"Have you?" he replied with his hands behind him, and a world of expression in his sarcastic voice.
"You misjudge him! You misjudge him, Mr. Elsmere!" the old man said tremulously. "I told you he could know nothing of this business--and he didn"t! He has been in town part of the time, and down here--how is he to know anything? He sees n.o.body. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real _bad_ fellow."
"Don"t abuse the man," said Robert, looking up. "It"s not worth while, when you can say your mind of the master."
Old Meyrick sighed.
"Well," said Robert, after a moment, his lip drawn and quivering, "you told him the story, I suppose? Seven deaths, is it, by now? Well, what sort of impression did these unfortunate accidents"--and he smiled--"produce?"
"He talked of sending money," said Meyrick doubtfully; "he said he would have Henslowe up and inquire. He seemed put about and annoyed. Oh, Mr.
Elsmere, you think too hardly of the squire, that you do!"
They strolled on together in silence. Robert was not inclined to discuss the matter. But old Meyrick seemed to be labouring under some suppressed emotion, and presently he began upon his own experiences as a doctor of the Wendover family. He had already broached the subject more or less vaguely with Robert. Now, however, he threw his medical reserve, generally his strongest characteristic, to the winds. He insisted on telling his companion, who listened reluctantly, the whole miserable and ghastly story of the old squire"s suicide. He described the heir"s summons, his arrival just in time for the last scene with all its horrors, and that mysterious condition of the squire for some months afterwards, when no one, not even Mrs. Darcy, had been admitted to the Hall, and old Meyrick, directed at intervals by a great London doctor, had been the only spectator of Roger Wendover"s physical and mental breakdown, the only witness of that dark consciousness of inherited fatality which at that period of his life not even the squire"s iron will had been able wholly to conceal.
Robert, whose attention was inevitably roused after a while, found himself with some curiosity realising the squire from another man"s totally different point of view. Evidently Meyrick had seen him at such moments as wring from the harshest nature whatever grains of tenderness, of pity, or of natural human weakness may be in it. And it was clear, too, that the squire, conscious perhaps of a shared secret, and feeling a certain soothing influence in the _navete_ and simplicity of the old man"s sympathy, had allowed himself at times, in the years succeeding that illness of his, an amount of unbending in Meyrick"s presence, such as probably no other mortal had ever witnessed in him since his earliest youth.
And yet how childish the old man"s whole mental image of the squire was after all! What small account it made of the subtleties, the gnarled intricacies and contradictions of such a character! Horror at his father"s end, and dread of a like fate for himself! Robert did not know very much of the squire, but he knew enough to feel sure that this confiding indulgent theory of Meyrick"s was ludicrously far from the mark as an adequate explanation of Mr. Wendover"s later life.
Presently Meyrick became aware of the sort of tacit resistance which his companion"s mind was opposing to his own. He dropped the wandering narrative he was busy upon with a sigh.
"Ah well, I daresay it"s hard, it"s hard," he said with patient acquiescence in his voice, "to believe a man can"t help himself. I daresay we doctors get to muddle up right and wrong. But if ever there was a man sick in mind--for all his book-learning they talk about--and sick in soul, that man is the squire."
Robert looked at him with a softer expression. There was a new dignity about the simple old man. The old-fashioned deference, which had never let him forget in speaking to Robert that he was speaking to a man of family, and which showed itself in all sorts of antiquated locutions which were a torment to his son, had given way to something still more deeply ingrained. His gaunt figure, with the stoop, and the spectacles and the long straight hair--like the figure of a superannuated schoolmaster--a.s.sumed, as he turned again to his younger companion, something of authority, something almost of stateliness.
"Ah, Mr. Elsmere," he said, laying his shrunk hand on the younger man"s sleeve and speaking with emotion, "you"re very good to the poor. We"re all proud of you--you and your good lady. But when you were coming, and I heard tell all about you, I thought of my poor squire, and I said to myself, "That young man"ll be good to _him_. The squire will make friends with him, and Mr. Elsmere will have a good wife--and there"ll be children born to him--and the squire will take an interest--and--and--maybe----""
The old man paused. Robert grasped his hand silently.
"And there was something in the way between you," the speaker went on, sighing. "I daresay you were quite right--quite right. I can"t judge.
Only there are ways of doing a thing. And it was a last chance; and now its missed--it"s missed. Ah! it"s no good talking; he has a heart--he has! Many"s the kind thing he"s done in old days for me and mine--I"ll never forget them! But all these last few years--oh, I know, I know. You can"t go and shut your heart up, and fly in the face of all the duties the Lord laid on you, without losing yourself and setting the Lord against you. But it is pitiful, Mr. Elsmere, it"s pitiful!"
It seemed to Robert suddenly as though there was a Divine breath pa.s.sing through the wintry lane and through the shaking voice of the old man.
Beside the spirit looking out of those wrinkled eyes, his own hot youth, its justest resentments, its most righteous angers, seemed crude, harsh, inexcusable.
"Thank you, Meyrick, thank you, and G.o.d bless you! Don"t imagine I will forget a word you have said to me."
The rector shook the hand he held warmly twice over, a gentle smile pa.s.sed over Meyrick"s ageing face, and they parted.
That night it fell to Robert to sit up after midnight with John Allwood, the youth of twenty whose case had been a severer tax on the powers of the little nursing staff than perhaps any other. Mother and neighbours were worn out, and it was difficult to spare a hospital nurse for long together from the diphtheria cases. Robert, therefore, had insisted during the preceding week on taking alternate nights with one of the nurses. During the first hours before midnight he slept soundly on a bed made up in the ground-floor room of the little sanatorium. Then at twelve the nurse called him, and he went out, his eyes still heavy with sleep, into a still frosty winter"s night.
After so much rain, so much restlessness of wind and cloud, the silence and the starry calm of it were infinitely welcome. The sharp cold air cleared his brain and braced his nerves, and by the time he reached the cottage whither he was bound, he was broad awake. He opened the door softly, pa.s.sed through the lower room, crowded with sleeping children, climbed the narrow stairs as noiselessly as possible, and found himself in a garret, faintly lit, a bed in one corner and a woman sitting beside it. The woman glided away, the rector looked carefully at the table of instructions hanging over the bed, a.s.sured himself that wine and milk and beef essence and medicines were ready to his hand, put out his watch on the wooden table near the bed, and sat him down to his task. The boy was sleeping the sleep of weakness. Food was to be given every half-hour, and in this perpetual impulse to the system lay his only chance.
The rector had his Greek Testament with him, and could just read it by the help of the dim light. But after a while, as the still hours pa.s.sed on, it dropped on to his knee, and he sat thinking--endlessly thinking.
The young labourer lay motionless beside him, the lines of the long emaciated frame showing through the bed-clothes. The night-light flickered on the broken discoloured ceiling; every now and then a mouse scratched in the plaster; the mother"s heavy breathing came from the next room; sometimes a dog barked or an owl cried outside. Otherwise deep silence, such silence as drives the soul back upon itself.
Elsmere was conscious of a strange sense of moral expansion. The stern judgments, the pa.s.sionate condemnations which his nature housed so painfully, seemed lifted from it. The soul breathed an "ampler aether, a diviner air." Oh! the mysteries of life and character, the subtle inexhaustible claims of pity! The problems which hang upon our being here; its mixture of elements; the pressure of its inexorable physical environment; the relations of mind to body, of man"s poor will to this tangled tyrannous life--it was along these old, old lines his thought went painfully groping; and always at intervals it came back to the squire, pondering, seeking to understand, a new soberness, a new humility and patience entering in.
And yet it was not Meyrick"s facts exactly that had brought this about.
Robert thought them imperfect, only half true. Rather was it the spirit of love, of infinite forbearance in which the simpler, duller nature had declared itself that had appealed to him, nay, reproached him.
Then these thoughts led him on farther and farther from man to G.o.d, from human defect to the Eternal Perfectness. Never once during those hours did Elsmere"s hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and G.o.d its source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt, of bitter brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling awhile, and then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine"s hand. It was she who led him through the shades; it was her voice murmuring in his ear.
When the first gray dawn began to creep in slowly perceptible waves into the room, Elsmere felt as though not hours but years of experience lay between him and the beginnings of his watch.
"It is by these moments we should date our lives," he murmured to himself as he rose; "they are the only real landmarks."
It was eight o"clock, and the nurse who was to relieve him had come. The results of the night for his charge were good: the strength had been maintained, the pulse was firmer, the temperature lower. The boy, throwing off his drowsiness, lay watching the rector"s face as he talked in an undertone to the nurse, his haggard eyes full of a dumb friendly wistfulness. When Robert bent over him to say good-bye, this expression brightened into something more positive, and Robert left him, feeling at last that there was a promise of life in his look and touch.
In another moment he had stepped out into the January morning. It was clear and still as the night had been. In the east there was a pale promise of sun; the reddish-brown trunks of the fir woods had just caught it, and rose faintly glowing in endless vistas and colonnades one behind the other. The flooded river itself rushed through the bridge as full and turbid as before, but all the other water surfaces had gleaming films of ice. The whole ruinous place had a clean, almost a festal air under the touch of the frost, while on the side of the hill leading to Murewell, tree rose above tree, the delicate network of their wintry twigs and branches set against stretches of frost-whitened gra.s.s, till finally they climbed into the pale all-completing blue. In a copse close at hand there were woodcutters at work, and piles of gleaming laths shining through the underwood. Robins hopped along the frosty road, and as he walked on through the houses towards the bridge, Robert"s quick ear distinguished that most wintry of all sounds--the cry of a flock of fieldfares pa.s.sing overhead.
As he neared the bridge he suddenly caught sight of a figure upon it, the figure of a man wrapped in a large Inverness cloak, leaning against the stone parapet. With a start he recognised the squire.
He went up to him without an instant"s slackening of his steady step.
The squire heard the sound of some one coming, turned, and saw the rector.
"I am glad to see you here, Mr. Wendover," said Robert, stopping and holding out his hand. "I meant to have come to talk to you about this place this morning. I ought to have come before."
He spoke gently, and quite simply, almost as if they had parted the day before. The squire touched his hand for an instant.
"You may not, perhaps, be aware, Mr. Elsmere," he said, endeavouring to speak with all his old hauteur, while his heavy lips twitched nervously, "that, for one reason and another, I knew nothing of the epidemic here till yesterday, when Meyrick told me."
"I heard from Mr. Meyrick that it was so. As you are here now, Mr.
Wendover, and I am in no great hurry to get home, may I take you through and show you the people?"
The squire at last looked at him straight--at the face worn and pale, yet still so extraordinarily youthful, in which something of the solemnity and high emotion of the night seemed to be still lingering.
"Are you just come?" he said abruptly, "or are you going back?"
"I have been here through the night, sitting up with one of the fever cases. It"s hard work for the nurses, and the relations sometimes, without help."
The squire moved on mechanically towards the village, and Robert moved beside him.
"And Mrs. Elsmere?"
"Mrs. Elsmere was here most of yesterday. She used to stay the night when the diphtheria was at its worst; but there are only four anxious cases left--the rest all convalescent."
The squire said no more, and they turned into the lane, where the ice lay thick in the deep ruts, and on either hand curls of smoke rose into the clear cold sky. The squire looked about him with eyes which no detail escaped. Robert, without a word of comment, pointed out this feature and that, showed where Henslowe had begun repairs, where the new well was to be, what the water supply had been till now, drew the squire"s attention to the roofs, the pigstyes, the drainage, or rather complete absence of drainage, and all in the dry voice of some one going through a catalogue. Word had already fled like wildfire through the hamlet that the squire was there. Children and adults, a pale emaciated crew, poured out into the wintry air to look. The squire knit his brows with annoyance as the little crowd in the lane grew. Robert took no notice.
Presently he pushed open the door of the house where he had spent the night. In the kitchen a girl of sixteen was clearing away the various nondescript heaps on which the family had slept, and was preparing breakfast. The squire looked at the floor.
"I thought I understood from Henslowe," he muttered, as though to himself, "that there were no mud floors left on the estate----"
"There are only three houses in Mile End without them," said Robert, catching what he said.
They went upstairs, and the mother stood open-eyed while the squire"s restless look gathered in the details of the room, the youth"s face, as he lay back on his pillows, whiter than they, exhausted and yet refreshed by the sponging with vinegar and water which the mother had just been administering to him; the bed, the gaps in the worm-eaten boards, the spots in the roof where the plaster bulged inward, as though a snake would bring it down; the coa.r.s.e china shepherdesses on the mantel-shelf, and the flowers which Catherine had put there the day before. He asked a few questions, said an abrupt word or two to the mother, and they tramped downstairs again and into the street. Then Robert took him across to the little improvised hospital, saying to him on the threshold, with a moment"s hesitation,--
"As you know, for adults there is not much risk, but there is always some risk----"
A peremptory movement of the squire"s hand stopped him, and they went in. In the downstairs room were half-a-dozen convalescents, pale, shadowy creatures, four of them under ten, sitting up in their little cots, each of them with a red flannel jacket drawn from Lady Helen"s stores, and enjoying the breakfast which a nurse in white cap and ap.r.o.n had just brought them. Upstairs, in a room from which a lath-and-plaster part.i.tion had been removed, and which had been adapted, warmed and ventilated by various contrivances to which Robert and Meyrick had devoted their practical minds, were the "four anxious cases." One of them, a little creature of six, one of Sharland"s black-eyed children, was sitting up, supported by the nurse, and coughing its little life away. As soon as he saw it, Robert"s step quickened. He forgot the squire altogether. He came and stood by the bedside, rigidly still, for he could do nothing, but his whole soul absorbed in that horrible struggle for air. How often he had seen it now, and never without the same wild sense of revolt and protest! At last the hideous membrane was loosened, the child got relief, and lay back white and corpse-like, but with a pitiful momentary relaxation of the drawn lines on its little brow. Robert stooped and kissed the damp tiny hand. The child"s eyes remained shut, but the fingers made a feeble effort to close on his.