'You have no idea what a queer sort of existence he lives in that huge place,' said Robert with energy. 'He is not unpopular exactly with the poor down here. When they want to belabour anybody they lay on at the agent, Henslowe. On the whole, I have come to the conclusion the poor like a mystery. They never see him; when he is here the park is shut up; the common report is that he walks at night; and he lives alone in that enormous house with his books. The county folk have all quarrelled with him, or nearly. It pleases him to get a few of the humbler people about, clergy, professional men, and so on, to dine with him sometimes. And he often fills the Hall, I am told, with London people for a day or two. But otherwise he knows no one, and nobody knows him.'
'But you say he has a widowed sister? How does she relish the kind of life?'
'Oh; by all accounts,' said the rector with a shrug, 'she is as little like other people as himself. A queer elfish little creature, they say, as fond of solitude down here as the squire, and full of hobbies. In her youth she was about the court. Then she married a canon of Warham, one of the popular preachers, I believe, of the day. There is a bright little cousin of hers, a certain Lady Helen Varley, who lives near here, and tells me stories of her. She must be the most whimsical little aristocrat imaginable. She liked her husband apparently, but she never got over leaving London and the fashionable world, and is as hungry now, after her long fast, for titles and big-wigs, as though she were the purest parvenu. The squire of course makes mock of her, and she has no influence with him. However, there is something naïve in the stories they tell of her. I feel as if I might get on with her. But the squire!'
And the rector, having laid down his pipe, took to studying his boots with a certain dolefulness.
Langham, however, who always treated the subjects of conversation presented to him as an epicure treats foods, felt at this point that he had had enough of the Wendovers, and started something else.
'So you physic bodies as well as minds?' he said, pointing to the medicine cupboard.
'I should think so!' cried Robert, brightening at once. 'Last winter I causticked all the diphtheritic throats in the place with my own hand. Our parish doctor is an infirm old noodle, and I just had to do it. And if the state of part of the parish remains what it is, it's a pleasure I may promise myself most years. But it shan't remain what it is.'
And the rector reached out his hand again for his pipe, and gave one or two energetic puffs to it as he surveyed his friend stretched before him in the depths of an armchair.
'I will make myself a public nuisance, but the people shall have their drains!'
'It seems to me,' said Langham, musing, 'that in my youth people talked about Ruskin; now they talk about drains.'