her
face in silence a moment as though trying to see her way more clearly
through the maze 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 because 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 association, 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 grow 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, _I 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?' she repeated insistently.

'I know nothing,' he said, his eyes still hidden.  'I know nothing!
But I trust God with all that is clearest 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, obscurity.

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 minister 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.

'Robert, my husband, my darling, it _cannot_ be!  It is a madness--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--except 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 backward, smiling at him with an exquisite
tenderness.  The tears were streaming down her cheeks.  They were
wet on his own.  Another moment and Robert would have lost the only
clew 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 jeopardized 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 of this point or that point--but of life and religion
altogether.--I see God's purposes in quite other proportions as it
were.--Christianity seems to me something small and local.--Behind
it, around it--including 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 of a part of truth.  Truth has never been, can
never be, contained in any one creed or system!'

She heard, but through her exhaustion, through the bitter sinking
of hope, she only half understood.  Only she realized that she and
he were alike helpless--both struggling in the grip of some force
outside of 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 her 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 unconscious; 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 color 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.



CHAPTER 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;
everyone 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 awhile 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 wood-path 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 repression.
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 had been sufficiently
weakened already.  For his wife's sake, his people's sake, his
honorable 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 crystallized, 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 residence 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 arguments 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 Institute, 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?  His lips would be
sealed as to any possible withdrawal 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 sickening 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 counted
for nothing.  Catherine should be tenderly shielded from all avoidable
pain, but for himself there must be no flinching, no self-indulgent
weakness.  Did he not owe every last hour he had to give to the
people among whom he had planned to spend the best energies of life,
and from whom his own act was about to part him in this lame,
impotent fashion.

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 toward 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?
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?  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 painfully from any
of his common religious favorites 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 chock 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.

          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 honor 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 reddening fern, the sun-gleams
stealing from crag to crag, and shoulder to shoulder; inside, row
after row of intent faces, all turned toward the central passage,
and, moving toward 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 checks and marvellous curls and jubilant airs,--Mrs. Leyburn'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 cited 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 hope; 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 trust in him and
make their common life once more rich toward God and man?  There
must be painful readjustment and friction no doubt.  He tries to
see the facts as they truly are, fighting against his own optimist
tendencies, and realizing 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?

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 re-creating 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 triumphantly, 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?

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 confined, on the further
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.

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 parlor-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, wondering the while at
the Rector's haggard mien and restless movements.

'Nursing other people, indeed!' she observed severely downstairs,
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!_'

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 colorless.  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, clamoring 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 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 detesting 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 remembered, 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
agonizing death of a kind but comparatively 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, disowning 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 of
marriage rest, both in theory and practice, on a common acceptance
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 toward 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 further 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 thankful 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 agonized 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 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 communicated 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 compacts 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 toward 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 problems of these two lives was not solved by a burst of
feeling.  Without that determining impulse of love and pity 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 afterward 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-by, 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 Monday, 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?'

'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 honorable 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 invaded 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 connections.

'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 colorless 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 ever-greens, 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, and close by,
an admiring circle of children and old men, huddling in the shade
of a great chestnut.

Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending,
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 furniture 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 painfully 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 recognized 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 extensively 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 toward 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 loath 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 Robert made his ineffectual
visit.  But at this actual moment Roberts 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?'

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.  Moreover 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 delicacy, 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 forms, 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 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 bole 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
Rector 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 honor 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 devising 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 unwonted brain exercise of the conversation, the
demon in Henslowe had been for the moment most strangely tamed after
half an hour's talk.  Actually some reminiscences of his old ways
of speech and thoughts 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 denunciation.

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.

How had it been done?  Neither Robert nor Henslowe ever quite knew.
Henslowe walked home in a bewilderment which for once had nothing
to do with brandy, but was simply the result of a moral shook 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 impressions that remained with Elsmere afterward
of this last meeting with 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 surprise in the
sympathetic looks of those about him, as though the tone of it had
been somewhat unexpected and disproportionate to the occasion.  Had
he betrayed himself in any way?  He looked for Catherine, but she
was nowhere to be seen.  Only in his search he caught the Squire's
ironical glance, and wondered with quick shame what sort of nonsense
he had been talking.

Then a neighboring 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 of 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 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 companion had tramped miles to see the function,
to rattle their sticks on the floor in Elsmere's honor, 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?  Precious
eloquent speech you made!  When I see you and people like you
throwing yourselves at the heads of the people, I always think of
Scaliger's remark about the Basques: "They say they understand one
another--_I 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 philosophy.'

'You remind me,' said Robert dryly, sitting down on one of the
library stools, 'of some of those sentiments you expressed so
forcibly on the first evening of our 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 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 dumfounded.

'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 his confession
of wide and illimitable defeat.  He was there, so to speak, to hand
over his sword.  But to the Squire, his surrender 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. Anselm'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 impatience.
'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 recognize 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 analyze.
Whatever it was, it drove him to throw himself upon Robert's position
with a perverse bewildering bitterness.

'Why should you break up your life in this wanton way?  Who, in
God's name is injured if you keep your living?  It is the business
of the thinker and the scholar to clear his mind of cobwebs.
Granted.  You have done it.  But it is also the business of the
practical man to live!  If I had your altruist, emotional temperament,
I should not hesitate for a moment. I should regard the historical
expressions of an eternal tendency in men as wholly indifferent to
me.  If I understand you aright, you have flung away the sanctions
of orthodoxy.  There is no other in the way.  Treat words as they
deserve.  _You_'--and the speaker laid an emphasis on the pronoun
which for the life of him he could not help making sarcastic--'_you_
will always have Gospel enough to preach.'

'I cannot,' Robert repeated quietly, unmoved by the taunt, if it
was one.  'I am in a different state, I imagine, from you.  Words--that
is to say, the specific Christian formulae--may be indifferent to
you, though a month or two ago I should hardly have guessed it;
they are just now anything but indifferent to me.'

The Squire's brow grew darker.  He took up the argument again, more
pugnaciously than ever.  It was the strangest attempt ever made to
gibe and flout a wandering sheep, back into the fold.  Robert's
resentment was roused at last.  The Squire's temper seemed to him
totally inexplicable, his arguments contradictory, the conversation
useless and irritating.  He got up to take his leave.

'What you are about to do, Elsmere,' the Squire wound up with
saturnine emphasis, 'is apiece 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 be _must_.'

There was a pause.  Robert held out his hand.  The Squire could
hardly touch it.  Outwardly his mood was one of the strangest
eccentricity and anger; and as to what was beneath it, Elsmere's
quick divination was dulled by worry and fatigue.  It only served
him so far that at the door he turned back, hat in hand, and said,
looking lingeringly the while at the solitary sombre figure, at the
great library, with all its suggestive and exquisite detail: 'If
Monday is fine, Squire, will you walk?'

The Squire made no reply except by another question,--

'Do you still keep to your Swiss plans for next week?' he asked
sharply.

'Certainly.  The plan, as it happens, is a Godsend.  But there,'
said Robert, with a sigh, 'let me explain the details of this dismal
business to you on Monday. I have hardly the courage for it now.'

The curtain dropped behind him.  Mr. Wendover stood a minute looking
after him; then, with some vehement expletive or other, walked up
to his writing-table, drew some folios that were laying on it toward
him, with hasty maladroit movements which sent his papers flying
over the floor, and plunged doggedly into work.


He and Mrs. Darcy dined alone.  After dinner the Squire leant against
the mantelpiece, sipping his coffee, more gloomily silent than even
his sister had seen him for weeks.  And, as always happened when
he became more difficult and morose, she became more childish.  She
was now wholly absorbed with a little electric toy she had just
bought for Mary Elsmere, a number of infinitesimal little figures
dancing fantastically under the stimulus of an electric current,
generated by the simplest means.  She hung over it absorbed, calling
to her brother every now and then, as though by sheer perversity,
to come and look whenever the pink or the blue _danseuse_ executed
a more surprising somersault than usual.

He took not the smallest spoken notice of her, though his eyes
followed her contemptuously as she moved from window to window with
her toy in pursuit of the fading light.

'Oh, Roger,' she called presently, still throwing herself to this
side and that, to catch new views of her pith puppets,  'I have got
something to show you.  You must admire them--you shall!  I have
been drawing them all day, and they are nearly done.  You remember
what I told you once about my "imps?"  I have seen them all my life,
since I was a child in France with papa, and I have never been able
to draw them till the last few weeks.  They are such dears--such
darlings; every one will know them when he sees them!  There is the
Chinese imp, the low, smirking creature, you know, that sits on
the edge of your cup of tea; there is the flipperty-flopperty
creature that flies out at you when you open a drawer; there is the
twisty-twirly person that sits jeering on the edge of your hat when
it blows away from you; and'--her voice dropped--'that _ugly, ugly_
thing I always see waiting for me on the top of a gate.  They have
teased nee 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 toward him, her _bizarre_ little figure swaying from side
to side, her eyes glittering, her restless hands pulling at the
lace round her blanched head and face.  The Squire, his hands behind
him, looked at her frowning, an involuntary horror dawning on his
dark countenance, turned abruptly, and left the room.


Mr. Wendover worked till midnight; then, tired out, he turned to
the bit of fire to which, in spite of the oppressiveness of the
weather, the chilliness of age and nervous strain had led him to
set a light.  He sat there for long, sunk in the blackest reverie.
He was the only living creature in the great library wing which
spread around and above him--the only waking creature in the whole
vast pile of Murewell.  The silver lamps shone with a steady
melancholy light on the chequered walls of books.  The silence was
a silence that could be felt; and the gleaming Artemis, the tortured
frowning Medusa, were hardly stiller in their frozen calm than the
crouching figure of the Squire.

So Elsmere was going!  In a few weeks the rectory would be once
more tenanted by one of those nonentities the Squire had either
patronized or scorned all his life.  The park, the lanes, the room
in which he sits, will know that spare young figure, that animated
voice, no more.  The outlet which had brought so much relief and
stimulus to his own mental powers is closed; the friendship on which
he had unconsciously come to depend so much is broken before it had
well begun.

All sorts of strange thwarted instincts make themselves felt in the
Squire.  The wife he had once thought to marry, the children he
might have had, come to sit like ghosts with him beside the fire.
He had never, like Augustine, 'loved to love;' he had only loved
to know.  But none of us escapes to the last the yearnings which
make us men.  The Squire becomes conscious that certain fibres he
had thought long since dead in him had been all the while twining
themselves silently round the disciple who had shown him in many
respects such a filial consideration and confidence.  That young
man might have become to him the son of his old age, the one human
being from whom, as weakness of mind and body break him down, even
his indomitable spirit might have accepted the sweetness of human
pity, the comfort of human help.

And it is his own hand which has done most to break the nascent,
slowly forming tie.  He has bereft himself.

With what incredible recklessness had he been acting all these
months!

It was the _levity_ of his own proceeding which stared him in the
face.  His rough hand had closed on the delicate wings of a soul
as a boy crushes the butterfly he pursues.  As Elsmere had stood
looking back at him from the library door, the suffering which spoke
in every line of that changed face had stirred a sudden troubled
remorse in Roger Wendover.  It was mere justice that one result of
that suffering should be to leave himself forlorn.

He had been thinking and writing of religion, of the history of
ideas, all his life.  Had he ever yet grasped the meaning of religion
_to the religious man_?  _God_ and _faith_--what have these venerable
ideas ever mattered to him personally, except as the subjects of
the most ingenious analysis, the most delicate historical inductions?
Not only sceptical to the core, but constitutionally indifferent,
the Squire had always found enough to make life amply worth living
in the mere dissection of other men's beliefs.

But to-night!  The unexpected shock of feeling, mingled with the
terrible sense, periodically alive in him, of physical doom, seems
to have stripped from the thorny soul its outer defences of mental
habit.  He sees once more the hideous spectacle of his father's
death, his own black half-remembered moments of warning, the teasing
horror of his sister's increasing weakness of brain.  Life has been
on the whole a burden, though there has been a certain joy no doubt
in the fierce intellectual struggle of it.  And to-night it seems
so nearly over!  A cold prescience of death creeps over the Squire
as he sits in the lamplit silence.  His eye seems to be actually
penetrating the eternal vastness which lies about our life.  He
feels himself old, feeble, alone.  The awe, the terror which are
at the root of all religions have fallen even upon him at last.

The fire burns lower, the night wears on; outside an airless, misty
moonlight hangs over park and field.  Hark! was that a sound upstairs,
in one of those silent empty rooms?

The Squire half rises, one hand on his chair, his blanched face
strained, listening.  Again!  Is it a footstep or simply a delusion
of the ear?  He rises, pushes aside the curtains into the inner
library, where the lamps have almost burnt away, creeps up the
wooden stair, and into the deserted upper story.

Why was that door into the end room--his father's room--open?  He
had seen it closed that afternoon. No one had been there since.
He stepped nearer.  Was that simply a gleam of moonlight on the
polished floor--confused lines of shadow thrown by the vine outside?
And was that sound nothing but the stirring of the rising wind of
dawn against the open casement window?  Or--

'_My God!_'

The Squire fled downstairs.  He gained his chair again.  He sat
upright an instant, impressing on himself, with sardonic vindictive
force, some of those truisms as to the action of mind on body, of
brain-process on sensation, which it had been part of his life's
work to illustrate.  The philosopher had time to realize a shuddering
fellowship of weakness with his kind, to see himself as a helpless
instance of an inexorable law, before he fell back in his chair; a
swoon, born of pitiful human terror--terror of things unseen--creeping
over heart and brain.




BOOK V.

ROSE.



CHAPTER XXXI.

It was a November afternoon.  London lay wrapped in rainy fog.  The
atmosphere was such as only a Londoner can breathe with equanimity,
and the gloom was indescribable.

Meanwhile, in defiance of the Inferno outside, festal preparations
were being made in a little house on Campden Hill.  Lamps were lit;
in the drawing-room chairs were pushed back; the piano was open,
and a violin stand towered beside it; chrysanthemums were everywhere;
an invalid lady in a 'beat cap' occupied the sofa; and two girls
were flitting about, clearly making the last arrangements necessary
for a 'musical afternoon.'

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.  Toward 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 because she was so totally in the dark as to the
whys and wherefores of her sister's moods.

Rose herself would have scornfully denied that any ways 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 precisely 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 bread-and-butter
miss, the easiest of preys for anyone 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 anyone 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 recall 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 hungering 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 out 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 _sang-froid_, 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 visualized, 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 harboring 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 a
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 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 through 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 ambition, 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 satisfied 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!' 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 expression,
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 just--a 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.

Among the cards she had still to fill up, was one of which the
envelope was addressed to the Hon. Hugh Flaxman, 90 St. Jame's
Place.  Lady Charlotte, though she had afterward again left town,
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 afterward when they were not at home; and
Rose now carelessly sent him a card, with the inward reflection
that he was much too great a man to come, and was probably enjoying
himself 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 a 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.
Afterward 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 formidably,
consciously brilliant in look and dress and manner!

Yes, he was still in town--settled there, indeed, for some time.
And she--was there any special day on which Mrs. Leyburn 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 yesteryear 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 unexpected 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?  I see
Mamma is now struggling with him.  The 'cellist with the hair--or
the lady in Greek dress--or the esoteric Buddhist?  What a fascinating
selection!  I had really no notion we should be quite so curious!'

'Mees Rose, they wait 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 quartet
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 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 be 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 knowledge and fine training.

'Very much improved, eh?' said an English professional to a German
neighbor, lifting his eyebrows interrogatively.

The other nodded with the business-like air of one who knows.
'Joachim, they say, war darueber entzueckt, 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.  'Vell, vid a bretty
woman--_ueberhaupt_--it _doesn't_ mean business!  It's zoziety--the
dukes and the duchesses--that ruins all the young 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 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 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 dislike new
people!'

His eye kindled at once.  'Say rather that it means a preference
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 dogmatize about each other!' she said
scornfully.  Her manner was by no means simple.  He did not feel
himself at all at ease with her.  His very embarrassment, 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 then,
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 had asked for her friendship, 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 disengaged himself and
went to stand in a corner and study his neighbors.

Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in the
most correct professional costume--long hair, velvet coat, eye-glass
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 candor, '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 neighborhood 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 humors 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 surrounded than this.  What was Mrs.
Leyburn--what were the Elsmeres about?  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 clamoring 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-fitting clothes.  But Rose
herself had evidently nothing but relish for the score.  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 parlor-maid mumbled a long name, 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 Leyburn?' 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?'

'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 toward the speaker.  It was Mr. Flaxman,
Lady Charlotte's companion.

'You need not have drawn the picture too black, Mr. Flaxman.  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?'

'_I_ 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.

'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
Frauelein Adelmann's veiled unmanageable contralto; then she turned
magisterially to Robert standing 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 at her eye.  'Why has Helen told me nothing
about it?  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 afterward
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 vouchsafed 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, Mr.
Elsmere.  I can't say you and he seemed to be on particularly 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, reddening 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 Leyburn?' 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 neighbor 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 opinion's sake.
He would ask his scout to dinner, and insist on dining with his own
servants, and shaking hands with his friends' butlers.  The scouts
and the butlers put 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
interesting.  A distinguished face, don't you think?--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 conversation closed immediately over the interruption,
and flowed on as evenly as before.

Unconsciously Langham retreated further and further 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 Langham caught her flush, and the excited sparkle of
her eyes.  Was this the 'someone in the stream?'  No doubt!--no
doubt!

When the party broke up Langham found himself borne toward the outer
room, and before he knew where he was going he was standing beside
her.

'Are _you_ still here?' 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 eves above her.

We are not always in this turmoil Mr. Langham.  Perhaps some other
day you will come and make friends with my mother?'



CHAPTER XXXII.

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that
Elsmere and Catherine first realized 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 infinitely easier to make
than to carry out.

'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 paragraphs 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 reproached him with her own.

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes
and beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely 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 Robert 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 now ardors with which his mind was filling--she who loved
him!--except by building, at any rate for the time, an inclosure
of silence round her Christian beliefs?  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 trembling 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 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, pondering,
wrestling.  Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of his own
act, and of her antecedents, to which be 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, be would have been ready enough to submit, in
terror lest his own forlornness should bring about hers.  But in
spite of the intellectual confusion 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 passionate 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 proselytizing
instinct may be never quite morally defensible, even as between
husband and wife.  Nevertheless, in all strong, convinced, and
ardent souls it exists, and must be reckoned with.

At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse which
neutralized 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.

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 favorite
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, spurs of green mountains
shut out alike the lower lake and the icy splendors of the 'Valais
depths profound.'  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, Robert 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 candle-light.

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 toward 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 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, seems 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, constrained
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 plat 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 toward her and
took her in his arms.

'Catherine,' he said to her, his lips trembling, 'am I never to
speak my mind to you anymore?  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 concerned.  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, and all that concerns our truest
life--are we, Catherine?'

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 living, not through
great crises, but through the detail of every day.

'Could yon not work at other things?' she whispered.

He was silent, looking straight before him into the moon-lit 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 stop
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?  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 invincibly 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 the woman on whom he had already inflicted so
severe a practical 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 Rhone 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 battleground 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 newborn 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 themselves more
sharply.  In after years, one of Catherine's dreariest memories was
the memory of their first instalment in the Bedford 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 everything 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 wealth--how it oppressed and bewildered
her!  Its mere grime and squalor, its murky, poisoned atmosphere
were a perpetual trial to the country-woman brought up amid the
dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain pastures.  She
drooped physically for a time, as did the child.

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 encouraged 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 fascinate 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 principles, a relaxation of moral fibre.

And the work among the poor was difficult.  Robert instinctively
felt that for him to offer 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 charitable 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 _Record_ 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 ministry.  The delicate face
flushed miserably from brow to chin.  Pitied for being Robert's
wife!  Oh, monstrous!--incredible!

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 projects 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 reasoning at all, but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily
experience.  Then the intellect had broken in, and destroyed or
transformed 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 border-lands 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 upshot 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
explanations 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 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 oppressive 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 favorite Christian
dilemma--Christianity or nothing.  Inside Christianity, light and
certainly; 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 explanation
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 speaking, 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 _question of
documents and testimony_.  Hence, the Christian explanation 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 neutralized 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 witchcraft was the product of physical ignorance and
superstition.'

'You say,' he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead
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, ad the
practical Atheism in which it is engulfed?  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 was
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 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?  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
minimize 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, unsoftened 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 understand them?
Superstition, in certain parts of rural Europe, there is in plenty,
but wherever you get intelligence and therefore movement, you got
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-Christian--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
without 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?  _Sin_,
you answer, _the enmity of the human mind against God, the momentary
triumph of Satan_.  And so you acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's
present defeat, looking for vengeance and requital here-after.  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 toward new
ways of worship and new forms of love!'


And after a while it was with these 'new ways of worship and now
forms of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied.  The
break with the old things was no sooner complete, than the eager
soul, incapable then, as always, of resting in negation or oppositions
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 darkness for the rising
of a new City of God!

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament
Square, on his way toward 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 Westminster 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 freedom 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 careless 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 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 toward
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
toward 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 clergyman 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 peaceful between the murky river mists and
the cleaner light-filled rays 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 disappearances, the sudden
engulfments, 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 colored success, as it claimed to be, where the
primitive tendency of man toward the organized excitement of religious
ritual, visible in all nations and civilizations, 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 these processes
of so-called destruction and decay were but the mere workings of
that divine plastic force which is forever moulding human society?
What if these beautiful venerable things which had fallen from
him, as from thousands of his follows, represented, in the present
stage of the world's history, not the props, but the hinderances,
of man?

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 part.  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
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 seem to oneself ridiculous--absurdly
lonely and powerless!  All great changes are preceded by numbers
of 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 blackness 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 uplifted 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 organized 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 pure 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 bidden room to men and women orphaned and
strangled 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 strenuous 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 ardor of his mood collapsed at the touch of her.
For the protest of a world in arms can be withstood 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 realizing 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 consequence, he was
involved, as Robert held, in endless contradictions 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 what
was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe.  He was hard-working
and kind-hearted, but the perpetual 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
toward 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 'incalculably 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 Leyburns' 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 be supposed to be a lad of
twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of fun and invincible
good humor attracted him greatly.

Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humor 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 ad 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 literature 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 introduced to 'Mr. Murray Edwardes.'

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 endeavored to do something 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 Tractarian
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 nothing of the agitations
outside.  At last however, toward the end of the old minister's
life, a powerful church of the new type, staffed by friends and
pupils of Pussy, 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 now and
splendid St. Wilfrid'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 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 among 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 responded.  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 the 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-by 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.  Unitarianism 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, persuasiveness 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 impossible.  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?'

The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water.  Robert gathered
that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating
dream of a recognized Christendom, a new wide-spreading, shelter
of faith for discouraged, brow-beaten 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 be 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 embarrassed 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 gathering 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
awhile 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 dryly recommended 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 Charlotte'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 departure 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 his own glimpse of her at Murewell,
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 encouraging 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 Elsmere's
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 humor
toward Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, 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 Murewell when
she married.  It was black, simply made, and had been a favorite
with both of them in the old surroundings.

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 experiences were a
trial to her.  But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious 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
self-colored 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
gentleman 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 abnormally long and white, sat near her, and
the circle of men were 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 afterward 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 everything,
were not cordial for all their smile.

Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive
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 introduce 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 seemed to
him to look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinized
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 odor 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 got 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 eyebrows.

'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' 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 conversation,
with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching his hand for
another cigarette, and drawing it back out 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.'

There was a ripple of laughter.

'Paris and illusions--_O 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 combative,
and slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis.  'The last time
I went to see Desforets in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the
house--theatrically speaking--_ice_.  They received 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 condition
of English morals!'

The twinkle in his eye was irresistible.  The men, understanding
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 Netteville contented herself
with a smile.

'They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan'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 Renan'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 tonight 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, recognized that the remark was
a shrewd one.

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 connection with the Ambassador.  All
that he could glean from memory he made quick use of now, urged at
first by the remorseful 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 after 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 Murewell, 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 rarely 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
country-woman'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 indifferently.

This was hardly an aspect of the matter which had yet occurred to
Catherine.  A flash of bitterness ran through her.  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 conversation 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 youth had been her slave and shadow for
the last two years.  His devotion now no longer mused her, and she
was endeavoring 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 newcomers where the
Squire's introduction had brought to her that night.  When the
Elsmeres rose to go, she said good-by 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 Robert 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 Netteville to
Lady Aubrey, with a light motion of the head toward 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 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 lamp-lit 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 _attache_ 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 and 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?  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 the tenderest words
remorseful love could find.  But the conflict 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.



CHAPTER 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 out 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 realize the gulf that lay between the present and
that visit of his to Murewell, when Robert and she had felt in
unison toward him, his opinions and his conduct to Rose, as toward
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 Langham was so much
in the Leyburns' drawing-room during these winter months, was a
question that several people asked--himself 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 pleasant
sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had ended in reaction
and self-abhorrence.  He had left Murewell remorseful, melancholy,
and ill-at-ease, but conscious, certainly, of a great relief that
he and Rose Leyburn 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 unmanageable 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 determining impulse had been merely one of flight.

However, as he had written to Robert toward 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 an oppression and a nightmare and as soon as he
had turned his back 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 provoking, stimulating
ways.  Certainly, from that first afternoon onward 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 notwithstanding with a little change
of tone, a careless 'You will find us next Wednesday as usual;
So-and-so is coming to play,' Langham would walk home in a state
of feeling he did not care to analyze, 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 suspect 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?

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 considerable 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?--unusual?'

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 evident 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 picturesque capacity for silence,
_might_ have attractions for a romantic and wilful girl.  But where
were the signs of it?  Rose rarely talked to him, and was always
ready to make him the 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 of 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!_  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--watching 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, highborn, and popular, he was gradually devoting
his advantages in the freest way to Rose's service.  He was an
excellent musical amateur, and 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 good-will.

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 aristocrat when he pleased,
for all his philosophical radicalism.  But with women he was the
most delightful mixture of deference 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 fervors 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 all, 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 pleasure, 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 Leyburns' 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 gayety and indifference of the most desperate
doubt and soreness,--opposition to Catherine, opposition to Mr.
Flaxman, 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 defenseless.  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 a 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 irritation 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 compulsion he
dared not analyze, 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 MacFadden 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 of 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 toward 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 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 realizing the drunken scene that might have
taken place in her presence if he had not succeeded in getting the
man safely out of the house.  But she felt that he was angry, and
mostly angry with her, and there was something 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?' 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 _I_ 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 Leyburn, you will
take your own way in spite of what anyone 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, dropping
him a mock courtesy.  But her lips 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 quartet.  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 perceived, 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?
He went into a fit of silent convulsive laughter as the idea
occurred to him.

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 of Madame Desforets' 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 southward toward 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 afternoon--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 appearance
at Lady Charlotte's this evening?' he asked her.

The omnivorous Lady Charlotte of course had made acquaintance 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.'

'Yes,' she said with a little satirical tightening of the lip.
'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 presently,
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 animation.
'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?' 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?' he sharply repeated, bending
forward, a curious accent in his tone.

'Yes!' she replied, with apparent surprise.  Then with a careless
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 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 among them her own young sister, Elise Romey, 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 daughter'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 France.  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 attention 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
frightened--wanted to go home.  But the elder sister, having begun
tormenting her, seems to have determined to keep her hold on 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 apartment there was
a supper party, and after it a horrible quarrel.  No one exactly
knows what happened.  But toward 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 toward 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 dryly, 'though of
course Madame Desforets tried to put her own color 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 afternoon, saw the announcement of Madame
Desforets coming, and poured out the story.  He and his wife nursed
the unfortunate girl with devotion.  She lived just a week, and
died of inflammation 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, 'Perhaps I
ought not to have done it.  But, as you sat there talking so lightly,
so gayly, 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!'

He hardly knew what he said.  He was driven on by a passionate sense
of physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure
fair youth and something malodorous and corrupt.  And there was
beside 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
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 sentiments 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 recognize 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 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 weakness,' 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 laboring under an uncomfortable sense of being
hoist with her own petard--an uncomfortable 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?'

'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 crossed, '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 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 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 convict, 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 dryly, when it was arranged;
'I should be glad to satisfy myself.'

When the Miss Leyburns were announced, Rose, though the younger,
came in first.  She always took the lead by a sort of natural right,
and Agnes never dreamt of protesting.  To-night the sisters were
in white.  Some soft creamy stuff 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 some color, gave just that
touch of purpose and art which the spectators 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 toward Lady Charlotte.
Anyone 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, emphasizing grace, disengaging 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
too.

'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 disgust,
'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.

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 ardor 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
Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.

Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, 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 analyze 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 Hercules, 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 revolutionize 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?'

His face fell.

'One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he admitted,
sighing.  Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous 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 anything yet of these
fashionable dealings with the devil!'

'Nothing.  Are you a believer?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of
any kind,' he added with an odd change of voice.  Come, Denman.'

And the two went off.  Langham came to stand beside Rose, while
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 emotions, 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 experience
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 further 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.

'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 gayly.  'We know
that some people have an extraordinary power over others.'

'Yes, that certainly we know!' he answered, his voice dropping, an
odd, strained note in it.  'I grant you that.'

She trembled deliciously.  Her eyelids fell.  They stood together,
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 among 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 everything, if anyone will volunteer?'

The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting
this and that.  Presently Lady Charlotte's loud dictatorial 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
Leyburn--you are always public-spirited--will you be victimized 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?'

Flaxman came up to explain.  Langham had turned to Rose--a wild
fury with Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him.
But there was no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the
large figure and towering cap bent toward 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 do?'

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 Charlotte 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 require 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 indignation surged
through him.

Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the
air in front of her.  The circle of people drew back.  Mr. Flaxman
and Mr. Denman prepared, notebook 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 outstretched 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 color 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 faculties; 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.

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 experiment 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 themselves.

'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. Sherwood'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?' exclaimed Lady
Charlotte under her breath.  'You must.  I promised to see her
safely off the promises.'

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
discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and
sister.

They looked at him--the one amazed, the other grimly observant--and
caught a slight significant motion of the head toward 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 bewildered
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 Leyburn, 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 color 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.

A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp.  But before she
could close it again, an arm was flung around her.  Should 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?
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 shly away from him, her
words coming from under the fur hood 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 paralyzing 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, 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?'

'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 toward 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 1ay 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
past--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 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 Langham's ear.  He was
absorbed in the dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction
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
re-create!  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 gift
back in her face--oh monstrous--oh inhuman!' and the cold drops
stood on his forhead.

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
outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the world!
Think of the little house--the children--the money 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!_'

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 old and sunken eyes across dark rivers
of sordid irremediable regret.

The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, 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 afterward 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 himself 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 anything for
him.  He gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard
him dragging books and boxes about as though he 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.  With an
expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining 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 behavior 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 afterward, 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 waiting 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 toward 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?  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 clamor, 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 afterward
the dining-room door opened.

'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.

Rose took it--glanced at the hand-writing.  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.

'Rose,' she said, looking up, 'was that someone 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 colorless 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 recognized Langham'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 was 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
older 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 arm-chair 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
colorless mouth working painfully.

Catherine was cut to the heart.  'Oh Rose!' she said, holding out
her hands, 'I will blame no one, dear, I seem hard--but I love you
so.  Oh, tell me--you would have told we everything once!'

There was the most painful yearning in her tone.  Rose lifted a
listless right hand and put it into her sister's out-stretched
palms.  But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered
cry, she fell toward Catherine.

'Catherine!  I cannot bear it.  I said I loved him--he kissed me--I
could kill myself and him.'

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 spectacle of moral and
mental struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her
inmost heart.  Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose--a
sense of shook, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation--and
a strange intervening 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 effect one's body like this?  It shall not--it
is humiliating!  "Miss Leyburn 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-by.'

She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch
her, 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 anyone 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 incoherent 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 toward something maimed
and paralyzed from birth, unworthy even of her contempt.  Then the
tears began to rain over her cheeks.

'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, changing!  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 judgement-issuing inexorably from the
facts of life and circumstance.


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 astonishment 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
flattered 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 toward reversing so plain a declaration of
God's will!  She could not sympathize--she would not consent.
Robert watched her in painful indecision.  He knew that she thought
him indifferent to her true reason for finding some comfort even
in her sister's trouble--that he seemed to her mindful only of the
passing human misery, indifferent 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 someone came into the room--someone 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 biding 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.

Robert 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, his 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 toward his friend had always
remained in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate toward
the don.  His sense of it now filled him with 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 coming--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 against the
chimney-piece 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 Robert, 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 be
begging you to talk the matter over with me, and let us face it
together.  Whether Rose would ever, under any circumstances, got
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
priori_, 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.

'Elsmere, there is nothing to be said!  I have behaved as 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 any 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-by!' 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 cannot even guess.
Very likely she would be the first to repudiate half of what I
have been saying.  And 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 cannot
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,
'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 day sitting
dumb and immovable in his chair.  Imagination was at work again
more feverishly than ever.  He was tortured 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 intellectual, 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.  Afterward 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?  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 inconsequent memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at
the rehearsal.  Had she looked so ill?  She flushed hotly at the
thought, and then realized again, with a sense of childish comfort,
the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in shielding her
from any unnecessary 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 largo
detached, house not far off, which threw a certain illumination
over him, though it left her in the 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 every thing to say,'  he answered, under his breath; 'I
have committed a crime--a villainy.'

'And it is not pleasant to you?' she said, quivering.  'I am sorry--I
cannot help you.  But you are wrong--it was no crime--it was necessary
and profitable like the doses of one's childhood!  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 tempting easy prey.  I
bear you no malice.  And do not let me break your friendship with
Robert; 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?  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.



CHAPTER XXXVII.

Ten days after Langham's return to Oxford, Elsmere received a
characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was
to be considered as still existing or at an end.  The calm and even
proud melancholy of the letter showed a considerable 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 pessimistic 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 conviction that no fresh influence from the outside
world would ever again be allowed to penetrate the solitude of
Langham's life.  In comparison 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, affectionate
letter in return.  Whatever had been his natural feelings of
resentment, he said, he could not realize, now that the crisis was
past, that he cared less about his old friend.  'As far as we two
are concerned, lot us forget it all.  I could hardly say this, you
will easily imagine, if I thought 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 now vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of
that February morning was a great softening toward Catherine.
Whatever might have been Catherine's intense relief when Robert
returned from his abortive mission, she never afterward let a
disparaging word toward Langham escape her lips to Rose.  She was
tenderness and sympathy 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 hullucination.  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 Langham had
been a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character.
He had crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless
revolt and lounging 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
separation 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 uncertainty, but
in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large portion
of the blows.  Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory, Langham's
endangered habits and threatened 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 easily be imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly 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, 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 _I_ 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 preparation 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 observing 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 or
anyone 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 kickings due to him!'

Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude
toward this same 'creature,' toward 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 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 friends 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 dumfounded 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 was 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 and 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 himself and Rose, a bright
nonchalance and impersonality of tone toward 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 unexplained stares and 'humphs' and grunts, a few
irrelevant disquisitions 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; terror
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 in Bedford Square once for a
week, and then for the first time she realized the profound change
which had passed over the Elsmeres' 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' 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 contained his papers.  Nor had he the heart to ask
her to read them.

Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appearance 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 existing
churches, which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid's, were miserably
attended, provided accommodation at the out-side for 3,000.  His
own chapel held 4OO, 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 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 miscellaneous
staff of lay-curates.  He asked no questions as to religious 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 pleasure 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 got
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 humor 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, pelting
each other and their teachers with the 'dips' which, as the buildings
were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been provided 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
ink-bottle whereon some enterprising spirit had just 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,
scrutinizing 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.

'It isn't only a pair of arms we want,' he remarked dryly, '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, won't 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 orthodox 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 refused.  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 XXXVIII.

There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings
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 Elsmere or Murray Edwardes.  He
was a devoted and Orthodox 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 ibis practice, however, he had married, and his wife,
who had been a doctor's daughter and a national schoolmistress, had
the same ardors 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 organization cases, into efforts
for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest acts
of ministry toward the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her
face, which but for the stress of London, of labor, and of poverty,
would have had a blunt fresh-colored 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 neighborhood 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 profound 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 influenced
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 honoring.

In the fast place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room as a
fresh centre for civilizing effort had been extremely shrewd.  The
district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a
number of promising elements.

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their school-room, 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 the south.
The old winding streets near it, and the blocks of workman'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 school-room windows, it was the potters who provided
him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock
laborers, settled there to supply the needs of 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 specialized 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 river-side streets
at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in the neighborhood
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 manifestations
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 Murewell 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 immediately 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 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 end embittered.  And it
gave him now a fresh pang to imagine how Newcome would receive the
news of his quondam friend's 'infidel propaganda,' established on
the very ground where he himself 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 organized 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 there 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 hew 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.  Toward religion
in general the prevailing attitude is, one of indifference tinged
with hostility.  'Eight hundred thousand people in South London,
of whom the enormous proportion 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 whole more conceited, more prejudiced, more given over
to crude theorizing, 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 intercourse 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 nil; 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 sensibility, of passion.
The more intermingling of races, which a modern city 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 despondency
produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun
to wear off; Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame
and ardor 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 storytelling which had been so great
a success at Murewell.  The story-telling struck the neighborhood
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 two-fold--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.  Sometimes 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 English country life and its humors, 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 Mount Blanc might be
buried without showing even his top-most snow-field 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'If.  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 _recueillement_.  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 neighbors 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 out 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.

'What is he, d'ye know?'  Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbor,
as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy
thumb in the story-teller's direction meanwhile.  'Seems like 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 fellows have their say, anyhow.'

Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker.  He was a young man, a
gas-fitter--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 dreadfuls.  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 colored plates of
tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a Kew assistant.
Those he would often set up on a large screen, or put up on the
walls, till the dingy school-room 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
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 downward.  He only can receive who already hath--there
is no profounder axiom.

And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brooding, 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, brutal,
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
freethinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books occupying the
place of honor in the window and the 'Freethinker' placard flaunting
at the door.  Inside there was still more highly seasoned literature
even than the 'Freethinker' to be had.  There was in particular a
small half-penny paper which was understood 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 unsavory sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised
through the parish as Lent drew on toward 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 apparent.
Soon it seemed to Robert that every bit of boarding 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 spurts 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 _sang-froid_, which struck on his tired nerves almost
more painfully then the laughing brutality of the men he had just
passed.

Directly he found himself in another street he opened the 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.

Robert 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 toward 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 illustration of a great axiom!  '_Faith has a judge--in
truth?_'

He went home and lay awake half the light pondering.  If he could
but pour out his 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 bear except under a moral compulsion
which he shrinks more and more painfully from exercising.

The next night was a storytelling 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 neighborhood seemed to be reeking.  It was the first
time he had approached any religious matter directly.  A knot of
workmen 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 watchmaker,
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 complained 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 excitement.  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 unusual 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, it you care to
hear it.'

Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval
of the club committee, and Elsmere's audience separated in a glow
of curiosity and expection.

'Didn't I tell ye?' the gas-fitter's snarling friend said to him.
'Scratch him and you find the parson.  Then 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 go to heaven without a certain number of 'em
slung about 'em.'

'Wait a bit!' said the gas-fitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a
certain raised inner temperature.

Next morning the North R---- Club was placarded with announcements
that on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver 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 inward struggle,
had accompanied her.  Their mid-day meal was over, and Robert had
been devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the
room in his wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand.
In particular, he had been coaxing her into friendship with a
wooden Japanese dragon which wound itself in awful yet most seductive
coils all 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 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 a rug beside a fascinating farm-yard
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 something 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 religious 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, but
through all his tender silence and consideration 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 of 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 of 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.

'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 realize for themselves the
historical character, so far as it can be, realized--to make them
see for themselves the real figure, as it went in and out among
men--so far as our eyes can now discern it.'

The words came quicker toward 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 historical
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?'

'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 persecute her
husband.  But what is persecution, if it is not the determination
not to understand?'

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, 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 awhile leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little
Mary's clamor, 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 unpalpable 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 realizes the working of
these things in other men's lives with it 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 chimney-piece, 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 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,' implied 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 offering 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 may 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. Andrew's, Wells 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 harbored 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 the right of it.  And
if so, why should I cut myself off from a whole host of beautiful
things not to be got outside her?  But the next day--_vive_ Elsmere
and the Revolution!  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 reading 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 nonchalance 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 Leyburn, too, might
like to hear her brother-in-law?'

'_Really_, Hugh,' cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, 'I think 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, however,
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 composedly.
'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?' 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. Wynnstay,
_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 Elsmeres.
Dropping his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a very delicate,
critical analysis of Catherine Elsmere's temperament 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 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 sob.  '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, however,'
she added, regaining her usual _role_ 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 menage.

Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with himself
and his manoeuvres.  Very likely it was quite unwise of him to have
devised another meeting between himself and Rose Leyburn 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 _role_ 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 Leyburn 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!  Evidently 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 addicted her.  In spite of all
her proud, bright reserve, 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, detaining it afterward
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 Langham 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 everything 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 spontaneously 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?' 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 between 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 up, and 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, and she coldly offered him her hand.  Why had Lady Charlotte
never told her he was to escort them?  Her irritation arose 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 grace_.'

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 disinterestedness, the quiet sense, and the humor 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 was not as ready as any bread-and-buttery 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--oh!
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 have 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 happened to her?  He must despise her to
have imagined it.  His outburst had filled her with the oddest and
most petulent 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 toward her maiden
dignity that romantic respect which she herself cherished toward
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 attitudinize to ourselves!  The whole of life often seems
one long dramatic performance, in which one-half of us is forever
posing to the other half.

But had he really made love to her?--had be meant what she had
assumed him to mean?  The girl lost herself in a torrent 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 was going
on.  The roadway and pavements were swarming; the carriage could
barely pick its way through the masses of human beings.  Flaming
gas-jets threw it all into strong satanic light and shade.  At this
corner of a dingy alley Rose could see a fight going on; the begrimed,
ragged children, regardless of the April rain, swooped backward and
forward 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, with the gray feathered hat, seemed especially
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, coloring,
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 dryly 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 swept 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 would
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 resumed their talk.  Rose
could not but see that his manner toward 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 afterward the drive
seemed to her more tedious and the dismal streets more dismal than
before.

She tried to forget her companions altogether.  Oh! what would
Robert have to say?  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 congenial to her, and there were
modern ferments at work in her.  No 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
everybody.  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 Madison 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 sufferance.'

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, Shakespeare, 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.

The hall was nearly full, and Mr. Flaxman 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-laborers, 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 color
and expression.  Almost everyone 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 further end, where
some political bravo seemed to be provoking his neighbors.  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
you 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 everybody, 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 among 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 gas-fitter 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 the
corners, stood beside him like some clumsy modern version, in a
commoner clay, of Goothe's 'spirit that denies.'

Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hands.

His first, words were hardly audible.  Rose felt her color 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 calmly down to
them.

In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experiences
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!'

Elsmere 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 patronized by your association.'

And he laid down on the 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
writings and such witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these
sheets do really help the cause of truth and intellectual 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 know, I
am endeavoring to make what is practically a settlement 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 rector 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 neighborhood 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 framework, 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 nervousness, 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 toward
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 neighbor, 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 conscience into his work, or a statesman
labors not for his own gain but for that of 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 depersonalize 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
man's 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 mans 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 everywhere the same
results.  Miracle may be the child of imagination, 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 disappears.  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 invective,
and savage mockery ever accomplished anything--nay, what is more
to the point, ever _destroyed_ anything in human history?  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 revolutionize except by sympathy.
Jesus only superseded Judaism by absorbing and re-creating all
that was best in it.  There are no inexplicable gaps and breaks in
the story of humanity.  The religion of the day with all its faults
and mistakes, 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 have seen all their noblest thoughts of God, of duty,
and of law embodied, realized before them with a shining and
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?  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 ineffaceably into the
civilization of Africa and Asia, so the life of Jesus is wrought
ineffaceably into the higher civilization, the nobler social
conceptions of Europe.  It is wrought into your being and into mine.
We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen 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?  The fact is merely a call to you and me, who recognize
it, to go, back to the roots of things, to re-conceive 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!_  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 documents 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 generation
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 labor 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 yearn to know--but,
such as it is, let me, very humbly and very tentatively, endeavor
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, he 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 Robert,
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 background, 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 Nazarene's
central conception--the spiritualized, universalized 'Kingdom 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 limitation, 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 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 unbearable.  Those listening
saw the trial, the streets of Jerusalem, 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 Palestin--_

              '"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 falseness, 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 imaginations 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?  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 something 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?  Love and revere _something_ we must, if we are to be
men and 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 Europeans
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 misrepresented by the
Churches we turn away from that in which our weak will; 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
brotherhood 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 out-worn forms and crystallizations
of older thought.  _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence and a more
reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired by his
memory, called afresh by his name!-Risen--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, in to which man's present has
breathed new meanings, shall be written:--

         '_In Thee, O 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 gas-fitter'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 _sang-froid_ 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 he 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 middle-men, 'as we'd like
to make it hot for 'em.'  But as for those people who got up the
Church-Mythologists Tom Paine called 'em-and the miracles, and made
an uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily speaking, he didn't
see what they'd got to do with keeping, 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
harsh savor and eloquence, which was much clapped by the small knot
of workmen among 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 themselves, and appealed earnestly
to his group of hearers 'to help in brining 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, know quite enough for the working-man--And people should not
be too smooth-spoken; what the working class wanted beyond 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 forward 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
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
AEtna 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 attenuated
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 unbearable.

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 atmosphere which blurred and magnified 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 from 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.

'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 vibrating 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, my friend, my
brother, and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim his own!'

Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beautiful;
never surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more penetrating
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 irritable 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, Newcome?' 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.  Newcome stood
wrestling with himself.  It was like the slow departure of a
possessing force.  Then he sombrely assented, and they turned toward
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 vigorously 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 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 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 gas-fitter 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 of 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 favorable 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 delivered
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 orthodox traditional teaching of
Christianity would become impossible as soon as it should be the
habit to make a free and modern use of history and geography and
social material in connection 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, &c.--supplanting 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 discussions which generally followed the lecture he
showed a receptiveness, 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 absolutely
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
_aa_bstract 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
armory 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 thinking, so providentially with his own
favorite experimental doctrines 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 afterward he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult.  He had the inherited temperament of
the Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of
Calvinism in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the
headquarters of continental radicalism in the nineteenth.  Robert
never felt his wits so much stretched and sharpened 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 Calvinistic 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 afterward 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 organization, the novelty of his position,
the inventiveness of his method, gave him little by little an immense
power in the place.  After the first two lectures 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 proportions; 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,
weaving 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, finding 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 projects of which that Elgood Street
room became the centre, Elsmere 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,
if it be honey-combed with vice and misery, is also honey-combed
with the labor of 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 among 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!  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!  How vain seem 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 lnstitute?  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 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 ardor 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 manuscript 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 attitude, '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 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 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 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 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
death-bed, shining with the Divine message, the 'visions' which to
her awe-struck childish sense would often seem to hold him in their
silent walks among the misty hills.

Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognize 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 stiffing 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 sympathize 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_ recognize 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.

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 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 neighbor'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, 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
favorable, 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 humor 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 assembled 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.  Catherine lingered a little, watching him longing
miserably, like any girl of eighteen, to throw herself on his neck
and reproach him for their unhappiness, his friends--she knew not
what!  He all the time was intimately conscious of her presence,
of her pale beauty, which now at twenty-seven, 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 delighted 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 super-human 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
action; his growing historical reputation drew the attention of the
men of thought.  Most people wished to know him and to talk to him,
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 gayety 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 impression 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 her
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 neighbor, 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 disagreeable 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.'

Poor brave goaded soul!  She had a vague idea of 'bearing testimony'
as her father would have borne it in like circumstances.  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 I 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 toward this
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 _role_ and weary
of himself!

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 knowledge 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 neighbors 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 young reformer's social simplicity, his dreams,
his optimisms.  But 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 neighborhood
of the enthusiast.

Presently she began to claim a practical interest in his 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 eyes, in the cordial grasp of the hand with which, he
said good-by 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 unbridled impulse--the secret,
and in one or two cases the shameful landmarks of her past.  And,
as persons of experience, they could also have warned you that the
cold intriguer, always mistress 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.

Toward the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine '_en petit comite_,
a gentleman's dinner--except for my cousin, Lady Aubrey Willert'--to
meet an eminent Liberal Catholic, a friend of Montalembert's youth.

It was a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw experiment.
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, looking 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 antagonism.  The memory of her Murewell
self flashed miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate
penitence toward him after her first sight of Newcome, of their
night walks during 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 evening Catherine sat
with the child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert.  He had gone
off early in the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to
take part in a committee of workmen organized 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.

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open on to
the bit of garden, where the trees are 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 impossible 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 relinquish
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?  '_I came not to send peace, but a
sword!_'

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 Catherine.  Shock and outburst
become inevitable.

So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by
vague terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about
her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, 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 rushed 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 your coat--_torn--blood!_'

'There is nothing wrong with _me_, dear,' he said hastily, taking
her hands 'nothing!  But it has been an awful afternoon.  Flaxman
will tell you.  I must go to this place, I suppose, 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 forward, '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 to regain, his ordinary
even manner.  His clothes, too, were covered with dust, and his
hand shook.  Catherine stood before him in consternation, while a
nurse came for the child.

'We had just begun our committee at four o'clock,' he said 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 gas-fitter,
who has been his right hand for the past three months?'

'No--never,' she said slowly.

Again he looked astonished; then he went on sadly: 'All this spring
he has been your husband's shadow, 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 know how to lift him
for the best.  We sent off for doctors.  His home was in the next
street, as it as it happened--nearer than any hospital; so we carried
him there.  The neighbors were around 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--"internal
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 further side, knelling.  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 it 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
neighbors 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
death-bed, 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 the window.  He told his
story with difficulty.

'Your husband tried to comfort him--promised that the wife and
children should be his special case, 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.  Toward 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.

'I 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?' 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 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 afternoon,
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 favorably.  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  got 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 afterward 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 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 herself, with memory,
with God.  It was the greatest moral upheaval 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, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had
to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which
were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westward 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 Querouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed
old gentleman of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more
lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptuous 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 looted 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 before-hand.  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 consideration
for him at dinner.  M. de Querouelle 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' sombre figure, of Maurice de Guerin'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
_distraut_, 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 French man, who had been informed
about him, and regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen
of English religious provincialisms.  The journalist, Mr. Addlestone,
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. Wharncliffe 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
Well 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 gunpowder 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 time you took me in to
dinner, that positively----'

'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the "Societe
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 meet, you gave me the cream of three new French
novels and all the dramatic 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
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 Cambridge _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 wall--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' 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?'

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 toward the farther end of the table.

'By Jove!' he said afterward to Wharncliffe as they walked away
from the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more
roles than Desforets!'  Sir John and his hostess were very old
friends.

Upstairs, smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining
in.  M. de Querouelle, 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
took at his watch.  Instantly Madame de Netteville glided up to
him.

'Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know
how nay affairs 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 toward 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' story, very shortly.  It would have been
impossible to him to give more than the dryest 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.'

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 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 kindness--'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?'

'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--but----'

'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug.  'I knew
you would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits.  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 dryly, his color 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.  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 himself 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 impossible
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 impression, 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-contemptuous
serenity.  He bowed again, this time with ironical emphasis, and
disappeared.

'Perhaps I had better go 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 was 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 Querouelle 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 scullery-maid 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 of 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 childhood, 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 a broken toy.
Besides, at no period of her life could she have looked upon a lost
possession as anything else than the opportunity 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 Querouelle
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 one 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 colors 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 know what
were the relations between himself and his wife--and had implored
him with the quick breath of an indescribable 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 repulsion, which his
most friendly biographer can only regard with a kind of grim
satisfaction.  For after all there is an amount of innocence and
absentmindedness 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
sentences, 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 her-self; 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 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 afterward 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 off 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 onward, in after days, he remembered 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 relation 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.  Nature 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.

'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?  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 dishonor 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 manliness 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
realized 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 afterward 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 realizes within himself, within the circle of
consciousness, the germs of all things hideous and vile.  '_Save
for the grace of God_,' he says to himself, shuddering, '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 something 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
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 absorbing himself
in a hundred outside interests, controversy, literature, society.
Even his work seemed to have lost half its sacredness.  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 himself, 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 homeward at last through the noise of Oxford Street,
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 motionless figure.  As he
closed the door it rose and walked toward 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 forever, 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!_----'

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 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 realize 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-jeopardized and wholly recovered; 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. Flaxman
left me.  You were right--I _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 know.  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?  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.'

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 announced 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 imparadisa la mia mente_.' Paradise is here,
visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands, whenever self is
lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of personality are beaten
down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit.



CHAPTER 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.  Afterward 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, ignorant, remorse supplied them.  But
they were hidden deep in Elsmere's memory.

A few days afterward 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.  He saw things as they were--without morbidness.  But a
certain boyish carelessness of mood he never afterward 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 toward certain spiritual ends.

On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman
which had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied 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 brooding had been
burnt into her mind.  The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook
on the high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched,
quick-eyed artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had
once loved, implied in everything, 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.

Afterward 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 coddled, 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
gayety, 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 convinced.  And,
meanwhile, the blessedness of this peace, this surrender!  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 dangerous 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 distance, 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.  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 list,
on a Friday, came the dreaded, expected letter: 'He is gone!  He
died early this morning, without pain, conscious 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, and 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 their 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 Langham'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 chilling 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.

'I 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 mouthfuls.  Langham was difficult, talked
disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon painfully conscious
that the old sympathetic bond between them no longer existed.
Presently, Langham, as though with an effort to remember, 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 presently, 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 animation.
'What purpose could be served?  Death should be avoided by the
living.  We have no business with it.  Do 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 him 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 he sat now with Langham, Grey had sat that first afternoon;
the freshman's curious eyes had been drawn again and again to the
dark 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 afterward which conveyed 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 honorably 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 accompanied
the group of gowned and venerable figures, representing the Heads
of Houses and the Professors, or mingled with the slowly pacing
crowds 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 conscious.  I
told you he mentioned your name among the friends to whom he sent
his good-by.  He thought for everybody.  For all those of his house
he left the most minute and tender directions.  He forgot nothing.
And all with such extraordinary 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?" 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 forgetfulness 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.

'Is Langham behind?' 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 anything
certain and irrevocable.  I understand. He could not say good-by
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 anything
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 Malvern, and
only reappears when the "Times" tells him the thing is done with.'

Both laughed.  Then Robert sighed.  Weaknesses of Langham'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 preparations.  Not a
sign now, in the 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.

'Elsmere, have you forgotten me?'

He turned and recognized 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 disgraceful escapade--an expulsion.

'You came for the funeral, of course?' said the other, his face
flushing consciously.

'Yes--and you too?'

The man turned away, and something in his silence led Robert 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, and 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 cemetery,
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 moving 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 sympathetic 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 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 pleasure 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 annoyance, who know 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 unwilling 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 lasting 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 insignificant chit of a schoolmasters
daughter should apparently care so little to be the Duke of Sedberg's
niece, and should even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing
a Flaxman; at another, utterly skeptical 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
civilization.  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.

'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 rode 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 wrongdoing 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.

Toward 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 honor
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 put them up to auction,' she said flippantly, 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 peoples 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
half-penny.  Listen.'

Rose listened; her eye kindled; the maid was summoned; and the
invitation accepted in Agnes's neatest hand.  Even 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 gayety 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, challenging 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 glowing so frankly from her
face, pointed her out as the school-girl of sweet sixteen, just
emancipated, and trying her wings.

'Ah, there is Lady Florence!' said her partner, a handsome young
Hussar.  'This ball is in her honor, 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 courtesy and whirled on again.

'_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 toward 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 growing 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, toward 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 Varley'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 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 _I_ broke I shouldn't mend.'

And still grumbling audibly about the floor, he hobbled off toward
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 chaperon's conversation such as, by the kind
contrivances of fate, a girl is tolerably sure to bear under similar
circumstances.

The debutante's good looks, Hugh Flaxman's apparent susceptibility
to them, the possibility of results, and the satisfactory 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 partners 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 occasionally to flavor her knitting with
literature, and she began 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 who thought
that the world was made for them_"-did it not run so?-"_and that,
all outside their own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism,
bestowed upon each other an amount of attention quite inconceivable.
. . . 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 intentioned 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 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 crowd of persons
who had been specially invited to 'meet their Royal Highnesses,'
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 eyes of Lady Florence's neighbors
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 descending 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 as fresh as the
flowers massed in the hall below.

'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 prevent herself from
falling down stairs, 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?  Don't speak--take mine.  Let me get you
down stairs 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.  Stinging 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 toward 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 displaced Agnes, and Rose
felt herself hoisted in by a strong arm.  She sank into the further
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 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 tempest 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 again driven
into a corner.  At the bottom of him was still a confidence that
would not yield.  Was it possible that he had 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 he should sit pensive on the banks of
Norwegian rivers till fortune had had time to change.




BOOK VII.

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 absorbing, 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' 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 skillfully treated, and after six weeks'
abstinence she had just returned to her children, and was being
watched by himself and a competent woman neighbor, whom he had
succeeded in interesting in the case.

Another was a young 'secret springer,' to use the mysterious terms
of the trade--Robson by name--whom Elsmere had originally known as
a clever workman belonging to the watchmaking 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 tumor
in the throat, and had become a torment to himself 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 humor
and clear-eyed despair.  In general outlook he was much akin to the
author of 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 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 also was becoming more and more the
instrument of far-reaching change, and thereafter, 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 nurtured 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 soul before the Eternal
Truth, no words can fitly describe.  With and ever increasing
detachment of mind from the objects of self and sense, he felt
himself a tool, in the Great Workman's hand, 'Accomplish 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 the 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; And 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 lectures. 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 intercourse.  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 preceding 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, however, 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
beginning, 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
favorite 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 mended 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 collaboration 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?  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 passion 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 clearing
his throat--

'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther
Elsmere?'

'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 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 mince 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 efficacious 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 excluding
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 organizing 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 between 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 workingmen in every
sort of working-dress, the occasional rumbling of huge wagons 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 had been killed before his eyes a year before
in a railway accident.

'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'll 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.  Robert 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 organization, and as to the observances 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 awe-struck, seemed to shine from the looks of the
men, standing or sitting round the central figure.  Even Lestrange
lost his smile under the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy
about him; and when Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there
weighed upon him 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 unconscious very
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 overtook 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 had 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 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 persuade 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 _plage_, along the irregular
village lane, to the little house where they had 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 humble
but perpetual warfare.  Then afterward 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 story 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
arm-chair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing, till dreaming,
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 professor of
the College de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist
or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of business.  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 around 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 glowing,
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 cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

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-colored
waves while he held her hand close and tenderly.  No--she was not
unhappy.  Something, indeed, had gone forever 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 XLVII.

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 loath 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 walks, breasting the mountains
in rain or sun, penetrating to their austerest solitudes alone, as
though haunted by that profound 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 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 Langham still roused in her a
pity that seemed to strain at her heartstrings.  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?

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! 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 Fill, '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 submissive, 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 had 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, however, since her illness had awoke
to that inquisitive affectionate 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 foot _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 dubiously.

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 we must be going home.'

Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a disapproving
sigh.

'You talk, William,' she said severely, '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 churchyard, 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_ this 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 a fine natural modesty,
would have preferred that his wife should refrain from whispering
on these topics in Rose's presence.  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 catechize
Rose, as to any marriageable young men she might have come across
in a recent visit to a great country-house of the neighborhood; an
operation which formed the invariable pendant to any of Rose's
absences.

So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homeward.  As
she did so she became aware of a man's figure walking along the
space of road between Graybarns 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 color 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?' she said after she had given him her
hand.  'Lady Helen told me last week she expected you in Ross-shire.'

Directly the word 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?'

He had caught her just on the little sweep, leading to 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. Leyburn is better than she was in town?  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 reveling in the sun and air.  I
am loath to go indoors yet awhile.  Are you 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 _sang-froid_ 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 toward 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 defined 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?'

They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast.  Mr. Flaxman, who
had been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete,
was giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles
shown by the primitive democrats of Norway.  As they passed a gap
in vicarage hedge, laughing and chatting, Rose became aware of a
window and a gray head hastily withdrawn.  Mr. Flaxman was puzzled
by the merry flash, instantly suppressed, that shoot 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 bed-ridden
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 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 is not an idiot could succeed in
killing himself.'

He looked at her, calmly smiling.

'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 traveled 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 Keswick--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 countenance.
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 attained
it.  Rather she seemed bent on hiding that face quite away from
him.  It seemed to him an age before, drawn by the 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 pursuing you--pressing
you.  Your manor 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
Norway 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 ill.  But suddenly 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?'

'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 was 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 whole life, has been to
win you?  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, its 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 hand 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 calmly, 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 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 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?'

She hesitated, and began to speak with difficulty, her eyes on the
ground.  But by the time they were in the main Shanmoor 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 bewildering 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 nothing so bad for the character as
universal popularity.'

'_I_ 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?' 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 myself too much to my family, and
too little to--'

'Not at all!' cried Rose hastily, adding, with charming incoherence,
while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in hex 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 realized dimly that she was hardly maintaining
the spirit of their contract, and that he was studying her with
eyes inconveniently bright and penetrating.

'Shall I quote to you,' he said, 'a sentence of Sterne's?  If it
violate our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. Strerne
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 license to behave like a bear toward all the
rest of the world.  _Affection may surely conduct thee through an
avenue of women to her who possesses thy heart without tearing the
flounces of any of their petticoats_"--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 I
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 afterward
understood, Rose for answer startled him and herself.  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 toward 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 mistaken.  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
hair-splittings of the situation delighted her ingenuous youth.
'I am free--he 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' cross-questioning on the matter, history
sayeth not.  Of one thing, however, a conscientious 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 impressions are equally easy
to make and equally fugitive.  He liked them all, she supposed, in
spite of the comparative scantiness of his later visit to Lerwick
Gardens, or he would not have gone out 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. Thornburgh 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 around Mrs. Leyburn, 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 afterward 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 flattered 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 evidently is very low.'

Hugh Flaxman's face fell.  Certain letters he had received from
Elsmere in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so pitiful
was the, half-conscious revelation in them of an incessant 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 Patites Dalles bay.  The
old _baigneur_ of the place, owner of the still primitive _etablissement
des bains_, without stopping to strip, or even to take off 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 arose 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, headed 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 grandchildren 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, miserable, 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
journey.  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 if 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-by was the little bunch of yellow briar
roses she gave him from her belt.

Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetot
to Petites Dalles.  It was the first of September.  A chilly west
wind blew up the dust before him and stirred the 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!  However, 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 perspicacity
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 benefit
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 Flaxman, 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 explain 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 reassuring 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, considering how severe the attack
had been.

'What do you think of him?' 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 momentary
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 of 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, with 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
magnificent _possibility_ of the Church; doubt with him applied to
all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he 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?

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 possession 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 religion for the asking?'

'But who can have it without?  _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 neighbor'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 religions 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!_  Of all words, the most tremendous?  Flaxman
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.'

'Must You? said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to
the practical.  'Why?'

'Look here!' And sitting down again on a sandhill overgrown with
wild grasses and mats of seathistle, 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 Murewell 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 afterward 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 at 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 emotion, 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; Catherine looked imploring in vain.  He
vowed that he was treating himself with a skill any professional
might envy, and went his way.  And for a time the stimulus of London
and of his work seemed to act favorably upon him.  After his first
welcome at the Club he came home with bright eye and vigorous step,
declaring that he was another man.

Flaxman established himself in St. James' Place.  Town was deserted,
the partridges at Greenlaws clamored 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 neighborhood 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 Leyburn 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!_'

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 employed in
warehousing goods belonging to various minor import trades, and
were hold 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 including also
Robert's helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons
interested in the man and his work from all parts--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 afterward that in Robert's attitude
toward 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,
brutalized, hostile to all things in heaven and earth?

'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the, role 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 maintenance
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 and naturally into being,
steeped and halloed, 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 infusing his own delicacy, his own
compunctions on the subject into the men and youths who had profited
in the past by Wardlaw'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 stiff-neckedness, so fatal to the average 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-patronizing
approval of the young barrister from the West who came down to
listen to him, and made a favor of teaching in his night-school,
were as precious to him as was the wholehearted, the self-abandoning
veneration, which the majority of those about him had begun to show
toward 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 it's clean paint, the half-filled
shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the walls
ready to be hung, the rolls of bright-colored matting 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 persuade 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 surrounded 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 conspicuous sign of membership.
Men came of all sorts: the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid
clerk or small accountant, stalwart warehouse men, huge carters and
dray-men, 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;' prim pupil-teachers, holding themselves
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 platform, the two great
inscriptions, which represented the only 'articles' of the new
faith, gleaming from the freshly colored walls:--

'_In thee, O Eternal, have I 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 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 hot 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 judgement 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 workingmen, the rest of the upper class; Elsmere,
of course, President.'

'Since then the first religious service under the new constitution
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 ignorant 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 realize the germs of
miraculous belief which each mass 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 marvelous element 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 wherever the sense
required it.  Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk
before her, and with choking sobs implored 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 stiffer
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 every-day
life of the Brotherhood.  They have been most carefully chosen, and
a sort of ritual importance has been attached to them from the
beginning.  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 saying of Vinet's:
"_C'est pour la religion que le peuple a le plus de talent; c'est
en religion qu'il montre le plus 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 Brotherhood.  It is that which
has raised most angry comment, cries of "profanity," "wanton insult,"
and whatnot.  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 neighborhood, when he asked me to go
and take a message to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary
help in the evening, after his day'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 mid-day
meal, a few bloaters, some potatoes, and bread.  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 themselves 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!--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_ chairman of a large proportion;
Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a few other fellows, "run" the rest for the
present.  But each committee contains workingmen; 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 going 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 undertaking 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 principles of the new
movement, of '"that continuous and leading 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 anything
to equal it.  As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it all
seriously, and don't know what to make of him or myself.

'_She_, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with him day
after day, and works away.  She no more believes in 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 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 organize 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?'

'More or less for the last month.  He is very much worried by it
himself, and talks of clergyman's throat.  He had a touch of it,
it appears, once in the country.'

'Clergyman's throat?' Edmondson shook his bead 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.  And 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 faced 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 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 down stairs, 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 calling impossible to disobey.  A telegram
was sent to Edmondson, and Robert drove off to Waterloo.

Out of the form 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 traveled 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 acquaintances 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?

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 over the neighborhood,
and he jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the
alacrity of a boy.

'Go on, Tom; see if I'm 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 confession 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 of 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 yearning and affection.
In that upper room he had lain through that agonized night of
crisis! the dawn-twittering 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 further 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.  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 lordly 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, 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,
recognizing from a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror
hanging by, that something of his natural color had returned to
him, he rose and bade Vincent announce him.

'And Mrs. Darcy?' he asked, as they stopped out into the hall again.

'Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she's very well,' said the man, but, as it
seemed to Robert 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 distinctness.

'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 mendin--oh yes,
mending, sir--no doubt of it.'

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 trampling
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 affectionately
on the old man's knee.

'I have added to my knowledge,' said the Squire dryly, 'Like Heine,
I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance 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 time we met?'

Robert smiled.

The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the
sarcastic gleam of the eyes.

'For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things
with neither of which you had 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!_'

'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.

'What did you think of her?'

'Very much what you told me to think--intellectually,' replied
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?'

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, quiveringly through.  The cynic
of a moment ago had dropped suddenly into a  sleep of more than
childish weakness and defenselessness.

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 figures 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 remained.  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 yet 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, darkening 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 them is ill, and
they won't let me have the doctor.'

Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness.  She 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 perplexity into which there slipped an
involuntary shiver.  Suddenly 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 toward 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 rubbish,'
he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, '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 yon 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.

Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been coming in
and out throughout 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 finger to the performance.  They took him up the library stairs,
through the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which had been
his father's, and so into his own.  By the time they set him down
he was quite aware and conscious again.

'It can't be said that I follow my own precepts,' he said to Robert
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 I 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.  Outside,
the night was slightly frosty.  A clear moon shone over the sloping
reaches of the park; the trees shone silvery 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 he
found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation,
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-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 sideways 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 underneath, 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, emphasizing, 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 moving.  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 anyone could hear,
and that then he would kill himself as his father did.'

Again be 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, 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.

Meyrick 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'll watch.  Oh, my
scratch is nothing, sir.  I'm used to a rough-and-tumble 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 he himself could hardly stand.
He crept away to his own room, his nerves still quivering 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 weakness 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 woodpath?  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 down?  Death here!  Death there!
Death everywhere, yawning 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 image
of the river of Death took possession of him.  He stood himself on
the brink: on the other side was Grey and the Squire.  But he felt
no pang of separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to
cross and join them!  And during a strange brief lull of feeling
the mind harbored image and expectation 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, the 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 his 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 traginc 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
every cry but their own.

'_Quittez,--quittez,--le long espoir et les vastes pensees!_'



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 weariness, and
develops into one of the most rapid forms of phthisis.  In his
opinion it had been originally set up by the effects of that chill
at Petites Dalles acting upon a constitution never strong, and at
that moment peculiarly susceptible 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 his _arret
de mort_ at the hands of the young doctor, who announced 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 Edmondson'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
agonized 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!'

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 wit Robert, and his further interview with
Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommendations and
directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed to 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 Murewell 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 afternoon, he went
like a man going himself to execution.  In the hall he met Catherine.

'You have seen Dr. Edmondson?' 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 on 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 fell them?'

A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it.  Never did he forget the
scene.  Some ominous rumor had spread, and the New Brotherhood was
besieged.  Impossible to give the reading.  A hall full of strained
up-turned faces listened to Flaxman's announcement, and to Elsmere's
messages of cheer and exhortation, 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 resident on the spot was to take all trouble off
their hands; they were to find servants ready for them, and every
comfort.

Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness with a
self-reliant calm that never failed.  But it seemed to Flaxman 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?  The momentary 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 gazing 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-by
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 with a fatherly concern.

'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 lot the Deil mak' hay o' it, if
we knaws it--the auld leer!' he added with a phraseology which did
more honor 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
toward _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?
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, seeing Robert's
look of distress, he seemed to cast about for something 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 the _frondeur_
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 consequences.
She herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, comforting the
sobbing creatures afterward 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-mmorow, wife, to-morrow!  _Cras ingens iterabimus sequor_.  Ah
me!  I leave _my_ new Salamis behind!'

But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham
and Newcome.

'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-by--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 impossible.

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
sometimes 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"-Flaxman!  An enchanted land--air, sun,
warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled
Eastern beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis--everything
that feeds the outer and the inner man.  To throw the window open
at waking to the depth of sunlit air 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.  Imagine, if she
were a trifle older, her mother would hardly view the proceedings
of those dear berosaried women with so much equanimity.'

'As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and receives
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 himself to hope, he found it a doubly hard
task to submit.'

Ah, 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 vigor, showed itself now in all its stern nakedness--sat
down, as it were, eye to eye with Elsmere--immovable, 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 withdraw 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 bowing 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 effort, Robert his
last stand.  As we know, ever since that passionate 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 before hand 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 feverish 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 sheen 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 cited, 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!'

He stroked her hair tenderly.

'My weariness 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 all indescribable self abasement.  They
had had their last struggle, and once more he had conquered!
Afterward 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 it's
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?  And He, the source
of love, of justice----'


Flaxman arrived a few days afterward.  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, olive-yard 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
parasol 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 civilization.  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
splendor 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 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 word.


But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that sometimes goes
with 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 confess himself, and, when
Flaxman left him, at once sent for Catherine and told her.

Catherine, coming out afterward, 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 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,
down stairs at eleven, read his English 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; underneath a revel of
every imaginable flower--narcissus and anemones, 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 monograph 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 favorite poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil.
Virgil perhaps most frequently.  Flaxman would read the AEneid aloud
to him, Robert following the passages he loved best in 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 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 rebuilding.
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, he 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 l'ignore;
quand on ne me le demande pas, je le sais tres-bien!_"  No, we
cannot, realize 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-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 day 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! Meyrick--Catherine--thank God!_'

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 Burwood.  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.


THE  END





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