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His own cat-pussy had gone away, tired of abuse and starvation irregularly combined with affection in the form of embraces and sugar, and Elsmere's heart had grieved for her. Here was another, and he could find out by actual experiment whether the velvet birds in the library would deceive her. Clutching the spitting, clawing creature to his bosom, he trotted off to the library.
And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from Newcome's inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered passion of years against certain 'dangerous tendencies' the elder priest discerned in the younger, against the worship of intellect and science as such which appeared in Elsmere's talk, in Elsmere's choice of friends. It was the eternal cry of the mystic of all ages.
In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been twofold the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories.
Catherine had been dropped out of his calculation as to Elsmere's future, at a very early stage. The following afternoon Robert, coming home from a round, found Catherine out, and a note awaiting him from the Hall. 'Can you and Mrs. Elsmere come in to tea? wrote the Squire. 'Madame de Netteville is here, and one or two others.
'Has it begun? said a hurried whisper at Elsmere's elbow, and turning, he saw Rose and Agnes on the step of the window, Rose's cheeks flushed by the night breeze, a shawl thrown lightly round her head. She was answered by the first notes of the flute, following some powerful chords in which Miss Barks had tested at once the strength of her wrists and the vicarage piano.
To which it may be added that Lady Helen, touched and dismayed by Elsmere's letter to her, had not been very eager to hand over the woes of her friends to her aunt's cool and irresponsible comments. Lady Charlotte deliberately looked at him a minute longer through her glass. Then she let it fall. 'You don't mean to tell me any more, I can see, Mr. Elsmere. But you will allow me to be astonished?
It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere's face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things he said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully.
And at that particular moment in Oxford history, the passage from philosophic idealism to glad acquiescence in the received Christian system, was a peculiarly easy one. It was the most natural thing in the world that a young man of Elsmere's temperament should rally to the Church.
And presently, after more talk of the incident of the afternoon, and when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped gradually into the subject of his own experiences in North R during the last six months. He assumed all through that she knew as much as there was to be known of Elsmere's work, and that she was as much interested as the normal wife is in her husband's doings.
Elsmere's new church, if he ever got it, would only be a fresh instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie. And when the people had got their rights and brought down the capitalists, they were not going to be such fools as put their necks under the heel of what were called 'the educated classes. The people who wrote the newspapers Mr.
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