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

and more promising vein, she asked him his opinion of Lady Selden's last novel, 'Love in a Marsh;' and when he confessed ignorance she paused a moment, fork in hand, her small wrinkled face looking almost as bewildered as when, three minutes before, her rashness had well-nigh brought her face to face with Gregory of Tours as a topic of conversation.

But she was not daunted long. With little air and bridlings infinitely diverting, she exchanged inquiry for the most beguiling confidence. She could appreciate 'clever men,' she said, for she--she too--was literary. Did Mr. Elsmere know--this in a hurried whisper, with sidelong glances to see that Mr. Wynnstay was safely occupied with Rose, and the Squire with Lady Charlotte--that she had once _written a novel_?

Robert, who had been posted up in many things concerning the neighborhood by Lady Helen Varley, could answer most truly that he had. Whereupon Mrs. Darcy beamed all over.

'Ah! but you haven't read it,' she said regretfully. 'It was when I was Maid of Honor, you know. No Maid of Honor had ever written a novel before. It was quite an event. Dear Prince Albert borrowed a copy of me one night to read in bed--I have it still, with the page turned down where he left-off.' She hesitated. 'It was only in the second chapter,' she said at last with a fine truthfulness, 'but you know he was so busy, all the Queen's work to do, of course, besides his own--poor man!'

Robert implored her to lend him the work, and Mrs. Darcy, with blushes which made her more weird than ever, consented.

Then there was a pause, filled by an acid altercation between Lady Charlotte and her husband, who had not found Rose as grateful for his attentions as, in his opinion, a pink and white nobody, at a country dinner-party ought to be, and was glad of the diversion afforded him by some aggressive remark of his wife. He and she differed on three main points: politics; the decoration of their London house, Sir. Wynnstay being a lover of Louis Quinze, and Lady Charlotte a preacher of Morris; and the composition of their dinner-parties. Lady Charlotte in the pursuit of amusement and notoriety, was fond of flooding the domestic hearth with all the people possessed of any sort of a name for any sort of a reason in London. Mr. Wynnstay loathed such promiscuity; and the company in which his wife compelled him to drink his wine had seriously soured a small irritable Conservative with more family pride than either nerves or digestion.

During the whole passage of arms, Mrs. Darcy watched Elsmere, cat-and-mouse fashion, with a further confidence burning within her, and as soon as there was once more a general burst of talk, she pounced upon him afresh. Would he like to know that after thirty years she had just finished her _second_ novel, unbeknown to her brother--as she mentioned him the little face darkened, took a strange bitterness--and it was just about to be entrusted to the post and a publisher?

Robert was all interest, of course, and inquired the subject. Mrs. Darcy expanded still more--could, in fact, have hugged him. But, just as she was launching into the plot a thought, apparently a scruple of conscience, struck her.

'Do you remember,' she began, looking at him a little darkly, askance, 'what I said about my hobbies the other day? Now, Mr. Elsmere, will you tell me--don't mind me--don't be polite--have you ever heard people tell stories of me? Have you ever, for instance, heard them call me a--a--tuft-hunter?'

'Never! 'said Robert heartily.

'They might,' she said sighing. 'I am a tuft-hunter. I can't help it. And yet we _are_ a good family, you know. I suppose it was that year at Court, and that horrid Warham afterward. Twenty years in a cathedral town--and a very _little_ cathedral town, after Windsor, and Buckingham Palace, and dear Lord Melbourne! Every year I came up to town to stay with my father for a month in the season, and if it hadn't been for that I should have died--my husband knew I should. It was the world, the flesh, and the devil, of course, but it couldn't be helped. But now,' and she looked plaintively at her companion, as though challenging him to a candid reply: 'You _would_ be more interesting, wouldn't you, to tell the truth, if you had a handle to your name?'

'Immeasurably,' cried Robert, stifling his laughter with immense difficulty, as he saw she had no inclination to laugh.

'Well, yes, you know. But it isn't right;' and again she sighed. 'And so I have been writing this novel just for that. It is called--what do you think?--"Mr. Jones." Mr. Jones is my hero--it's so good for me, you know, to think about a Mr. Jones.'

She looked beamingly at him. 'It must be indeed! Have you endowed him with every virtue?'

'Oh yes, and in the end, you know--' and she bent forward eagerly--'it all comes right. His father didn't die in Brazil without children after all, and the title--'

'What,' cried Robert, 'so he _wasn't_ Mr. Jones?'

Mrs. Darcy looked a little conscious.

'Well, no,' she said guiltily, 'not just at the end. But it really doesn't matter--not to the story.'

Robert shook his head, with a look of protest as admonitory as he could make it, which evoked in her an answering expression of anxiety. But just at that moment a loud wave of conversation and of laughter seemed to sweep down upon them from the other end of the table, and their little private eddy was effaced. The Squire had been telling an anecdote, and his clerical neighbors had been laughing at it.

'Ah!' cried Mr. Longstaffe, throwing himself back in his chair with a chuckle, 'that was an Archbishop worth having!'

'A curious story,' said Mr. Bickerton, benevolently, the point of it, however, to tell the truth, not being altogether clear to him. It seemed to Robert that the Squire's keen eye, as he sat looking down the table, with his large nervous hands clasped before him, was specially fixed upon himself.

'May we hear the story?' he said, bending forward. Catherine, faintly smiling in her corner beside the host, was looking a little flushed and moved out of her ordinary quiet.

'It is a story of Archbishop Manners Sutton,' said Mr. Wendover, in his dry, nasal voice. 'You probably know it, Mr. Elsmere. After Bishop Heber's consecration to the see of Calcutta, it fell to the Archbishop to make a valedictory speech, in the course of the luncheon at Lambeth which followed the ceremony. "I have very little advice to give you as to your future career," he said to the young Bishop, "but all that experience has given me I hand on to you. Place before your eyes two precepts, and two only. One is--Preach the Gospel; and the other is--_Put down enthusiasm!_"'

There was a sudden gleam of steely animation in the Squire's look as he told his story, his eye all the while fixed on Robert. Robert divined in a moment that the story had been retold for his special benefit, and that in some unexplained way, the relations between him and the Squire were already biased. He smiled a little with faint politeness, and falling back into his place made no comment on the Squire's anecdote. Lady Charlotte's eyeglass, having adjusted itself for a moment to the distant figure of the Rector, with regard to whom she had been asking Dr. Meyrick for particulars quite unmindful of Catherine's neighborhood, turned back again toward the Squire.

'An unblushing old worldling, I should call your Archbishop,' she said briskly, 'and a very good thing for him that he lived when he did. Our modern good people would have dusted his apron for him.'

Lady Charlotte prided herself on these vigorous forms of speech, and the Squire's neighborhood generally called out an unusual crop of them. The Squire was still sitting with his hands on the table, his great brows bent, surveying his guests.

'Oh, of course all the sensible men are dead!' he said indifferently. 'But that is a pet saying of mine--the Church of England in a nutshell.'

Robert flushed, and after a moment's hesitation bent forward.

'What do you suppose,' he asked quietly, your Archbishop meant, Mr. Wendover, by enthusiasm? Nonconformity, I imagine.'

'Oh, very possibly!' and again Robert found the hawk-like glance concentrated on himself. 'But I like to give his remark a much wider extension. One may make it a maxim of general experience, and take it as fitting all the fools with a mission who have teased our generation--all your Kingsleys, and Maurices, and Ruskins--everyone bent on making any sort of aimless commotion, which may serve him both as an investment for the next world and an advertisement for this.'

'Upon my word, Squire,' said Lady Charlotte, 'I hope you don't expect Mr. Elsmere to agree with you?'

Mr. Wendover made her a little bow.

'I have very little sanguineness of any sort in my composition,' he said dryly.

'I should like to know,' said Robert, taking no notice of this by-play; 'I should like to know, Mr. Wendover, leaving the Archbishop out of count, what _you_ understand by this word enthusiasm in this maxim of yours?'

'An excellent manner,' thought Lady Charlotte, who with all her noisiness, was an extremely shrewd woman, 'an excellent manner and an unprovoked attack.'

Catherine's trained eye, however, had detected signs in Robert's look and bearing which were lost on Lady Charlotte, and which made her look nervously on. As to the rest of the table, they had all fallen to watching the 'break' between the new Rector and their host with a good deal of curiosity.

The Squire paused a moment before replying.

'It is not easy to put it tersely,' he said at last; 'but I may define it, perhaps, as the mania for mending the roof of your right-hand neighbor with straw torn off the roof of your left-hand neighbor; the custom, in short, of robbing Peter to propitiate Paul.'

'Precisely,' said Mr. Wynnstay, warmly; 'all the ridiculous Radical nostrums of the last fifty years--you have hit them off exactly. Sometimes you rob more and propitiate less; sometimes you rob less and propitiate more. But the principle is always the same.' And mindful of all those intolerable evenings, when these same Radical nostrums had been forced down his throat at his own table he threw a pugnacious look at his wife, who smiled back serenely in reply. There is small redress indeed for these things, when out of the common household stock the wife possesses most of the money, and a vast proportion of the brains.

'And the cynic takes pleasure in observing,' interrupted the Squire, 'that the man who effects the change of balance does it in the loftiest manner, and profits in the vulgarest way. Other trades may fail. The agitator is always sure of his market.'

He spoke with a harsh contemptuous insistence which was gradually setting every nerve in Robert's body tingling. He bent forward again, his long, thin frame and boyish, bright complexioned face making an effective contrast to the Squire's bronzed and wrinkled squareness.

'Oh, if you and Mr. Wynnstay are prepared to draw an indictment against your generation and all its works I have no more to say,' he said, smiling still, though his voice had risen a little in spite of himself. 'I should be content to withdraw with my Burke into the majority. I imagined your attack on enthusiasm had a narrower scope, but if it is to be made synonymous with social