And suddenly Langham threw up the sponge. He held out his hand to his companion, a momentary gleam of tenderness in his black eyes, such as on one or two critical occasions before had disarmed the impetuous Elsmere.
'No use to discuss it further. You have a strong case, of course, and you have put it well. Only, when you are pegging away at reforming and enlightening the world, don't trample too much on the people who have more than enough to do to enlighten themselves.'
As to Mrs. Elsmere, in this new turn of her son's fortunes, she realised with humorous distinctness that for some years past Robert had been educating her as well as himself. Her old rebellious sense of something inherently absurd in the clerical status had been gradually slain in her by her long contact through him with the finer and more imposing aspects of church life. She was still on light skirmishing terms with the Harden curates, and at times she would flame out into the wildest, wittiest threats and gibes, for the momentary satisfaction of her own essentially lay instincts; but at bottom she knew perfectly well that, when the moment came, no mother could be more loyal, more easily imposed upon, than she would be.
'I suppose, then, Robert, we shall be back at Murewell before very long,' she said to him one morning abruptly, studying him the while out of her small twinkling eyes. What dignity there was already in the young lightly-built frame! what frankness and character in the irregular, attractive face!
'Mother,' cried Elsmere indignantly, 'what do you take me for? Do you imagine I am going to bury myself in the country at five or six-and-twenty, take six hundred a year, and nothing to do for it? That would be a deserter's act indeed.'
Mrs. Elsmere shrugged her shoulders. 'Oh, I supposed you would insist on killing yourself, to begin with. To most people nowadays that seems to be the necessary preliminary of a useful career.'
Robert laughed and kissed her, but her question had stirred him so much that he sat down that very evening to write to his cousin Mowbray Elsmere. He announced to him that he was about to read for orders, and that at the same time he relinquished all claim on the living of Murewell. 'Do what you like with it when it falls vacant,' he wrote, 'without reference to me. My views are strong that before a clergyman in health and strength, and in no immediate want of money, allows himself the luxury of a country parish, he is bound, for some years at any rate, to meet the challenge of evil and poverty where the fight is hardest—among our English town population.'
Sir Mowbray Elsmere replied curtly in a day or two to the effect that Robert's letter seemed to him superfluous. He, Sir Mowbray, had nothing to do with his cousin's views. When the living was vacant—the present holder, however, was uncommon tough and did not mean dying—he should follow out the instructions of his father's will, and if Robert did not want the thing he could say so.
In the autumn Robert and his mother went back to Oxford. The following spring he redeemed his Oxford reputation completely by winning a Fellowship at Merton after a brilliant fight with some of the best men of his year, and in June he was ordained.
In the summer term some teaching work was offered him at Merton, and by Mr. Grey's advice he accepted it, thus postponing for a while that London curacy and that stout grapple with human need at its sorest for which his soul was pining. 'Stay here a year or two,' Grey said bluntly; 'you are at the beginning of your best learning time, and you are not one of the natures who can do without books. You will be all the better worth having afterwards, and there is no lack of work here for a man's moral energies.'