Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

at once. "Half the day," he used to say to me, "you will be king of your world: the other half be the slave of something which will take you out of your world into the general world;" and then he would quote to me that saying he was always bringing into lectures--I forget whose it is--"_The decisive events of the world take place in the intellect_. It is the mission of books that they help one to remember it." Altogether it was striking, coming from one who has always had such a tremendous respect for practical life and work, and I was much impressed by it. So blame him!'

Langham was silent. Elsmere had noticed that any allusion to Grey found Langham less and less responsive.

'Well what is the "great work"?' he said at last, abruptly.

'Historical. Oh, I should have written something without Grey; I have always had a turn for it since I was a child. But he was clear that history was especially valuable--especially necessary to a clergyman. I felt he was right, entirely right. So I took my Final Schools' history for a basis, and started on the Empire, especially the decay of the Empire. Some day I mean to take up one of the episodes in the great birth of Europe-the makings of France, I think, most likely. It seems to lead farthest and tell most. I have been at work now nine months.'

'And are just getting into it?'

'Just about. I have got down below the surface, and am beginning to feel the joys of digging;' and Robert threw back his head with one of his most brilliant, enthusiastic smiles. 'I have been shy about boring you with the thing, but the fact is, I am very keen indeed; and this library has been a godsend!'

'So I should think.' Langham sat down on one of the carved wooden stools placed at intervals along the bookcases and looked at his friend, his psychological curiosity rising a little.

'Tell me,' he said presently--'tell me what interests you specially--what seizes you--in a subject like the making of France, for instance?'

'Do you really want to know?' said Robert, incredulously.

The other nodded. Robert left his place, and began to walk up and down, trying to answer Langham's questions, and at the same time to fix in speech a number of sentiments and impressions bred in him by the work of the past few months. After a while Langham began to see his way. Evidently the forces at the bottom of this new historical interest were precisely the same forces at work in Elsmere's parish plans, in his sermons, in his dealings with the poor and the young forces of imagination and sympathy. What was enchaining him to this new study was not, to begin with, that patient love of ingenious accumulation which is the learned temper proper, the temper, in short, of science. It was simply a passionate sense of the human problems which underlie all the dry and dusty detail of history and give it tone and color, a passionate desire to rescue something more of human life from the drowning, submerging past, to realize for himself and others the solidarity and continuity of mankind's long struggle from the beginning until now.

Langham had had much experience of Elsmere's versatility and pliancy, but he had never realized it so much as now, while he sat listening to the vivid, many-colored speech getting quicker and quicker, and more and more telling and original as Robert got more absorbed and excited by what he had to say. He was endeavoring to describe to Langham the sort of book be thought might be written on the rise of modern society in Gaul, dwelling first of all on the outward spectacle of the blood-stained Frankish world as it was, say, in the days of Gregory the Great, on its savage kings, its fiendish women, its bishops and its saints; and then, on the conflict of ideas going on behind all the fierce incoherence of the Empire's decay, the struggle of Roman order and of German freedom, of Roman luxury and of German hardness; above all, the war of orthodoxy and heresy, with its strange political complications. And then, discontented still, as though the heart of the matter was still untouched, he went on, restlessly wandering the while, with his long arms linked behind him, throwing out words at an object in his mind, trying to grasp and analyze that strange sense which haunts the student of Rome's decline as it once overshadowed the infancy of Europe, that sense of a slowly departing majesty, of a great presence just withdrawn, and still incalculably potent, traceable throughout in that humbling consciousness of Goth or Frank that they were but 'beggars hutting in a palace--the place had harbored greater men than they!'

'There is one thing,' Langham said presently, in his slow, nonchalant voice, when the tide of Robert's ardor ebbed for a moment, 'that doesn't seem to have touched you yet. But you will come to it. To my mind, it makes almost the chief interest of history. It is just this. History depends on _testimony_. What is the nature and the value of testimony at given times? In other words, did the man of the third century understand or report, or interpret facts in the same way as the man of the sixteenth or the nineteenth? And if not, what are the differences, and what are the deductions to be made from them, if any?' He fixed his keen look on Robert, who was now lounging against the books, as though his harangue had taken it out of him a little.

'Ah, well,' said the Rector smiling, 'I am only just coming to that. As I told you, I am only now beginning to dig for myself. Till now it has all been work at second hand. I have been getting a general survey of the ground as quickly as I could with the help of other men's labors. Now I must go to work inch by inch, and find out what the ground is made of. I won't forget your point. It is enormously important, I grant--enormously,' he repeated reflectively.

'I should think it is' said Langham to himself as he rose; 'the whole of orthodox Christianity is in it, for instance!'

There was not much more to be seen. A little wooden stair-case led from the second library to the upper rooms, curious old rooms, which had been annexed one by one as the Squire wanted them, and in which there was nothing at all--neither chair, nor table, nor carpet--but books only. All the doors leading from room to room had been taken off; the old worm-eaten boards had been roughly stained; a few old French engravings had been hung here and there where the encroaching books left an opening; but otherwise all was bare. There was a curious charm in the space and air of these empty rooms, with their latticed windows opening on to the hill, and letting in day by day the summer sun-risings or the winter dawns, which had shone upon them for more than three centuries.

'This is my last day of privilege,' said Robert. 'Everybody is shut out when once he appears, from this wing, and this part of the grounds. This was his father's room,' and the Rector led the way into the last of the series; 'and through there,' pointing to a door on the right, 'lies the way to his own sleeping-room, which is of course connected with the more modern side of the house.'

'So this is where that old man ventured "what Cato did and Addison approved," murmured Langham, standing in the middle of the room and looking around him. This particular room was now used as a sort of lumber place, a receptacle for the superfluous or useless books, gradually thrown off by the great collection all around. There were innumerable volumes in frayed or broken bindings lying on the ground. A musty smell hung over it all; the gray light from outside, which seemed to give only an added subtlety and charm, to the other portions of the ancient building through which they had been moving, seemed here _triste_ and dreary. Or Langham fancied it.

He passed the threshold again with a little sigh, and saw suddenly before him at the end of the suite of rooms, and framed in the doorways facing him, an engraving of a Greuze picture--a girl's face turned over her shoulder, the hair waving about her temples, the lips parted, the teeth gleaming mirth and provocation and tender yielding in every line. Langham started, and the blood rushed to his heart. It was as though Rose herself stood there and beckoned to him.


CHAPTER XV.

'Now, having seen our sight,' said Robert, as they left the great mass of Murewell behind them, 'come and see our scandal. Both run by the same proprietor, if you please. There is a hamlet down there in the hollow'--and he pointed to a gray speck in the distance--'I which deserves a Royal Commission all to itself, which is a _disgrace_'--and his tone warmed--'to any country, any owner, any agent! It is owned by Mr. Wendover, and I see the pleasing prospect straight before me of beginning my acquaintance with him by a fight over it. You will admit that it is a little hard on a man who wants to live on good terms with the possessor of the Murewell library to have to open relations with him by a fierce attack on his drains and his pigsties.'

He turned to his companion with a half-rueful spark of laughter in his gray, eyes. Langham hardly caught what he said. He was far away in meditations of his own.

'An attack,' he repeated vaguely; 'why an attack?'

Robert plunged again into the great topic of which his quick mind was evidently full. Langham tried to listen, but was conscious that his friend's social enthusiasms bored him a great deal. And side by side with the consciousness there slid in a little stinging reflection that four years ago no talk of Elsmere's could have bored him.

'What's the matter with this particular place?' he asked languidly, at last, raising his eyes toward the group of houses now beginning to emerge from the distance.

An angry, red mounted in Robert's cheek.

'What isn't the matter with it? The houses which were built on a swamp originally, are falling into ruin; the roofs, the drains, the accommodation per head, are all about equally scandalous. The place is harried with illness; since I came there has been both fever and diphtheria there. They are all crippled with rheumatism, but _that_ they think nothing of; the English laborer takes rheumatism as quite in the day's bargain! And as to _vice_--the vice that comes of mere endless persecuting opportunity--I can tell you one's ideas of personal responsibility get a good deal shaken up by a place like this! And I can do nothing. I brought over Henslowe to see the place, and he behaved like a brute. He scoffed at all my complaints, said that no landlord would be such a fool as to build fresh cottages on such a site, that the old ones must just be allowed to go to ruin; that the people might live in them if they chose, or turn out of them if they chose. Nobody forced them to do either; it was their own look-out.'

'That was true,' said Langham, 'wasn't it?'

Robert turned upon him fiercely.

'Ah! you think it so easy for these poor creatures to leave their homes their working places! Some of them have been there thirty