CHAPTER XXI
Meanwhile the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and apparently throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. Robert, as soon as he found that radical measures were for the time hopeless, had applied himself with redoubled energy to making the people use such palliatives as were within their reach, and had preached boiled water and the removal of filth till, as he declared to Catherine, his dreams were one long sanitary nightmare. But he was not confiding enough to believe that the people paid much heed, and he hoped more from a dry hard winter than from any exertion either of his or theirs.
But, alas! with the end of November a season of furious rain set in.
Then Robert began to watch Mile End with anxiety, for so far every outbreak of illness there had followed upon unusual damp. But the rains pa.s.sed, leaving behind them no worse results than the usual winter crop of lung ailments and rheumatism, and he breathed again.
Christmas came and went, and with the end of December the wet weather returned. Day after day rolling ma.s.ses of south-west cloud came up from the Atlantic and wrapped the whole country in rain, which reminded Catherine of her Westmoreland rain more than any she had yet seen in the South. Robert accused her of liking it for that reason, but she shook her head with a sigh, declaring that it was "nothing without the becks."
One afternoon she was shutting the door of the school behind her, and stepping out on the road skirting the green--the bedabbled wintry green--when she saw Robert emerging from the Mile End lane. She crossed over to him, wondering as she neared him that he seemed to take no notice of her. He was striding along, his wideawake over his eyes, and so absorbed that she had almost touched him before he saw her.
"Darling, is that you? Don"t stop me, I am going to take the pony-carriage in for Meyrick. I have just come back from that accursed place; three cases of diphtheria in one house, Sharland"s wife--and two others down with fever."
She made a horrified exclamation.
"It will spread," he said gloomily, "I know it will. I never saw the children look such a ghastly crew before. Well, I must go for Meyrick and a nurse, and we must isolate and make a fight for it."
In a few days the diphtheria epidemic in the hamlet had reached terrible proportions. There had been one death, others were expected, and soon Robert in his brief hours at home could find no relief in anything, so heavy was the oppression of the day"s memories. At first Catherine for the child"s sake kept away; but the little Mary was weaned, had a good Scotch nurse, was in every way thriving, and after a day or two Catherine"s craving to help, to be with Robert in his trouble, was too strong to be withstood. But she dared not go backwards and forwards between her baby and the diphtheritic children. So she bethought herself of Mrs. Elsmere"s servant, old Martha, who was still inhabiting Mrs.
Elsmere"s cottage till a tenant could be found for it, and doing good service meanwhile as an occasional parish nurse. The baby and its nurse went over to the cottage. Catherine carried the child there, wrapped close in maternal arms, and leaving her on old Martha"s lap, went back to Robert.
Then she and he devoted themselves to a hand-to-hand fight with the epidemic. At the climax of it there were about twenty children down with it in different stages, and seven cases of fever. They had two hospital nurses; one of the better cottages, turned into a sanatorium, accommodated the worst cases under the nurses, and Robert and Catherine, directed by them and the doctors, took the responsibility of the rest, he helping to nurse the boys and she the girls. Of the fever cases Sharland"s wife was the worst. A feeble creature at all times, it seemed almost impossible she could weather through. But day after day pa.s.sed, and by dint of incessant nursing she still lived. A youth of twenty, the main support of a mother and five or six younger children was also desperately ill. Robert hardly ever had him out of his thoughts, and the boy"s dog-like affection for the rector, struggling with his deathly weakness, was like a perpetual exemplification of Ahriman and Ormuzd--the power of life struggling with the power of death.
It was a fierce fight. Presently it seemed to the husband and wife as though the few daily hours spent at the rectory were mere halts between successive acts of battle with the plague-fiend--a more real and grim Grendel of the Marshes--for the lives of children. Catherine could always sleep in these intervals, quietly and dreamlessly; Robert very soon could only sleep by the help of some prescription of old Meyrick"s.
On all occasions of strain since his boyhood there had been signs in him of a certain lack of const.i.tutional hardness which his mother knew very well, but which his wife was only just beginning to recognise. However, he laughed to scorn any attempt to restrain his constant goings and comings, or those hours of night-nursing, in which, as the hospital nurses were the first to admit, no one was so successful as the rector.
And when he stood up on Sundays to preach in Murewell Church, the worn and spiritual look of the man, and the knowledge warm at each heart of those before him of how the rector not only talked but lived, carried every word home.
This strain upon all the moral and physical forces, however, strangely enough, came to Robert as a kind of relief. It broke through a tension of brain which of late had become an oppression. And for both him and Catherine these dark times had moments of intensest joy, points of white light illuminating heaven and earth. There were cloudy nights--wet, stormy January nights--when sometimes it happened to them to come back both together from the hamlet, Robert carrying a lantern, Catherine clothed in waterproof from head to foot, walking beside him, the rays flashing now on her face, now on the wooded sides of the lane, while the wind howled through the dark vault of branches overhead. And then, as they talked or were silent, suddenly a sense of the intense blessedness of this comradeship of theirs would rise like a flood in the man"s heart, and he would fling his free arm round her, forcing her to stand a moment in the January night and storm while he said to her words of pa.s.sionate grat.i.tude, of faith in an immortal union reaching beyond change or death, lost in a kiss which was a sacrament. Then there were the moments when they saw their child, held high in Martha"s arms at the window, and leaping towards her mother; the moments when one pallid sickly being after another was p.r.o.nounced out of danger; and by the help of them the weeks pa.s.sed away.
Nor were they left without help from outside. Lady Helen Varley no sooner heard the news than she hurried over. Robert, on his way one morning from one cottage to another, saw her pony-carriage in the lane.
He hastened up to her before she could dismount.
"No, Lady Helen, you mustn"t come here," he said to her peremptorily, as she held out her hand.
"Oh, Mr. Elsmere, let me. My boy is in town with his grandmother. Let me just go through, at any rate, and see what I can send you."
Robert shook his head, smiling. A common friend of theirs and hers had once described this little lady to Elsmere by a French sentence which originally applied to the d.u.c.h.esse de Choiseul. "Une charmante pet.i.te fee sortie d"un oeuf enchante!"--so it ran. Certainly, as Elsmere looked down upon her now, fresh from those squalid death-stricken hovels behind him, he was brought more abruptly than ever upon the contrasts of life. Lady Helen wore a green velvet and fur mantle, in the production of which even Worth had felt some pride; a little green velvet bonnet perched on her fair hair; one tiny hand, ungloved, seemed ablaze with diamonds; there were opals and diamonds somewhere at her throat, gleaming among her sables. But she wore her jewels as carelessly as she wore her high birth, her quaint irregular prettiness, or the one or two brilliant gifts which made her sought after wherever she went. She loved her opals as she loved all bright things; if it pleased her to wear them in the morning, she wore them; and in five minutes she was capable of making the sourest puritan forget to frown on her and them. To Robert she always seemed the quintessence of breeding, of aristocracy at their best. All her freaks, her sallies, her absurdities even, were graceful.
At her freest and gayest there were things in her--restraints, reticences, perceptions--which implied behind her generations of rich, happy, important people, with ample leisure to cultivate all the more delicate niceties of social feeling and relation. Robert was often struck by the curious differences between her and Rose. Rose was far the handsomer; she was at least as clever; and she had a strong imperious will where Lady Helen had only impulses and sympathies and _engouements_. But Rose belonged to the cla.s.s which struggles, where each individual depends on himself and knows it. Lady Helen had never struggled for anything--all the best things of the world were hers so easily that she hardly gave them a thought; or rather, what she had gathered without pain she held so lightly, she dispensed so lavishly, that men"s eyes followed her, fluttering through life, with much the same feeling as was struck from Clough"s radical hero by the peerless Lady Maria--
"Live, be lovely, forget us, be beautiful, even to proudness, Even for their poor sakes whose happiness is to behold you; Live, be uncaring, be joyous, be sumptuous; only be lovely!"
"Uncaring," however, little Lady Helen never was. If she was a fairy, she was a fairy all heart, all frank foolish smiles and tears.
"No, Lady Helen--no," Robert said again. "This is no place for you, and we are getting on capitally."
She pouted a little.
"I believe you and Mrs. Elsmere are just killing yourselves all in a corner, with no one to see," she said indignantly. "If you won"t let me see, I shall send Sir Harry. But who"--and her brown fawn"s eyes ran startled over the cottages before her--"who, Mr. Elsmere, does this _dreadful_ place belong to?"
"Mr. Wendover," said Robert shortly.
"Impossible!" she cried incredulously. "Why, I wouldn"t ask one of my dogs to sleep there," and she pointed to the nearest hovel, whereof the walls were tottering outwards, the thatch was falling to pieces, and the windows were mended with anything that came handy--rags, paper, or the crown of an old hat.
"No, you would be ill advised," said Robert, looking with a bitter little smile at the sleek dachshund that sat blinking beside its mistress.
"But what is the agent about?"
Then Robert told her the story, not mincing his words. Since the epidemic had begun, all that sense of imaginative attraction which had been reviving in him towards the squire had been simply blotted out by a fierce heat of indignation. When he thought of Mr. Wendover now, he thought of him as the man to whom in strict truth it was owing that helpless children died in choking torture. All that agony of wrath and pity he had gone through in the last ten days sprang to his lips now as he talked to Lady Helen, and poured itself into his words.
"Old Meyrick and I have taken things into our own hands now," he said at last briefly. "We have already made two cottages fairly habitable.
To-morrow the inspector comes. I told the people yesterday I wouldn"t be bound by my promise a day longer. He must put the screw on Henslowe, and if Henslowe dawdles, why we shall just drain and repair and sink for a well ourselves. I can find the money somehow. At present we get all our water from one of the farms on the brow."
"Money!" said Lady Helen impulsively, her looks warm with sympathy for the pale hara.s.sed young rector. "Sir Harry shall send you as much as you want. And anything else--blankets--coals?"
Out came her note-book, and Robert was drawn into a list. Then, full of joyfulness at being allowed to help, she gathered up her reins, she nodded her pretty little head at him, and was just starting off her ponies at full speed, equally eager "to tell Harry" and to ransack Churton for the stores required, when it occurred to her to pull up again.
"Oh, Mr. Elsmere, my aunt, Lady Charlotte, does nothing but talk about your sister-in-law. _Why_ did you keep her all to yourself? Is it kind, is it neighbourly, to have such a wonder to stay with you and let n.o.body share?"
"A wonder?" said Robert, amused. "Rose plays the violin very well, but----"
"As if relations ever saw one in proper perspective!" exclaimed Lady Helen. "My aunt wants to be allowed to have her in town next season if you will all let her. I think she would find it fun. Aunt Charlotte knows all the world and his wife. And if I"m there, and Miss Leyburn will let me make friends with her, why, you know, _I_ can just protect her a little from Aunt Charlotte!"
The little laughing face bent forward again; Robert, smiling, raised his hat, and the ponies whirled her off. In anybody else Elsmere would have thought all this effusion insincere or patronising. But Lady Helen was the most spontaneous of mortals, and the only high-born woman he had ever met who was really, and not only apparently, free from the "nonsense of rank." Robert shrewdly suspected Lady Charlotte"s social tolerance to be a mere varnish. But this little person, and her favourite brother Hugh, to judge from the accounts of him, must always have found life too romantic, too wildly and delightfully interesting from top to bottom, to be measured by any but romantic standards.
Next day Sir Harry Varley, a great burly country squire, who adored his wife, kept the hounds, owned a model estate, and thanked G.o.d every morning that he was an Englishman, rode over to Mile End. Robert, who had just been round the place with the inspector and was dead tired, had only energy to show him a few of the worst enormities. Sir Harry, leaving a cheque behind him, rode off with a discharge of strong language, at which Robert, clergyman as he was, only grimly smiled.
A few days later Mr. Wendover"s crimes as a landowner, his agent"s brutality, young Elsmere"s devotion, and the horrors of the Mile End outbreak, were in everybody"s mouths. The county was roused. The Radical newspaper came out on the Sat.u.r.day with a flaming article; Robert, much to his annoyance, found himself the local hero; and money began to come in to him freely.
On the Monday morning Henslowe appeared on the scene with an army of workmen. A racy communication from the inspector had reached him two days before, so had a copy of the _Churton Advertiser_. He had spent Sunday in a drinking bout, turning over all possible plans of vengeance and evasion. Towards the evening, however, his wife, a gaunt clever Scotchwoman, who saw ruin before them, and had on occasion an even sharper tongue than her husband, managed to capture the supplies of brandy in the house and effectually conceal them. Then she waited for the moment of collapse which came on towards morning, and with her hands on her hips she poured into him a volley of home-truths which not even Sir Harry Varley could have bettered. Henslowe"s nerve gave way. He went out at daybreak, white and sullen, to look for workmen.
Robert, standing on the step of a cottage, watched him give his orders, and took vigilant note of their substance. They embodied the inspector"s directions, and the rector was satisfied. Henslowe was obliged to pa.s.s him on his way to another group of houses. At first he affected not to see the rector, then suddenly Elsmere was conscious that the man"s bloodshot eyes were on him. Such a look! If hate could have killed, Elsmere would have fallen where he stood. Yet the man"s hand mechanically moved to his hat, as though the spell of his wife"s harangue were still potent over his shaking muscles.
Robert took no notice whatever of the salutation. He stood calmly watching till Henslowe disappeared into the last house. Then he called one of the agent"s train, heard what was to be done, gave a sharp nod of a.s.sent, and turned on his heel. So far so good: the servant had been made to feel, but he wished it had been the master. Oh, those three little emaciated creatures whose eyes he had closed, whose clammy hands he had held to the last!--what reckoning should be asked for their undeserved torments when the Great Account came to be made up?
Meanwhile not a sound apparently of all this reached the squire in the sublime solitude of Murewell. A fortnight had pa.s.sed. Henslowe had been conquered, the county had rushed to Elsmere"s help, and neither he nor Mrs. Darcy had made a sign. Their life was so abnormal that it was perfectly possible they had heard nothing. Elsmere wondered when they _would_ hear.
The rector"s chief help and support all through had been old Meyrick.
The parish doctor had been in bed with rheumatism when the epidemic broke out, and Robert, feeling it a comfort to be rid of him, had thrown the whole business into the hands of Meyrick and his son. This son was nominally his father"s junior partner, but as he was, besides, a young and brilliant M.D. fresh from a great hospital, and his father was just a poor old general pract.i.tioner, with the barest qualification, and only forty years" experience to recommend him, it will easily be imagined that the subordination was purely nominal. Indeed young Meyrick was fast ousting his father in all directions, and the neighbourhood, which had so far found itself unable either to enter or to quit this mortal scene without old Meyrick"s a.s.sistance, was beginning to send notes to the house in Churton High Street, whereon the superscription "Dr. _Edward_ Meyrick" was underlined with ungrateful emphasis. The father took his deposition very quietly. Only on Murewell Hall would he allow no trespa.s.sing, and so long as his son left him undisturbed there, he took his effacement in other quarters with perfect meekness.
Young Elsmere"s behaviour to him, however, at a time when all the rest of the Churton world was beginning to hold him cheap and let him see it, had touched the old man"s heart, and he was the rector"s slave in this Mile End business. Edward Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the hamlet once a day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him. His attainments, of course, were useful, but his c.o.c.ksureness was irritating, and his manner to his father abominable. The father, on the other hand, came over in the shabby pony-cart he had driven for the last forty years, and having himself no press of business, would spend hours with the rector over the cases, giving them an infinity of patient watching, and amusing Robert by the cautious hostility he would allow himself every now and then towards his son"s new-fangled devices.
At first Meyrick showed himself fidgety as to the squire. Had he been seen, been heard from? He received Robert"s sharp negatives with long sighs, but Robert clearly saw that, like the rest of the world, he was too much afraid of Mr. Wendover to go and beard him. Some months before, as it happened, Elsmere had told him the story of his encounter with the squire, and had been a good deal moved and surprised by the old man"s concern.
One day, about three weeks from the beginning of the outbreak, when the state of things in the hamlet was beginning decidedly to mend, Meyrick arrived for his morning round, much preoccupied. He hurried his work a little, and after it was done asked Robert to walk up the road with him.
"I have seen the squire, sir," he said, turning on his companion with a certain excitement.
Robert flushed.