'No—no,' he said with the saddest smile. 'No, I had not forgotten it. Don't go, Catherine—don't go. I must. But why should you go through it?'
'But there are all those flags and wreaths,' she said, getting up in pained bewilderment. 'I must go and look after them.'
He caught her in his arms.
'Oh, my wife, my wife, forgive me!' It was a groan of misery. She put up her hands and pressed his hair back from his temples.
'I love you, Robert,' she said simply, her face colourless, but perfectly calm.
Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, he went into the workroom and found her surrounded with flags, and a vast litter of paper roses and evergreens, which she and the new agent's daughters who had come up to help her were putting together for the decorations of the morrow. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to smile and talk as usual, her lap full of evergreens, and her politeness exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to Robert one of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He fled from it out into the village driven by a restless longing for change and movement.
Here he found a large gathering round the new Institute. There were carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, and close by, an admiring circle of children and old men, huddling in the shade of a great chestnut.
Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending, stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting friendliness of those about him, or worried by their blunt comments on his looks. He could not bear more than a glance into the new rooms apportioned to the Naturalists' Club. There against the wall stood the new glass cases he had wrung out of the squire, with various new collections lying near, ready to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections stood out bravely in the added space and light; the walls were hung here and there with a wonderful set of geographical pictures he had carried off from a London exhibition, and fed his boys on for weeks; the floors were freshly matted; the new pine fittings gave out their pleasant cleanly scent; the white paint of doors and windows shone in the August sun. The building had been given by the squire. The fittings and furniture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had planned for it all!—only to see the fruits of two years' effort out of doors, and personal frugality at home, handed over to some possibly unsympathetic stranger. The heart beat painfully against the iron bars of fate, rebelling against the power of a mental process so to affect a man's whole practical and social life!
He went out at last by the back of the Institute, where a little bit of garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to a lane.
At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge made by the builders' carts, he saw a man standing, who turned away down the lane, however, as soon as the rector's figure emerged into view.