'If it were Ireland it might be to somebody's interest to ferret it out,' said Robert bitterly. 'But these poor folks are out of the world. They may be brutalised with impunity. Oh, such a case as I had here last autumn! A young girl of sixteen or seventeen, who would have been healthy and happy anywhere else, stricken by the damp and the poison of the place, dying in six weeks, of complications due to nothing in the world but 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 Mister 'Enslowe would jest 'a mended that bit 'o roof of ours last winter, Bessie needn't have laid in the wet so many nights as she did, and she coughin' fit to break your heart, for all the things yer could put over 'er."'

Robert paused, his strong young face, so vehemently angry a few minutes before, tremulous with feeling. 'Ah, well,' he said at last with a long breath, moving away from the parapet of the bridge on which he had been leaning, 'better be oppressed than oppressor, any day! Now, then, I must deliver my stores. There's a child here Catherine and I have been doing our best to pull through typhoid.'

They crossed the bridge and turned down the track leading to the hamlet. Some planks carried them across the ditch, the main sewer of the community, as Robert pointed out, and they made their way through the filth surrounding one of the nearest cottages.

A feeble elderly man, whose shaking limbs and sallow bloodless skin make him look much older than he actually was, opened the door and invited them to come in. Robert passed on into an inner room, conducted thither by a woman who had been sitting working over the fire. Langham stood irresolute; but the old man's quavering 'kindly take a chair, sir; you've come a long way,' decided him, and he stepped in.

Inside the hovel was miserable indeed. It belonged to that old and evil type which the efforts of the last twenty years have done so much all over England to sweep away: four mud walls, enclosing an oblong space about eight yards long, divided into two unequal portions by a lath and plaster partition, with no upper storey, a thatched roof, now entirely out of repair, and letting in the rain in several places, and a paved floor little better than the earth itself, so large and cavernous were the gaps between the stones. The dismal place had no small adornings—none of those little superfluities which, however ugly and trivial, are still so precious in the dwellings of the poor, as showing the existence of some instinct or passion which is not the creation of the sheerest physical need; and Langham, as he sat down, caught the sickening marsh smell which the Oxford man, accustomed to the odours of damp meadows in times of ebbing flood and festering sun, knows so well. As old Milsom began to talk to him in his weak tremulous voice, the visitor's attention was irresistibly held by the details about him. Fresh as he was from all the delicate sights, the harmonious colours and 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. '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 realised that, in this quarter of his parish at any rate, his friend's pastoral vanity, if he had any, would not find much to feed on. Nothing, to judge from this specimen at least, greatly affected an inhabitant of Mile End. Gratitude, responsiveness, imply health and energy, past or present. The only constant defence which the poor have against such physical conditions as those which prevailed at Mile End is apathy.

As they came down the dilapidated steps at the cottage door, Robert drew in 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 drily; 'but as you may want hereafter to make excuses for your man, and he may give you occasion, I wouldn't begin by painting him to yourself any blacker than need be.'

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 afterwards but a little scene in a miserable cottage, where they found a whole family party gathered round the mid-day meal. A band of puny, black, black-eyed children were standing or sitting at the table. The wife, confined of twins three weeks before, sat by the fire, deathly pale, a 'bad leg' stretched out before her on some improvised support, one baby on her lap and another dark-haired bundle asleep in a cradle beside her. There was a pathetic pinched beauty about the whole family. Even the tiny twins were comparatively shapely; all the other children had delicate transparent skins, large eyes, and small colourless mouths. The father, a picturesque handsome fellow, looking as though he had gipsy blood in his veins, had opened the door to their knock. Robert, seeing the meal, would have retreated at once, in spite of the children's shy inviting looks, but a glance past them at the mother's face checked the word of refusal and apology on his lips, and he stepped in.

In after years Langham was always apt to see him in 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, some one who will be proud of her, and yet have a full life of his own in which she may share.'

'Your views are extremely clear,' said Langham, and his smile had a touch of bitterness in it. 'If hers agree, I prophesy you won't have long to wait. She has beauty, talent, charm—everything that rich and important men like.'

There was the slightest sarcastic note in the voice. Robert winced. It was borne in upon one of the least worldly of mortals that he had been talking like the veriest schemer. What vague quick impulse had driven him on?

By the time they emerged again upon the Murewell Green the rain had cleared altogether away, and the autumnal morning had broken into sunshine, which played mistily on the sleeping woods, on the white fronts of the cottages, and the wide green where the rain-pools glistened. On the hill leading to the rectory there was the flutter of a woman's dress. As they hurried on, afraid of being late for luncheon, they saw that it was Rose in front of them.

Langham started as the slender figure suddenly defined itself against the road. A tumult within, half rage, half feeling, showed itself only in an added rigidity of the finely-cut features.

Rose turned directly she heard the steps and voices, and over the dreaminess of her face there flashed a sudden brightness.

'You have been a long time!' she exclaimed, saying the first thing that came into her head, joyously, rashly, like the child she in reality was. 'How many halt and maimed has Robert taken you to see, Mr. Langham?'

'We went to Murewell first. The library was well worth 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 any one can ever tear themselves away from the country?'

'Rose, don't be abusive,' said Robert, opening his eyes at her tone. Then, passing his arm through hers, he looked banteringly down upon her. 'For the first time since you left the metropolis you have walked yourself into a colour. 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 analyse. 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 towards 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 Englishmen, as a whole, like attempting the contradictory—like, above all, to eat their cake and have it. The nation has made you and maintains you for its own purposes. But that is another matter.'

Robert smoked on a moment in silence. Then he flushed and laid down his pipe.

'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 you think,' said Rose briskly, covering a parish library book the while in a way which made Catherine's fingers itch to take it from her, 'and for us? It's some use having a carrier now.'

Catherine made no reply. She thought of the 'noodle' fading out of life in the room where Mary Backhouse died; she actually saw the white hair, the blurred eyes, the palsied hands, the poor emaciated limbs stretched along the settle. Her heart rose, but she said nothing.

'And has Mrs. Thornburgh been enjoying her summer?'

'Oh! I suppose so,' said Rose, her tone indicating a quite measureless indifference. 'She had another young Oxford man staying with her in June—a missionary—and it annoyed her very much that neither Agnes nor I would intervene to prevent his resuming his profession. She seemed to think it was a question of saving him from being eaten, and apparently he would have proposed to either of us.'

Catherine could not help laughing. 'I suppose she still thinks she married Robert and me.'

'Of course. So she did.'

Catherine coloured a little, but Rose's hard lightness of tone was unconquerable.

'Or if she didn't,' Rose resumed, 'nobody could have the heart to rob her of the illusion. Oh, by the way, Sarah has been under warning since June! Mrs. Thornburgh told her 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. Mrs. 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. 'Every one in Long Whindale is always just where and what they were last year. I admit they are born and die, but they do nothing else of a decisive kind.'

Catherine's hands worked away for a while, then she laid down her book and said, lifting her clear large eyes on her sister,—

'Was there never a time when you loved the valley, Rose?'

'Never!' cried Rose.

Then she pushed away her work, and leaning her elbows on the table turned her brilliant face to Catherine. There was frank mutiny in it.

'By the way, Catherine, are you going to prevent mamma from letting me go to Berlin for the winter?'

'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 workroom with her white wrists locked behind her, she met that argument with all the concentrated passion which her youth had for years been storing up against it. Catherine sat presently overwhelmed, bewildered. This language of a proud and tameless 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, he 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 strolling 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 towards the lonely sceptic who had once been so good to Robert.

Robert was just bethinking himself that it was time to go off to the school, when they were all startled by an unexpected visitor—a short old lady, in a rusty black dress and bonnet, who entered the drive and stood staring at the rectory party, a tiny hand in a black thread glove shading the sun from a pair of wrinkled eyes.

'Mrs. Darcy!' exclaimed Robert to his wife after a moment's perplexity, and they walked quickly to meet her.

Rose and Langham exchanged a few commonplaces till the others joined them, and then for a while the attention of everybody in the group was held by the squire's sister. She was very small, as thin and light as thistle-down, ill-dressed, and as communicative as a babbling child. The face and all the features were extraordinarily minute, and moreover, blanched and etherealised by age. She had the elfish look of a little withered fairy godmother. And yet through it all it was clear that she was a great lady. There were certain poses and gestures about her, which made her thread gloves and rusty skirts seem a mere whim and masquerade, adopted, perhaps deliberately, from a high-bred love of congruity, to suit the country lanes.

She had come to ask them all to dinner at the Hall on the following evening, and she either brought or devised on the spot the politest messages from the squire to the new rector, which pleased the sensitive Robert and silenced for the moment his various misgivings as to Mr. Wendover's advent. Then she stayed chattering, studying Rose every now and then out of her strange little eyes, restless and glancing as a bird's, which took stock also of the garden, of the flower-beds, of Elsmere's lanky frame, and of Elsmere's handsome friend in the background. She was most odd when she was grateful, and she was grateful for the most unexpected things. She thanked Elsmere effusively for 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 could hardly keep his countenance.

She thought it particularly considerate of them to have been to see the squire's books. It would make conversation so easy when they came to dinner.

'Though I don't know anything about his books. He doesn't like women to talk about books. He says they only pretend—even the clever ones. Except, of course, Madame de Stael. He can only say she was ugly, and I don't deny it. But I have about used up Madame de Stael,' she added, dropping into another sigh as soft and light as a child's.

Robert was charmed with her, and even Langham smiled. And as Mrs. Darcy adored 'clever men,' ranking them, as the London of her youth had ranked them, only second to 'persons of birth,' she stood among them beaming, becoming more and more whimsical and inconsequent, more and more deliciously incalculable, as she expanded. At last she fluttered off, only, however, to come hurrying back, with little, short, scudding steps, to implore them all to come to tea with her as soon as possible in the garden that was her special hobby, and in her last new summer-house.

'I build two or three every summer,' she said. 'Now, there are twenty-one! Roger laughs at me,' and there was a momentary bitterness in the little eerie face, 'but how can one live without hobbies? That's one—then I've two more. My album—oh, you will all write in my album, won't you? When I was young—when I was Maid of Honour'—and she drew herself up slightly—'everybody had albums. Even the dear Queen herself! I remember how she made M. Guizot write in it; something quite stupid, after all. Those hobbies—the garden and the album—are quite harmless, aren't they? They hurt nobody, do they?' Her voice dropped a little, with a pathetic expostulating intonation in it, as of one accustomed to be rebuked.

'Let me remind you of a saying of Bacon's,' said Langham, studying her, and softened perforce into benevolence.

'Yes, yes,' said Mrs. Darcy in a flutter of curiosity.

'God Almighty first planted a garden,' he quoted; 'and indeed, it is the purest of all human pleasures.'

'Oh, but how delightful!' cried Mrs. Darcy, clasping her diminutive hands in their thread gloves. 'You must write that in my album, Mr. Langham, that very sentence; oh, how clever of you to remember it! What it is to be clever and have a brain! But, then—I've another hobby——'

Here, however, she stopped, hung her head and looked depressed. Robert, with a little ripple of laughter, begged her to explain.

'No,' she said plaintively, giving a quick uneasy look at him, as though it occurred to her that it might some day be his pastoral duty to admonish her. 'No, it's wrong. I know it is—only I can't help it. Never mind. You'll know soon.'

And again she turned away, when, suddenly, Rose attracted her attention, and she stretched out a thin white bird-claw of a hand and caught the girl's arm.

'There won't be much to amuse 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 some one had pricked her. While Catherine and Elsmere escorted Mrs. Darcy to the gate she turned to go in, her head thrown back stag-like, her cheek still burning. Why should it be always open to the old to annoy the young with impunity?

Langham watched her mount the first step or two; his eye travelled up the slim figure so instinct with pride and will—and something in him suddenly gave way. It was like a man who feels his grip relaxing on some attacking thing he has been holding by the throat.

He followed her hastily.

'Must you go in? And none of us have paid our respects yet to those phloxes in the back garden?'

Oh woman—flighty woman! An instant before, the girl, sore and bruised in every fibre, she only half knew why, was thirsting that this man might somehow offer her his neck that she might trample on it. He offers it, and the angry instinct wavers, as a man wavers in a wrestling match when his 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 were hardly out before she could have bitten the tongue that spoke them. He had made her feel her indiscretions of Sunday night as she deserved to feel them, and now after three minutes conversation she was on the verge of fresh ones. Would she never grow up, never behave like other girls? That word humble! 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-bye to St. Anselm's, and to turn my back for good and all on my men. I can't remember that I have wished for anything else for six years.'

She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely languid, or was it from him that the emotion she felt invading herself first started? 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! Realise once for all that you have nothing to do with them. Life is theirs—belongs to them. You are already outside it. Go your way, and be a spectre among the active and the happy no longer."'

He leant his back against the gate. Did he see her? Was he conscious of her at all in this rare impulse of speech which had suddenly overtaken one of the most withdrawn and silent of human beings? All her airs dropped off her; a kind of fright seized her; and involuntarily she laid her hand on his arm.

'Don't—don't—Mr. Langham! Oh, don't say such things! Why should you be so unhappy? 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 disorganised. She could not bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to have been laid bare to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary scene—to both a kind of lifetime.

Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort.

'That was adorable of you,' he said with a long breath. 'But I stole it—I despise myself. Why should you pity me? 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 these Langham put into words with an extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was something in him which found a kind of pleasure in the long analysis, which took pains that it should be infinitely well done.

Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of literature she would have realised that she was witnessing a masterly dissection of one of those many morbid growths of which our nineteenth century psychology is full. But she was anything but literary, and she could not analyse her excitement. The man's physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity of what he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect her. And through it all there was the strange girlish pride that this should have befallen her; a first crude intoxicating sense of the power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a 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 drily, 'I am not slow to retaliate. Every term I live I find the young man a less interesting animal. I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.'

And for one curious instant he looked out over the village, his fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent, longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing what cue to take.

'And then—' he went on presently (but was the strange being speaking to her?)—'so long as I stay there, worrying those about me, and eating my own heart out, I am cut off from the only life that might be mine, that I might find the strength to live.'

The words were low and deliberate. After his moment of passionate speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began to feel strangely remote from him.

'Do you mean the life of the student?' she asked him after a pause, timidly.

Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her.

'Of the dreamer, rather.'

And as her eyes still questioned, as he was still moved by the spell of her responsiveness, he let the new wave of feeling break in words. Vaguely at first, and then with a growing flame and force, he fell to describing to her what the life of thought may be to the thinker, and those marvellous moments which belong to that life when the mind which has divorced itself from desire and sense sees spread out before it the vast realms of knowledge, and feels itself close to the secret springs and sources of being. And as he spoke, his language took an ampler turn, the element of smallness which attaches to all mere personal complaint vanished, his words flowed, became eloquent, inspired, till the bewildered child beside him, warm through and through as she was with youth and passion, felt for an instant by sheer fascinated sympathy the cold spell, the ineffable prestige, of the thinker's voluntary death in life.

But only for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill smote her to the heart.

'You make me shiver,' she cried, interrupting him. 'Have those strange things—I don't understand them—made you happy? Can they make any one happy? Oh no, no! 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 afterwards if I can't get it, or if I get too much of it, why then I will love you, live with you. You are my second string, my reserve. You—and art—and poetry."'

'But everything depends on feeling,' he said softly, but lightly, as though to keep the conversation from slipping back into those vague depths it had emerged from; 'and if one has forgotten how to feel—if when one sees or hears something beautiful that used to stir one, one can only say "I remember it moved me once!"—if feeling dies, like life, like physical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man!'

She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism.

'Oh, I cannot imagine it!' she cried. 'I shall feel to my last hour.' Then, after a pause, in another tone, 'But, Mr. Langham, you say music excites you, Wagner excites you?'

'Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,' he admitted, smiling.

'Well then,' and she looked at him persuasively, 'why not give yourself up to music? It is so easy—so little trouble to one's self—it just takes you and carries you away.'

Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious—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 big book going, and cheat the years after all, I suppose, as well as most people.'

'And you will know, you will remember,' she said faltering, reddening, her womanliness forcing the words out of her, 'that you have friends: Robert—my sister—all of us?'

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 clamouring to be heard. He—the man of thirty-five—confessing himself, making a tragic scene, playing Manfred or Cain to this adorable half-fledged creature, whom he had known five days! Supposing Elsmere had been there to hear—Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh! As he leant over the gate he found himself quivering with impatience to be away—by himself—out of reach—the critic in him making the most bitter remorseless mock of all these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But for the life of him he could not find a word to say—a move to make. He stood hesitating, gauche, as usual.

'Do you know, Mr. Langham,' said Rose lightly, by his side, 'that there is no time at all left for you to give me good advice in? That is an obligation still hanging over you. I don't mean to release you from it, but if I don't go in now and finish the covering of those library books, the youth of Murewell will be left without any literature till Heaven knows when!'

He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into common mundanity.

'Hang literature—hang the parish library!' he said with a laugh as he moved after her. Yet his real inner feeling towards that parish library was one of infinite friendliness.

'Hear these men of letters!' she said scornfully. But she was happy; there was a glow on her cheek.

A bramble caught her dress; she stopped and laid her white hand to it, but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and between them they wrenched it away, but not till those soft slim fingers had several times felt the neighbourhood of his brown ones, and till there had flown through and through him once more, as she stooped over him, the consciousness that she was young, that she was beautiful, that she had pitied him so sweetly, that they were alone.

'Rose!'

It was Catherine calling—Catherine, who stood at the end of the grass-path, with eyes all indignation and alarm.

Langham rose quickly from the ground.

He felt as though the gods had saved him—or damned him—which?



CHAPTER XVII

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 neighbours.

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 wifie,' he said to her, 'I am certain Langham has no intention of marrying.'

'Then more shame for him,' cried Catherine, flushing. 'They could not have looked more conscious, Robert, when I found them together, if he had just proposed.'

'What, in five days?' said Robert, more than half inclined to banter his wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine made no answer. 'I believe with men of that sort,' he said at last, 'relations to women are never more than half-real—always more or less literature—acting. Langham is tasting an 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 towards Rose, who was either chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional, or taking off the ways of some famous teacher; or else, which was worse, playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound—now as soft and delicate as first love, now as full and grand as storm waves on an angry coast. And the sister going with compressed lip to her work-table would recognise sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and never had the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her.

As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene in the garden he had rated, satirised, examined himself in the most approved introspective style. One half of him declared that scene to have been the heights of melodramatic absurdity; the other thought of it with a thrill of tender gratitude towards the young pitiful creature who had evoked it. After all, why, because he was alone in the world and must remain so, should he feel bound to refuse this one gift of the gods, the delicate passing gift of a girl's—a child's friendship? As for her, the man's very real, though wholly morbid, modesty scouted the notion of love on her side. He was a likely person for a beauty on the threshold of life and success to fall in love with; but she meant to be kind to him, and he smiled a little inward 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 any one in her life. There was in her a vehemence of antagonism to the man's manner, his pessimism, his infidelity, his very ways of speaking and looking, which astonished even herself.

Robert's eager soul meanwhile, for once irresponsive to Catherine's, was full of nothing but the squire. At last the moment was come, and that dumb spiritual friendship he had formed through these long months with the philosopher and the savant was to be tested by sight and speech of the man. He bade himself a hundred times pitch his expectations low. But curiosity and hope were keen, in spite of everything.

Ah, those parish worries! Robert caught the smoke of Mile End in the distance, curling above the twilight woods, and laid about him vigorously with his stick on the squire's shrubs, as he thought of those poisonous hovels, those ruined lives! But, after all, it might be mere ignorance, and that wretch 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 recognised Langham as having met him at Oxford.

Having done so he turned back to the knot of people with whom he had been engaged on their entrance. His manner had been reserve itself. The hauteur of the grandee on his own ground was clearly marked in it, and Robert could not help fancying that towards himself there had even been something more. And not one of those phrases which, under the 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 has received a blow, as he moved across to the other side of the fireplace to shake hands with the worthy family doctor, old Meyrick, who was already well known to him. Catherine, in some discomfort, for she too had felt their 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 towards the Romney portrait of Mr. Wendover's grandmother, and was certain when he stooped afterwards to say something to his companion, that he was commenting on a certain surface likeness there was between her and the young auburn-haired beauty of the picture. Hateful! And they would be sent down to dinner together to a certainty.

The other guests were Lady Charlotte Wynnstay, a cousin of the squire—a tall, imperious, loud-voiced woman, famous in London society for her relationships, her audacity, and the salon which in one way or another she managed to collect round her; her dark, thin, irritable-looking husband; two neighbouring 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 neighbourhood—the wife of a neighbouring squire whose property joined that of Murewell Hall, one Lady Helen Varley, of whom more presently. Lady Charlotte was the sister of the Duke of Sedbergh, one of the greatest of dukes, and the sister also of Lady Helen's mother, Lady Wanless. Lady Wanless had died prematurely, and her two younger children, Helen and Hugh Flaxman, creatures both of them of unusually fine and fiery quality, had owed a good deal to their aunt. There were family alliances between the Sedberghs and the Wendovers, and Lady Charlotte made a point of keeping up with the squire. She adored cynics and people who said piquant things, and it amused her to make her large tyrannous hand felt by the squire's timid, crack-brained, ridiculous little sister.

As to Dr. Meyrick, he was tall and gaunt as Don Quixote. His gray hair made a ragged fringe round his straight-backed head; he wore an old-fashioned neck-cloth; his long body had a perpetual stoop, as though of deference, and his spectacled look of mild attentiveness had nothing in common with that medical self-assurance with which we are all nowadays so familiar. Robert noticed presently that when he addressed Mrs. Darcy he said 'Ma'am,' making no bones at all about it; and his manner generally was the manner of one to whom class distinctions were the profoundest reality, and no burden at all on a naturally humble temper. Dr. Baker, of Whindale, 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 neighbour as they sat down. The table was entirely covered with Japanese lilies, save for the splendid silver candelabra from which the light flashed, first on to the faces of the guests, and then on to those of the family portraits, hung thickly round the room. A roof embossed with gilded Tudor roses on a ground of black oak hung above them; a rose-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 colour made by the reddish gold of her hair, the warm whiteness of her skin, and the brown-pink tints of her dress, at the crystals playing the part of diamonds on her beautiful neck, and remembered Robert's remarks to him. The same irony mingled with the same bitterness returned to him, and the elder brother's attitude became once more temporarily difficult. 'Who is your neighbour?' he inquired of her presently.

'Lady Charlotte's husband,' she answered mischievously, under her breath. 'One needn't know much more about him I imagine!'

'And that man opposite?'

'Robert's pet aversion,' she said calmly, without a change of countenance, so that Mr. Longstaffe opposite, who was studying her as he always studied pretty young women, stared at her through her remark in sublime ignorance of its bearing.

'And your sister's neighbour?'

'I can't hit him off in a sentence, he's too good!' said Rose laughing; 'all I can say is that Mrs. Bickerton has too many children, and the children have too many ailments for her ever to dine out.'

'That will do; I see the existence,' said Langham with a shrug. 'But he has the look of an apostle, though a rather hunted one. Probably nobody here, except Robert, is fit to tie his shoes.'

'The squire could hardly be called empresse,' said Rose, after a second, with a curl of her red lips. Mr. Wynnstay was still safely engaged with Mrs. Darcy, and there was a buzz of talk largely sustained by Lady Charlotte.

'No,' Langham admitted; 'the manners I thought were not quite equal to the house.'

'What possible reason could he have for treating Robert with those airs?' said Rose indignantly, ready enough in girl fashion to defend her belongings against the outer world. 'He ought to be only too glad to have the opportunity of knowing him and making friends with him.'

'You are a sister worth having;' and Langham smiled at her as she leant back in her chair, her white arms and wrists lying on her lap, and her slightly flushed face turned towards him. They had been on these pleasant terms of camaraderie all day, and the intimacy between them had been still making strides.

'Do you imagine I don't appreciate Robert because I make 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 his 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 airs 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 neighbourhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most truly that he had. Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over.

'Ah! but you haven't read it,' she said regretfully. 'It was when I was Maid of Honour, you know. No Maid of Honour had ever written a novel before. It was quite an event. Dear 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, Mr. Wynnstay being a lover of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris; and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte, in the pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the domestic hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a name for any sort of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity; and the company in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seriously soured a small irritable Conservative with more family pride than either nerves or digestion.

During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched 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 afterwards. Twenty years in a cathedral town—and a very little cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, and dear Lord Melbourne! Every year I came up to town to stay with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn't been for that 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 neighbours had been laughing at it.

'Ah!' cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a chuckle, 'that was an Archbishop worth having!'

'A curious story,' said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it, however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed to Robert that the squire's keen eye, as he sat looking down the table, with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed upon himself.

'May we hear the story?' he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and moved out of her ordinary quiet.

'It is a story of Archbishop Manners 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 re-told for his special benefit, and that in some unexplained way the relations between him and the squire were already biassed. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and falling back into his place made no comment on the squire's anecdote. Lady Charlotte's eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the distant figure of the rector, with regard to whom she had been asking Dr. Meyrick for particulars, quite unmindful of Catherine's neighbourhood, turned back again towards the squire.

'An unblushing old worldling, I should call your Archbishop,' she said briskly. 'And a very good thing for him that he lived when he did. Our modern good people would have dusted his apron for him.'

Lady Charlotte prided herself on these vigorous forms of speech, and the squire's neighbourhood generally called 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—every one bent upon making any sort of aimless commotion, which may serve him both as an investment for the next world, and an advertisement for this.'