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'I told you he could know nothing of this business and he didn't! He has been in town part of the time, and down here how is he to know anything? He sees nobody. That man Henslowe, sir, must be a real bad fellow. 'Don't abuse the man, said Robert, looking up. 'It's not worth while, when you can say your mind of the master. Old Meyrick sighed.
The thing must be put right somehow, and at once, with as little waste of time and energy as possible, and Henslowe had shown himself not to be trusted; so telling a servant to follow him, the Squire had made his way with difficulty to a place he had not seen for years. Then had followed the unexpected and unwelcome apparition of the Rector.
Henslowe walked home in a bewilderment which for once had nothing to do with brandy, but was simply the result of a moral shock acting on what was still human in the man's debased consciousness, just as electricity acts on the bodily frame. Robert, on the other hand, saw him depart with a singular lightening of mood. What he seemed to have achieved might turn out to be the merest moonshine.
Robert caught the smoke of Mile End in the distance, curling above the twilight woods, and laid about him vigorously with his stick on the squire's shrubs, as he thought of those poisonous hovels, those ruined lives! But, after all, it might be mere ignorance, and that wretch Henslowe might have been merely trading on his master's morbid love of solitude.
Henslowe, who was drinking hard, no sooner heard Elsmere's voice in the little hall than he dashed open the door which separated them, and, in a paroxysm of drunken rage, hurled at Elsmere all the venomous stuff he had been garnering up for months against some such occasion. The vilest abuse, the foulest charges there was nothing that the maddened sot, now fairly unmasked, denied himself.
For some time notwithstanding, he avoided an open breach with the rector. He met Elsmere's remonstrances by a more or less civil show of argument, belied every now and then by the sarcasm of his coarse blue eye, and so far the two men had kept outwardly on terms. Elsmere had reason to know that on one or two occasions of difficulty in the parish Henslowe had tried to do him a mischief.
The rector, with some of those pitiful memories of the hamlet, of which we had glimpses in his talk with Langham, burning at his heart, felt the man no better than a murderer, and as good as told him so. Then, without giving him time to reply, Robert strode on, leaving Henslowe planted in the pathway.
But in this direction, as in many others, the way was barred. All the land in the parish was the Squire's, and not an inch of the Squire's land would Henslowe let young Elsmere have anything to do with if he knew it.
I'm cold as hell," said Heineman crossly, and they filed in through the revolving door, followed by a waiter with their drinks. "I've been in the Red Cross all afternoon, Andy.... I think I am going to work that Roumania business.... Want to come?" said Henslowe in Andrews' ear.
Andrews lay on his back talking towards the ceiling. Henslowe was on his feet, striding nervously about the room. "As if anyone was ever free," he muttered. "All right, quibble, quibble. You can argue anything away if you want to. Of course, cowardice is the best policy, necessary for survival. The man who's got most will to live is the most cowardly...go on."
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