Elsley

“ A very cheap country, a comfortable house rent free, and a lovely neighbourhood, were a pleasant change after dear London lodgings: but it is a question whether the change made Elsley a better man.
In the first place, he became a more idle man. The rich enervating climate began to tell upon his mind, as it did upon Lucia's health. He missed that perpetual spur of nervous excitement, change of society, influx of ever-fresh objects, which makes London, after all, the best place in the world for hard working; and which makes even a walk along the streets an intellectual tonic. ”

“ Valencia shut the door again, laughing.
"You seem very intimate with Major Campbell," said Elsley.
"Intimate? I look on him as my father almost. Now, may we come in?" said she, knocking again in pretty petulance. "I want to introduce Mr. Vavasour."
"I shall be only too happy," said the Major, opening his door (this time with his coat on) ; "there are few persons in the world whom I have more wished to know than Mr. Vavasour." And he held out his hand, and quite led Elsley in. He spoke in a tone of grave interest, looking intently at Elsley as he spoke. ”

“ For each and every one of them finds his neighbour a pleasanter person than he expected; and none need leave those rooms without knowing something more than he did when he came in, and taking an interest in some human being who may need that interest. To one of these houses, no matter which, Elsley was invited on the strength of the "Soul's Agonies;" found himself, for the first time, face to face with high-bred Englishwomen; and fancied—small blame to him—that he was come to the mountains of the Peris, and to Fairy Land itself. ”

“ And Elsley was left behind, under the grey church spire, sleeping with his fathers, and vexing his soul with poetry no more. Mark has covered him now with a fair Portland slab. He took Claude Mellot to it this winter before church time, and stood over it long with a puzzled look, as if dimly discovering that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamed of in his philosophy.
"Wonderful fellow he was, after all! Mary shall read us out some of his verses to-night. But, I say, why should people be born clever, only to make them all the more miserable?" ”

“ Not that he dared, or wished, to conduct himself with her as he did with Valencia, even had she not been a married woman; he did not know her as intimately as he did her sister; but still he had a right to behave as the most intimate friend of her family, and he asserted that right; and all the more determinedly because Elsley seemed now and then not to like it. "I will teach him how to behave to a charming woman," said he to himself; and perhaps he had been wiser if he had not said it: but every man has his weak point, and chivalry was Major Campbell's. ”

“ She was too high-minded to complain much to Clara; and her sister Valencia was the very last person to whom she would confess that her run-away-match had not been altogether successful. So she lived alone and friendless, shrinking into herself more and more, while the vulgar women round mistook her honour for pride, and revenged themselves accordingly. She was an uninteresting fine lady, proud and cross, and Elsley was a martyr. ”

“ She has no household cares. Mr. Bowie manages everything, and does so, in order to keep up the honour of the family, on a somewhat magnificent scale. The children, in that bracing air, are better than she has ever seen them. She has Valencia all to herself; and Elsley, in spite of the dark fancies over which he has been brooding, is better behaved, on the whole, than usual.
He has escaped—so he considers—escaped from Campbell, above all from Thurnall. From himself, indeed, he has not escaped; but the company of self is, on the whole, more pleasant to him than otherwise just now. ”

“ Had he been merely ludicrous, Lucia would never have married him; and he could only have been spoken of with indignation, or left utterly out of the story, as a simply unpleasant figure, beyond the purposes of a novel, though admissible now and then into tragedy. One cannot heartily laugh at a man if one has not a lurking love for him, as one really ought to have for Elsley. How much value is to be attached to his mere power of imagination and fancy, and so forth, is a question ”

“ Beside, what might not Thurnall have told Campbell about him? And what use might not the Major make of his secret? Besides, Elsley's dread and suspicion increased rapidly when he discovered that Campbell was one of those men who live on terms of peculiar intimacy with many women; whether for his own good or not, still for the good of the women concerned. For only by honest purity, and moral courage superior to that of the many, is that dangerous post earned; and women will listen to the man who will tell them the truth, however sternly ”

“ In the first place, it would have been an ugly thing to take notice of any man's attentions to a wife; it could not be done but upon the strongest grounds, and done in a way which would make a complete rupture necessary, so breaking up the party in a sufficiently unpleasant way. Besides, to move in the matter at all would be to implicate Lucia; for, of whatsoever kind Campbell's attentions were, she evidently liked them; and a quarrel with her on that score was more than Elsley dared face. ”

“ Vavasour shall come with me. Of course you will! You do not know what a delightful person he is, when once you can break the ice."
Elsley, like most vain men, was of a jealous temper; and Valencia's eagerness to see Major Campbell jarred on him. He wanted to keep the exquisite creature to himself, and Headley was quite enough of an intruder already. Beside, the accounts of the new comer, his learning, his military prowess, the reverence with which all, even Scoutbush, evidently regarded him, made him prepared to dislike the Major ”

“ How lovely it would seem, dear, to see you a countess.'
'Elsie,' I said severely, with one hand on her arm, 'you are a dear little soul, and I am very fond of you; but if you think I could sell myself for a coronet to a pasty-faced young man with a pea-green complexion and glassy blue eyes—I can only say, my child, you have misread my character. He isn't a man: he's a lump of putty!'
I think Elsie was quite shocked that I should apply these terms to a courtesy lord, the eldest son of a peer. ”

“ With the first blush of dawn, old Elspat Elshender arrived with a confused but lamentable history of the disasters and terrors of the night—of how she had been carried away by the devil and Major Weir on a high trotting horse—how claps of thunder had rung around her cottage, and lightning consumed it—and that it was not until she was able to repeat the Lord's Prayer that they assumed the forms of Lord Clermistonlee and his hellicate butler, Juden Stenton, and thereafter vanished in a flash of fire, leaving Elsie among the nettles and whins at the avenue gate. ”

“ Elsmere sat indoors reading up the history of the parish system of Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner of the study, where he and the vicar protected each other against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good woman would open the door once and again in the morning, and put her head through in search of prey; but on being confronted with two studious men instead of one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she would give vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. In reality Elsmere was thinking of nothing in the world but what Catherine Leyburn might be doing that morning. ”

“ The Squire kept up with difficulty awhile, a faint glimmer of sarcasm playing now and then round the straight thin-lipped mouth. Then suddenly he stopped.
‘No, let it be. Forget me and my book, Elsmere. Everything can be got out of in this world. By the way, we seem to have reached the ends of the earth. Those are the new Mile End cottages, I believe. With your leave, I’ll sit down in one of them, and send to the Hall for the carriage.’
Elsmere’s repentant attention was drawn at once to his companion. ”

“ Robert at last held out his hand with a smile, and he went. He left Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible depression. In reality there was no man who worked harder at the New Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. He worked under perpetual protest from the frondeur within him, but something stung him on—on—till a habit had been formed which promises to be the joy and salvation of his later life. Was it the haunting memory of that thin figure—the hand clinging to the chair—the white appealing look?
Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the consequences. ”

“ She laid on her colours thickly, and Elsmere at once assumed extravagance.
'A saint, a beauty, and a wit all to yourselves in these wilds!' he said, laughing. 'What luck! But what on earth brought them here—a widow and three daughters—from the south? It was an odd settlement surely, though you have one of the loveliest valleys and the purest airs in England.'
'Oh, as to lovely valleys,' said Mrs. Thornburgh, sighing, 'I think it very dull; I always have. When one has to depend for everything on a carrier that gets drunk, too! Why, you know they belong here. ”

“ His mood was that of the disciple only eager to be enrolled. And what he found was a quiet, friendly, host, surrounded by a group of men talking the ordinary pleasant Oxford chit-chat—the river, the schools, the Union, the football matches, and so on. Every now and then, as Elsmere stood at the edge of the circle listening, the rugged face in the centre of it would break into a smile, or some boyish speaker would elicit the low spontaneous laugh in which there was such a sound of human fellowship, such a genuine note of self-forgetfulness. ”

“ THE SWAN KNIGHT
Elsa was a very beautiful girl. She lived with her father, the Duke of Brabant. Her father loved her very much, so they lived happily in their lovely home. But one day Elsa’s father died, leaving her all of his lands and castles. Then she had no one to care for her, and she was very unhappy indeed.
The Duke of Brabant had had a trusted friend, Frederick of Telramund. He undertook the care of Elsa; but he did not guard the lonely maiden as her father would have wished. Indeed, this man tried to force her to marry him, that he might obtain all of her wealth. ”

“ What! Live for thirty years in that great house, and never care whether your tenants and labourers lived like pigs or like men, whether the old people died of damp, or the children of diphtheria, which you might have prevented! Robert's brow grew dark over it.
The click of an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreaminess at once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. In another moment Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a holly stick in his hand, his face aglow with health and exercise and kindling at the sight of his wife. ”

“ They reached the little lane leading to the gate of Burwood. She paused at the foot of it.
'You will come in and see my mother, Mr. Elsmere?'
Her look expressed a yearning she could not crush. 'Your pardon, your friendship,' it cried, with the usual futility of all [Pg 117] good women under the circumstances. But as he met it for one passionate instant, he recognised fully that there was not a trace of yielding in it. At the bottom of the softness there was the iron of resolution. ”

“ Elsmere, from the little house in Morton Street where she had established herself, had watched her boy’s meteoric career through those crowded months with very frequent misgivings. No one knew better than she that Robert was constitutionally not of the toughest fibre, and she realized long before he did that the Oxford life as he was bent on leading it must end for him in premature breakdown. But, as always happens, neither her remonstrance, nor Mr. Grey’s common sense, nor Langham’s fidgety protests had any effect on the young enthusiast to whom self-slaughter came so easy. ”

“ His experience of London clergymen, for instance, had not been particularly favorable, and he had a store of anecdotes on the subject which Robert had heard before, but which now, repeated in Catherine’s presence, seemed to have lost every shred of humor they once possessed. Poor Elsmere tried with all his might to divert the stream, but it showed a tormenting tendency to recur to the same channel. And meanwhile the little spectacled wife, dressed in a high home-made cashmere, sat looking at her husband with a benevolent and smiling admiration. She kept all her eloquence for the poor. ”

“ But Robert could find nothing to say in return; and in an instant Mr. Grey's quick eye detected the strained nervous emotion of the man before him.
'Come and sit down, Elsmere—there, in the window, where we can talk. One has to live on this east side of the house this weather.'
'In the first place,' said Mr. Grey, scrutinising him, as he returned to his own book-littered corner of the window-seat. 'In the first place, my dear fellow, I can't congratulate you on your appearance. I never saw a man look in worse condition—to be up and about.'
'That's nothing!' said Robert almost impatiently. ”

“ So many such beautiful things have happened beside all the funny ones. The Stillwells finding out about each other, and Mr. Corny ‘turning over a new leaf’ to take better care of his folks; Gerald and Aurora learning to be gentle to everybody; those Manor House people making up; and darling Elsa growing happy, just like other girls. None of these things would have happened if the dear old Water Lily hadn’t brought them all together. I’d like Elsa and her father to be the real heads of it, with that sweet Lucetta and her babies next. ”