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Updated: June 26, 2025
He tried to discipline the roving mind, to infuse into the boy's literary temper the delicacy, the precision, the subtlety of his own. His fastidious, critical habits of work supplied exactly that antidote which Elsmere's main faults of haste and carelessness required.
Your way, being a modern, is to bustle and try experiments. Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over Elsmere's keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of intellectual and social assumption enwrapped her, which annoyed Robert in much the same way as Langham's philosophical airs were wont to do.
He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere's stick had made in the sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, 'I will take the first expense: and draw on me afterwards up to five hundred a year, for the first four years. Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand. 'I do not thank you, he said quietly, after a moment's pause; 'the work itself will do that.
It was a head of Medusa, and the frightful stony calm of it struck on Elsmere's ruffled nerves with extraordinary force. It flashed across him that here was an apt symbol of that absorbing and overgrown life of the intellect which blights the heart and chills the senses. And to that spiritual Medusa, the man before him was not the first victim he had known.
Young Elsmere's behavior to him, however, at a time when all the rest of the Churton world was beginning to hold him cheap and let him see it, had touched the old man's heart, and he was the Rector's slave in this Mile End business. Edward Meyrick would come whirling in and out of the hamlet once a day. Robert was seldom sorry to see the back of him.
"Miracles do not happen" broke the bruised reed of the Rev. Robert Elsmere's faith. That long-legged weakling, with his auburn hair and "boyish innocence of mood," and sweet ignorance of the wicked world, went down, it will be remembered, like a ninepin before the assaults of a sceptical squire who had studied in Germany.
Elsmere had soon tasted each other's quality, and formed a curious alliance, founded on true similarity in difference. But the criticism thus warded off the vicar expended itself with all the more force on his subordinates. The Harden curates were the chief crook in Mrs. Elsmere's otherwise tolerable lot. Her parish activities brought her across them perpetually, and she could not away with them.
Elsmere, said the nurse, a motherly body, looking at him with friendly admonition, 'if you don't go home and rest you'll be ill too, and I'd like to know who'll be the better for that? 'How many deaths? asked the Squire abruptly, touching Elsmere's arm, and so reminding Robert of his existence. 'Meyrick spoke of deaths.
As a matter of fact, owing to some travelling difficulties, the vicar and Elsmere did not get home till noon on Friday. Catherine knew nothing of either delay or arrival. Mrs. Leyburn watched her with anxious timidity, but she never mentioned Elsmere's name to any one on the Friday morning, and no one dared speak of him to her.
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.
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