"As you please," said the other indifferently. "I have no doubt I shall find myself in the newspapers before long. If so, I daresay I shall manage to put up with it. Society is made up of fanatics and the creatures they hunt. If I am to be hunted, I shall be in good company."
Robert stood hat in hand, tormented with a dozen crosscurrents 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 mantelpiece, which was a new addition to the room. It was a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere"s ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man before him was not the first victim he had known.
Possessed with the fancy the young man made his way into the hall.
Arrived there, he looked round with a kind of pa.s.sionate 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 a.s.sociated 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 enwrapped it, seemed to look after him as he walked away, mutely wondering that he should have allowed anything so trivial as a peasant"s grievance to come between him and its perfections.
In the wooded lane outside the rectory gate he overtook Catherine. He gave her his report, and they walked on together arm-in-arm, a very depressed pair.
"What shall you do next?" she asked him.
"Make out the law of the matter," he said briefly.
"If you get over the inspector," said Catherine anxiously, "I am tolerably certain Henslowe will turn out the people."
He would not dare, Robert thought. At any rate, the law existed for such cases, and it was his bounden duty to call the inspector"s attention.
Catherine did not see what good could be done thereby, and feared harm.
But her wifely chivalry felt that he must get through his first serious practical trouble his own way. She saw that he felt himself distressingly young and inexperienced, and would not for the world have hara.s.sed him by over advice.
So she let him alone, and presently Robert threw the matter from him with a sigh.
"Let it be a while," he said, with a shake of his long frame. "I shall get morbid over it if I don"t mind. I am a selfish wretch too. I know you have worries of your own, wifie."
And he took her hand under the trees and kissed it with a boyish tenderness.
"Yes," said Catherine, sighing, and then paused. "Robert," she burst out again, "I am certain that man made love of a kind to Rose. _He_ will never think of it again, but since the night before last she, to my mind, is simply a changed creature."
"_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-sc.r.a.ping. Then the swing-door leading to the study opened and Elsmere and Catherine came out. Elsmere stopped with an exclamation.
His visitors were two men from Mile End. One was old Milsom, more sallow and palsied than ever. As he stood bent almost double, his old knotted hand resting for support on the table beside him, everything in the little hall seemed to shake with him. The other was Sharland, the handsome father of the twins, whose wife had been fed by Catherine with every imaginable delicacy since Robert"s last visit to the hamlet. Even his strong youth had begun to show signs of premature decay. The rolling gipsy eyes were growing sunken, the limbs dragged a little.
They had come to implore the rector to let Mile End alone. Henslowe had been over there in the afternoon, and had given them all very plainly to understand that if Mr. Elsmere meddled any more they would be all turned out at a week"s notice to shift as they could. "And if you don"t find Thurston Common nice lying this weather, with the winter coming on, you"ll know who to thank for it," the agent had flung behind him as he rode off.
Robert turned white. Rose, watching the little scene with listless eyes, saw him towering over the group like an 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.
"Ay, ay, sir," said Milsom, unmoved. "But if it isn"t fevers, it"s summat else. I can make a shilling or two where I be, speshally in the first part of the year, in the basket work, and my wife she goes charring up at Mr. Carter"s farm, and Mr. Dodson, him at the farther farm, he do give us a bit sometimes. Ef you git us turned away it will be a bad day"s work for all on us, sir, you may take my word on it."
"And my wife so ill, Mr. Elsmere," said Sharland, "and all those childer! I can"t walk three miles farther to my work, Mr. Elsmere, I can"t nohow. I haven"t got the legs for it. Let un be, sir. We"ll rub along."
Robert tried to argue the matter.
If they would but stand by him he would fight the matter through, and they should not suffer, if he had to get up a public subscription, or support them out of his own pocket all the winter. A bold front, and Mr. Henslowe must give way. The law was on their side, and every labourer in Surrey would be the better off for their refusal to be housed like pigs and poisoned like vermin.
In vain. There is an inexhaustible store of cautious 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 pa.s.sionate 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 companions of his historical work.
Catherine stood and watched him sadly.
"Must you, Robert?"
"I won"t be beholden to that man for anything an hour longer than I can help," he answered her.
When the packing was nearly finished he came up to where she stood in the open window.