"But you are recovering?" Robert said, laying his hand affectionately on the old man"s knee.
"I have added to my knowledge," said the squire drily. "Like Heine, I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth. And I am not in bed, which I was last week. For Heaven"s sake don"t ask questions. If there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the subject of the human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you so hoa.r.s.e for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of "the people,"
who wouldn"t even subscribe to bury you? Have you been working up the Apocrypha as I recommended you last time we met?"
Robert smiled.
"For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things with neither of which had you much sympathy in old days--holiday-making and "slumming.""
"Oh, I remember," interrupted the squire hastily. "I was low last week, and read the Church papers by way of a counter-irritant. You have been starting a new religion, I see. A new religion! _Humph!_"
The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the sarcastic gleam of the eyes.
"You are hardly the man to deny," he said, undisturbed, "that the old ones _laissent a desirer_."
"Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you should go and set up a brand-new one--an ugly anachronism besides," retorted the squire. "However, you and I have no common ground--never had. I say _know_, you say _feel_. Where is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?"
"I have not seen her for six months," Robert replied, with equal abruptness.
The squire laughed a little under his breath.
"What did you think of her?"
"Very much what you told me to think--intellectually," replied Robert, facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.
"Well, I certainly never told you to think anything--_morally_," said the squire. "The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see there?"
The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere went through with it, the squire watching him for a while with an expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.
But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle change in the squire"s att.i.tude--a relaxation of his own sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness.
The squire"s head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and defencelessness.
Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so much to him.
Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken--they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so--a river lost in the sands!
Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping squire.
"A bad sign! a bad sign!" he said, and shook his head mournfully.
After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical _malaise_ than had ever yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up to her with a warm greeting.
"Are you going in to the squire? Let us go together."
She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into the room behind her, a curious film, so it seemed to him, darkening her small gray eyes.
"The squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen my white mice?
Oh, they are such darlings! Only, one of them is ill, and they won"t let me have the doctor."
Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She stood in the middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger to a large cage of white mice which stood in the window. The room seemed full besides of other creatures. Robert stood rooted, looking at the tiny withered figure in the black dress, its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in lace, with a perplexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver.
Suddenly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent, strong-looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head towards Mrs.
Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing the mice with the weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, and went out sick at heart. The careful exquisite beauty of the great hall struck him as something mocking and anti-human.
No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. In the evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in another key. He insisted on a certain amount of light, and, leaning on Robert"s arm, went feebly round the bookshelves. He took out one of the volumes of the Fathers that Newman had given him.
"When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rubbish," he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, "and of the other hours I maundered away in services and self-examination! Thank Heaven, however, the germ of revolt and sanity was always there. And when once I got to it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick."
Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the shrunken squire.
"Oh, not one _you_ have any chance of learning, my good friend," said the other aggressively. "And after all it"s simple. _Go to your grave with your eyes open_--that"s all. But men don"t learn it, somehow.
Newman was incapable--so are you. All the religions are nothing but so many vulgar anaesthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse."
"Do you want me to contradict you?" said Robert, smiling; "I am quite ready."
The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his chair again, he said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau in the window, "The book is all there--both parts, first and second. Publish it if you please. If not, throw it into the fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has done its work; it has helped me through half a century of living."
"It shall be to me a sacred trust," said Elsmere with emotion. "Of course if you don"t publish it, I shall publish it."
"As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more rational to tell me about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood of yours."
Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The words would not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the middle that strange creeping sleep overtook the squire again.
Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been coming in and out through the evening, eyeing Elsmere, now that there was more light on the scene, with almost as much anxiety and misgiving as the squire, was summoned. The squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a male attendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a finger to the performance. They took him up the library stairs, through the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which had been his father"s, and so into his own. By the time they set him down he was quite awake and conscious again.
"It can"t be said that I follow my own precepts," he said to Robert grimly as they put him down. "Not much of the open eye about this. I shall sleep myself into the unknown as sweetly as any saint in the calendar."
Robert was going when the squire called him back.
"You"ll stay to-morrow, Elsmere?"
"Of course, if you wish it."
The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently.
"Why did you ever go?"
"As I told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else for an honest man to do."
The squire turned round with a frown.
"What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get me out of this."
By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches of the park; the trees shone silverly in the cold light, their black shadows cast along the gra.s.s. Robert found himself quartered in the Stuart room, where James II. had slept, and where the tartan hangings of the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by way of distracting his thoughts a little from the squire, and that other tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took from his coat-pocket a French _Anthologie_ which had been Catherine"s birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.
Then he slept profoundly--the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange noises in his ears.
A cry "Help!" resounded through the wide empty galleries.
He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the squire"s room.