Robert was in twenty minds as to any further conversation with the squire. After the ladies had gone, while every nerve in him was still tingling with anger, he had done his best to keep up indifferent talk on local matters with Mr. Bickerton. Inwardly he was asking himself whether he should ever sit at the squire's table and eat his bread again. It seemed to him that they had had a brush which would be difficult to forget. And as he sat there before the squire's wine, hot with righteous heat, all his grievances against the man and the landlord crowded upon him. A fig for intellectual eminence if it make a man oppress his inferiors and bully his equals!
But as the minutes passed on, the rector had cooled down. The sweet, placable, scrupulous nature began to blame itself. 'What, play your cards so badly, give up the game so rashly, the very first round? Nonsense! Patience and try again. There must be some cause in the background. No need to be white-livered, but every need, in the case of such a man as the squire, to take no hasty needless offence.'
So he had cooled and cooled, and now here were Meyrick and he close to the squire and his companion. The two men, as the rector approached, were discussing some cases of common enclosure that had just taken place in the neighbourhood. Robert listened a moment, then struck in. Presently, when the chat dropped, he began to express to the squire his pleasure in the use of the library. His manner was excellent, courtesy itself, but without any trace of effusion.
'I believe,' he said at last, smiling, 'my father used to be allowed the same privileges. If so, it quite accounts for the way in which he clung to Murewell.'
'I had never the honour of Mr. Edward Elsmere's acquaintance,' said the squire frigidly. 'During the time of his occupation of the rectory I was not in England.'
'I know. Do you still go much to Germany? Do you keep up your relations with Berlin?'
'I have not seen Berlin for fifteen years,' said the squire briefly, his eyes in their wrinkled sockets fixed sharply on the man who ventured to question him about himself, uninvited. There was an awkward pause. Then the squire turned again to Mr. Bickerton.
'Bickerton, have you noticed how many trees that storm of last February has brought down at the north-east corner of the park?'
Robert was inexpressibly galled by the movement, by the words themselves. The squire had not yet addressed a single remark of any kind about Murewell to him. There was a deliberate intention to exclude implied in this appeal to the man who was not the man of the place, on such a local point, which struck Robert very forcibly.
He walked away to where his wife was sitting.