'You will let me tell it, I hope?' he said quietly. 'I will tell it so

that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself thought it

incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, it has just this

afternoon been repeated to me by a man who was an eyewitness of part of

it.'

Rose was silent. Her attitude was _hauteur_ itself, but she made no

further active opposition.

'Three months ago,' he began, speaking with some difficulty, but still

with a suppressed force of feeling which amazed his hearer, 'Madame

Desforets was acting in St. Petersburg. She had with her a large

company, and amongst them her own young sister, Elise Romey, a girl of

eighteen. This girl had been always kept away from Madame Desforets by

her parents, who had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest

daughter's artistic success for the infamy of her life.'

Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to speak.

'Elise Romey, however, had developed a passion for the stage. Her

parents were respectable--and you know young girls in France are brought

up strictly. She knew next to nothing of her sister's escapades. But she

knew that she was held to be the greatest actress in Europe--the

photographs in the shops told her that she was beautiful. She conceived

a romantic passion for the woman whom she had last seen when she was a

child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry affection, partly by

her own longing wish to become an actress, she escaped from home and

joined Madame Desforets in the South of France. Madame Desforets seems

at first to have been pleased to have her. The girl's adoration pleased

her vanity. Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing.

I believe,' and Langham gave a little dry laugh, 'they were photographed

together at Marseilles with their arms round each other's necks, and the

photograph had an immense success. However, on the way to St.

Petersburg, difficulties arose. Elise was pretty, in a _blonde_ childish

way, and she caught the attention of the _jeune premier_ of the company,

a man'--the speaker became somewhat embarrassed--'whom Madame Desforets

seems to have regarded as her particular property. There were scenes at

different towns on the journey. Elise became frightened--wanted to go

home. But the elder sister, having begun tormenting her, seems to have

determined to keep her hold on her, as a cat keeps and tortures a

mouse--mainly for the sake of annoying the man of whom she was jealous.

They arrived at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. The girl was worn

out with travelling, unhappy, and ill. One night in Madame Desforets's

apartment there was a supper party, and after it a horrible quarrel. No

one exactly knows what happened. But towards twelve o'clock that night

Madame Desforets turned her young sister in evening dress, a light shawl

round her, out into the snowy streets of St. Petersburg, barred the door

behind her, and revolver in hand dared the wretched man who had caused

the _fracas_ to follow her.'

Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight was not

revealing.

Langham turned away from her towards the blaze, holding out his hands to

it mechanically.

'The poor child,' he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, 'wandered

about for some hours. It was a frightful night--the great capital was

quite strange to her. She was insulted--fled this way and that--grew

benumbed with cold and terror, and was found unconscious in the early

morning under the archway of a house some two miles from her sister's

lodgings.'

There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering breath.

'I do not believe it!' she said passionately. 'I cannot believe it!'

'It was amply proved at the time,' said Langham drily, 'though of course

Madame Desforets tried to put her own colour on it. But I told you I had

private information. On one of the floors of the house where Elise Romey

was picked up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an

important Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made

friends with him there. He walked home with me this afternoon, saw the

announcement of Madame Desforets's coming, and poured out the story. He

and his wife nursed the unfortunate girl with devotion. She lived just a

week, and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life heard

anything so pitiful as his description of her delirium, her terror, her

appeals, her shivering misery of cold.'

There was a pause.

'She is not a woman,' he said presently, between his teeth. 'She is a

wild beast.'

Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the flame

which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round.

'I have told you a shocking story,' he said hurriedly. 'Perhaps I ought

not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking so lightly, so gaily,

it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable that that woman should ever

sit here in this room--talk to you--call you by your name--laugh with

you--touch your hand! Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so

far--you _shall_ not do it!'

He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a passionate sense of

physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure fair

youth and something malodorous and corrupt. And there was besides a wild

unique excitement in claiming for once to stay--to control her.

Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw the tears in

her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl's awful story. But

through the tears something gleamed--a kind of exultation--the

exultation which the magician feels when he has called spirits from the

vasty deep, and after long doubt and difficult invocation they rise at

last before his eyes.

'I will never see her again,' she said in a low wavering voice, but she

too was hardly conscious of her own words. Their looks were on each

other; the ruddy capricious light touched her glowing cheeks, her

straight-lined grace, her white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of

another's misery into which they had both been looking there had sprung

up, by the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication

of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from

them like a golden mist. 'Be always thus!' her parted lips, her liquid

eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed to fail him; he was lost in

bewilderment.

There were sounds outside--Catherine's voice. He roused himself with a

supreme effort.

'To-night--at Lady Charlotte's?'

'To-night,' she said, and held out her hand.

A sudden madness seized him--he stooped--his lips touched it--it was

hastily drawn away, and the door opened.

CHAPTER XXXV

'In the first place, my dear aunt,' said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself

back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte's drawing-room fire, 'you

may spare your admonitions, because it is becoming more and more clear

to me that, whatever my sentiments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a

serious thought to me.'

He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His tone and

manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was puzzled by him.

'Stuff and nonsense!' replied the lady with her usual emphasis; 'I never

flatter you, Hugh, and I don't mean to begin now, but it would be mere

folly not to recognise that you have advantages which must tell on the

mind of any girl in Miss Leyburns position.'

Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his hands in his

pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection of his irreproachable

trouser-knees.

'I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,' he said, still stooping,

'but Miss Leyburn doesn't care twopence about my advantages.'

'Very proper of you to say so,' returned Lady Charlotte sharply; 'the

remark, however, my good sir, does more credit to your heart than your

head.'

'In the next place,' he went on undisturbed, 'why you should have done

your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn and me together, if

you meant in the end to oppose my marrying her, I don't quite see.'

He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so slightly.

'You know my weaknesses,' she said presently, with an effrontery which

delighted her nephew. 'She is my latest novelty, she excites me, I can't

do without her. As to you, I can't remember that you wanted much

encouragement, but, I acknowledge, after all these years of

resistance--resistance to my most legitimate efforts to dispose of

you--there was a certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last!'

'Upon my word!' he said, throwing back his head with a not very cordial

laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She was sitting opposite to

him, her powerful loosely-gloved hands crossed over the rich velvet of

her dress, her fair large face and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty

cap, as vigorous, shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age as

could be found. The room behind her and the second and third

drawing-rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a

cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were

awaiting the arrival of the evening's guests upstairs.

Lady Charlotte's mind had been evidently much perturbed by the

conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the

latter half. She was labouring under an uncomfortable sense of being

hoist with her own petard--an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning

of her husband's, delivered at Murewell.

'And now,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'having confessed in so many words that you

have done your best to bring me up to the fence, will you kindly

recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion I should not jump it?'

'Society, amusement, flirtation, are one thing,' she replied with

judicial imperativeness, 'marriage is another. In these democratic days

we must know everybody; we should only marry our equals.'

The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she regretted

them. Mr. Flaxman's expression changed.

'I do not agree with you,' he said calmly, 'and you know I do not. You

could not, I imagine, have relied much upon _that_ argument.'

'Good gracious, Hugh!' cried Lady Charlotte crossly; 'you talk as if I

were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been

amusing myself--I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last

few weeks since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that

I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like,

that I have got you into the scrape--now I want to get you out of it! I

am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses--and you know

what the duke will say.'

'The duke be--translated!' said Flaxman coolly. 'Nothing of what you

have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest

weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the duke than

you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care--or I

am very much mistaken--for somebody else.'

He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.

'What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres' friend?

Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of

hers?'

'I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,' replied her

nephew. 'However, he is not a nonentity. Far from it! Ten years ago,

when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most

distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.

'Another instance of what university reputation is worth!' said Lady

Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty

whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her

nephew ousted by the _force majeure_ of a rival--and that a rival whom

she regarded as an utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity,

nor family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.

Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical amused

eyes.

'I should like to know,' he said presently, with a curious slowness and

suavity, 'I should greatly like to know why you asked him here

to-night?'

'You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody--a convict, a

crossing-sweeper--if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with

him!'

Flaxman laughed.

'Well, it may be convenient to-night,' he said reflectively. 'What are

we to do--some thought-reading?'

'Yes. It isn't a crush. I have only asked about thirty or forty people.

Mr. Denman is to manage it.'

She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request at the

moment.

Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little plan to his

aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed.

'I want to make a few notes,' he said drily, when it was arranged; 'I

should be glad to satisfy myself.'

When the Misses Leyburn were announced, Rose, though the younger, came

in first. She always took the lead by a sort of natural right, and

Agnes never dreamt of protesting. To-night the sisters were in white.

Some soft creamy stuff was folded and draped about Rose's slim shapely

figure in such a way as to bring out all its charming roundness and

grace. Her neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously.

Her red-gold hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte's innumerable

candles. A knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a Japanese

fan of the same colour, gave just that touch of purpose and art which

the spectator seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in

the dress of a young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession,

distributing a few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced

towards Lady Charlotte. Any one with a discerning eye could have seen

that she was in that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a

statue to which the master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the

sculptor, had been at work upon her, refining here, softening there,

planing away awkwardness, emphasising grace, disengaging as it were,

week by week, and month by month, all the beauty of which the original

conception was capable. And the process is one attended always by a glow

and sparkle, a kind of effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes

beauty more beautiful and grace more graceful.

The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, which had

already begun to mark her entrance into a room, surrounded Rose as she

walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing absently

silent, woke up directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his

aunt.

'You failed us at rehearsal,' he said with smiling reproach; 'we were

all at sixes and sevens.'

'I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. Lady

Charlotte, Catherine couldn't come. Agnes and I are alone in the world.

Will you chaperon us?'

'I don't know whether I will accept the responsibility to-night--in that

new gown,' replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting up her eyeglass to

look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the scrutiny with a light smiling

silence, even though she knew Mr. Flaxman was looking too.

'On the contrary,' she said, 'one always feels so particularly good and

prim in a new frock.'

'Really? I should have thought it one of Satan's likeliest moments,'

said Flaxman, laughing--his eyes, however, the while saying quite other

things to her, as they finished their inspection of her dress.

Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at Rose's

smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests.

'I have made a muddle as usual,' she said to herself in disgust,

'perhaps even a worse one than I thought!'

Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman's state of mind, however, he never showed

greater self-possession than on this particular evening.

A few minutes after Rose's entry he introduced her for the first time to

his sister Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just come up to town for the

opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen had come to-night to Martin

Street, all ardour to see Hugh's new adoration, and the girl whom all

the world was beginning to talk about--both as a beauty and as an

artist. She rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to

anything so light and airy as Lady Helen's movements, caught the girl's

hands in both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised admiration,

said to her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive things possible.

Rose--who with all her lithe shapeliness, looked over-tall and even a

trifle stiff beside the tiny bird-like Lady Helen--took the advances of

Hugh Flaxman's sister with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked

down at the small radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh

Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.

Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, to be

introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who was behind her sister,

saw Rose's eyes wandering from Lady Helen to the door, restlessly

searching and then returning.

Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance Agnes spied a

well-known form emerging.

'Mr. Langham! But Rose never told me he was to be here to-night, and how

_dreadful_ he looks!'

Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely across the

room. Rose had seen him at once; and they had greeted each other across

the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, trying to analyse what had struck her so.

The face was always melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was

ghastly, and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the

jet-black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would

have remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose's attention was claimed by

the young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman had brought up.

Mr. Denman was a fair-haired young Hercules, whose tremulous agitated

manner contrasted oddly with his athlete's looks. Among other magnetisms

he was clearly open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking to

Rose, staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy

lids,--much longer than the girl thought fair.

'Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new force before?'

he asked her, with a solemnity which sat oddly on his commonplace

bearded face.

'Oh yes!' she said flippantly. 'We have tried it sometimes. It is very

good fun.'

He drew himself up. 'Not _fun_,' he said impressively, 'not fun.

Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend

upon it. If established it will revolutionise our whole views of life.

Even a Huxley could not deny that!'

She studied him with mocking eyes. 'Do you imagine this party to-night

looks very serious?'

His face fell.

'One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,' he admitted,

sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man.

Why was he not cricketing or shooting or exploring, or using the muscles

Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose, instead

of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other people's

night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go away?

'Come, Mr. Denman,' said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; 'the audience

is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!' and he gave Langham a

cool greeting. 'Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings

with the devil?'

'Nothing. Are you a believer?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. 'I never refuse an experiment of any

kind,' he added with an odd change of voice. 'Come, Denman.'

And the two went off. Langham came to a stand beside Rose, while old

Lord Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the

Queen's Speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all

elderly men.

They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine

shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young

emotion, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she noticed

none of that change which had struck Agnes.

And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man's silence! An

hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him

to Lady Charlotte's that night. And yet here he was, riveted to her

side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her

loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of

her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the

teasing difficult creature of the last few months.

At Murewell his chagrin had been _not_ to feel, _not_ to struggle, to

have been cheated out of experience. Well, here _is_ the experience in

good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how

little the exquisite child beside him knows of it, or of the man on whom

she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting

in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and

eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her

is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.

The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and its

detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of

card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of

telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended them all, his

restless eye wandering every other minute to the farther drawing-room in

which the lights had been lowered, catching there always the same patch

of black and white,--Rose's dress and the dark form beside her.

'Are you convinced? Do you believe?' said Rose, merrily looking up at

her companion.

'In telepathy? Well--so far--I have not got beyond the delicacy and

perfection of Mr. Denman's--muscular sensation. So much I am sure of!'

'Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous!' she said gaily. 'We _know_ that

some people have an extraordinary power over others.'

'Yes, that certainly we know!' he answered, his voice dropping, an odd

strained note in it. 'I grant you that.'

She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood together,

conscious only of each other.

'Now,' said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between the two

drawing-rooms, 'I have done all I can--I am exhausted. But let me beg of

you all to go on with some experiments amongst yourselves. Every fresh

discovery of this power in a new individual is a gain to science. I

believe about one in ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will

arrange everything, if any one will volunteer?'

The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting this

and that. Presently Lady Charlotte's loud dictatorial voice made itself

heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand looking round the circle of her

guests.

'Somebody must venture--we are losing time.'

Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall and radiant

on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees. 'Miss Leyburn--you are

always public-spirited--will you be victimised for the good of science?'

The girl got up with a smile.

'And Mr. Langham--will you see what you can do with Miss Leyburn?

Hugh--we all choose her task, don't we--then Mr. Langham wills?'

Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose--a wild fury with

Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him. But there was

no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the large figure and

towering cap bent towards him. Refusal was impossible.

'Command me!' he said with a sudden straightening of the form and a

flush on the pale cheek. 'I am afraid Miss Leyburn will find me a very

bad partner.'

'Well, now then!' said Flaxman; 'Miss Leyburn, will you please go down

into the library while we settle what you are to do!'

She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed out

unconscious of him--rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the ground.

'Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do?' asked Lady Charlotte in the

same loud emphatic tone.

'If I might suggest something quite different from anything that has

been yet tried,' said Mr. Flaxman, 'suppose we require Miss Leyburn to

kiss the hand of the little marble statue of Hope in the far

drawing-room. What do you say, Langham?'

'What you please!' said Langham, moving up to him. A glance passed

between the two men. In Langham's there was a hardly sane antagonism and

resentment, in Flaxman's an excited intelligence.

'Now then, said Flaxman coolly, 'fix your mind steadily on what Miss

Leyburn is to do--you must take her hand--but except in thought, you

must carefully follow and not lead her. Shall I call her?'

Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of being

watched--tricked. Why were he and she to be made a spectacle for this

man and his friends! A mad irrational indignation surged through him.

Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the air

in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. Flaxman and Mr.

Denman prepared, note-book in hand, to watch the experiment. Langham

moved desperately forward.

But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though by

enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, were blotted

out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot everything but her and this

thing she was to do. He had her in his grasp--he was the man, the

master--and what enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying pliant

form! In the distance far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on

tiptoe, one outstretched arm just visible from where he stood.

There was a moment's silent expectation. Every eye was riveted on the

two figures--on the dark handsome man--on the blindfolded girl.

At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange wavering

motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly parted lips; her

bright colour was ebbing. She was conscious of nothing but the grasp in

which her hand was held--otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state

during the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one under

the partial influence of an anaesthetic; a benumbing grip was laid on all

her faculties; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she was

going.

Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half an hour or

five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing beside a small

marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and her lips had on them a

slight sense of chill, as though they had just been laid to something

cold.

She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her was Langham's

face, a marvellous glow and animation in every line of it.

'Have I done it?' she asked in a tremulous whisper.

For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still bewildered.

He nodded, smiling.

'I am so glad,' she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing at

him. There was the most adorable _abandon_ in her whole look and

attitude. He could but just restrain himself from taking her in his

arms, and for one bright flashing instant each saw nothing but the

other.

The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the little

old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and through which

they had swept without heeding, was drawn back with a rattle.

'She has done it! Hurrah!' cried Mr. Flaxman. 'What a rush that last

was, Miss Leyburn! You left us all behind.'

Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her eyes. A

rush? She had known nothing about it!

Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report to his aunt,

who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the experiment from the main

drawing-room. His face was a curious mixture of gravity and the keenest

excitement. The gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a

passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged certain

instincts of breeding and refinement which were now revenging

themselves.

'Did she do it exactly?' said Lady Helen eagerly.

'Exactly,' he said, standing still.

Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would not see her

look.

'Lady Charlotte, where is my sister?' said Rose, coming up from the back

room, looking now nearly as white as her dress.

It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady who lived on

Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had been obliged to go at

the beginning of the last experiment. Agnes, torn between her interest

in what was going on and her desire to get back to her mother, had at

last hurriedly accepted this Mrs. Sherwood's offer of a seat in her

carriage, imagining that her sister would want to stay a good deal

later, and relying on Lady Charlotte's promise that she should be safely

put into a hansom.

'I must go,' said Rose, putting her hand to her head. 'How tiring this

is! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman?'

'Exactly three minutes,' he said, his gaze fixed upon her with an

expression that only Lady Helen noticed.

'So little! Good-night, Lady Charlotte!' and giving her hand first to

her hostess then to Mr. Flaxman's bewildered sister, she moved away into

the crowd.

'Hugh, of course you are going down with her?' exclaimed Lady Charlotte

under her breath. 'You must. I promised to see her safely off the

premises.'

He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look made a step

forward, but he caught her arm.

'Don't spoil sport,' he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of

discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and

sister.

They looked at him--the one amazed, the other grimly observant--and

caught a slight significant motion of the head towards Langham's distant

figure.

Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned his back, Lady

Helen's large astonished eyes followed him to the door.

'Oh, Hugh!' was all she could say as they came back to her brother.

'Never mind, Nellie,' he whispered, touched by the bewildered sympathy

of her look; 'I will tell you all about it to-morrow. I have not been

behaving well, and am not particularly pleased with myself. But for her

it is all right. Poor, pretty little thing!'

And he walked away into the thick of the conversation.

Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for their

carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming out of the

cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale child-like fatigue in her

looks which set his heart beating faster than ever.

'Miss Leyburn, how are you going home?'

'Will you ask for a hansom, please?'

'Take my arm,' he said, and she clung to him through the crush till they

reached the door.

Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street seemed blocked,

a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and shouting men with lanterns.

Which of them suggested, 'Shall we walk a few steps?' At any rate, here

they were, out in the wind and the darkness, every step carrying them

farther away from that moving patch of noise and light behind.

'We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,' he said. 'Are you warm?'

'Perfectly.'

A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the colour was coming back.

She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well

shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.

Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was

being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the

glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they

passed within the power of the lamps, each saw with noonday distinctness

every line and feature in the other's face. They swept on--the night,

with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world

about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind

them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen's voices;

before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight.

London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this

wandering of theirs.

A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could

close it again, an arm was flung around her. She could not speak or

move, she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry

wind, and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.

'Oh, stay there!' a voice said close to her ear. 'Rest there--pale tired

child--pale tired little child!'

That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing

and protecting her from the cold--not kissing her--till at length she

looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.

'Are you sure at last?' she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the

far depths of her own thought to his.

'Sure!' he said, his expression changing. 'What can I be sure of? I am

sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor,

insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be

miserably throwing yourself away!'

She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about

him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm,

holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.

'Do you know,' he repeated--a tone of intense melancholy replacing the

tone of passion,--'how little I have to give you?'

'I know,' she answered, her face turned shyly away from him, her words

coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. 'I

know that--that--you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that----'

'Oh, hush,' he said, and his voice was full of pain. 'You know so

little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself,

till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or

be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain

selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell,

though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from

you. There is something paralysing in me, which is always forbidding me

to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical

disability--the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort.

Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony?

Oh, impossible!' he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him.

'You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright

and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It

is a crime--an infamy--that I should be speaking to you like this!'

Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling

and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.

'No, no,' she said wistfully; 'not if you love me.'

He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which

the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by

the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of

circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very passion

beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the

self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her

love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.

'You will not say you love me!' she cried, with hurrying breath. 'But I

know--I know--you do.'

Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from

him--'At least, if you don't, I am very--very--unhappy.'

The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself

saved, like Faust,--saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment's

impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to

hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest

shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.

CHAPTER XXXVI

Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. She would not

let him take her any farther.

'I will say nothing,' she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing

hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, 'till I see you again.

To-morrow?'

'To-morrow morning,' he said, waving his hand to her, and in another

instant he was facing the north wind alone.

He walked on fast towards Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached

his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where

the fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his

large reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay

littered on the floor.

He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung

shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to

him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that

walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long

passed--incredible almost.

And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a

hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft

confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent,

insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful

man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his

arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love.

Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but

fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal

note also that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.

So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which

life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt

the torturing thrill of passion--he has evoked such an answer as all

men might envy him,--and fresh from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty, the

strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her

response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of

gratitude and tenderness; the next--is nothing what it promises to

be?--and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost

some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where

its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over

the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate

the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent

upper room. Nothing caught Langham's ear. He was absorbed in the

dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of

himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.

'But I love her!--I love her! A little courage--a little effort--and I

too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere

contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me

back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not

forced her love--it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it,

if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope

thrown to him?'

To which the pale spectre self said scornfully--

'_Courage_ and _effort_ may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary.

They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two

others--_habit_ and _character_. Slave as you are of habit, of the

character you have woven for yourself out of years of deliberate

living--what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can

recreate! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden,

but for God's sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you

with theirs!'

'But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so

warm a heart! Poor child--poor child! I have played on her pity. I have

won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face--oh

monstrous--oh inhuman!' and the cold drops stood on his forehead.

But the other self was inexorable. 'You have acted as you were bound to

act--as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true

human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the

critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What

in God's name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such

ambitions? You are poor--you must go back to Oxford--you must take up

the work your soul loathes--grow more soured, more embittered--maintain

a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted,

and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even

that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from

the world! Think of the little house--the children--the money

difficulties--she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,--you

incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull

rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck--submit--refuse that

long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time.

_Kismet--Kismet!_'

And spread out before Langham's shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal

Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in

the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures,

two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with cold

and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.

The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, a cold and

bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and

terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of

manhood, had been alike powerless to save.

The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table

and wrote.

Then for hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of

fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection.

It was a base thing which he had done--it was also a strange thing

psychologically; and at intervals he tried to understand it, to track it

to its causes.

At nine o'clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a

commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him

with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.

On his way back he passed a gunsmith's, and stood looking fascinated at

the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes

gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the

bounds of tragedy--become farcical even.

'I should only stand a month--arguing--with my finger on the trigger.'

In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of

him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He

gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging

books and boxes about as though he were packing.

A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27,

looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The

ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through the

fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was

clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose's mood answered to

that of Nature.

Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs.

Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two, was

in a chair by the fire reading some letters forwarded to her from

Bedford Square.

He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an

expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview

with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself

happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of

her behaviour to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how

unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh

blow! 'But afterwards, when she has got over it,--when she knows that it

makes me happy,--that nothing else would make me happy,--then she will

be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again,

from the beginning. I won't be angry or hard over it--poor Cathie!'

And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for

what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light

catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly

towards her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady

Charlotte's house the night before had been a very different matter from

the royally attended leave-takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which

generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her

head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. 'I have

never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.'

But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself.

So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is

dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by

the clamour, will take up very much the same line.

What matter! The girl's spirit seemed to rise against all the world.

There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a

jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to

overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been

expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with

a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the

artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.

Besides--success! To make a man hope and love, and live again--_that_

shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling,

her heart very soft.

Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage

to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterwards the

dining-room door opened.

'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.

Rose took it--glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush--a

surreptitious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a wandering letter

from Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and

opened it.

Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and details as some

famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered

field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other

inmate in it, struck her.

'Rose,' she said, looking up, 'was that some one brought you a note?'

The girl turned with a start--a letter fell to the ground. She made a

faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.

'Rose--darling!' cried Catherine, springing up, 'are you ill?'

Rose looked at her with a perfectly colourless fixed face, made a feeble

negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front

of her, let her head fall upon them.

Catherine stood over her aghast. 'My darling--what is it? Come and lie

down--take this water.'

She put some close to her sister's hand, but Rose pushed it away. 'Don't

talk to me,' she said with difficulty.

Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek

resting against her sister's shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What

could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the

letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once

recognised Langham's handwriting. But before she could combine any

rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered

herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister's arm.

'I was startled,' she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 'Last

night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him--I expected him here this

morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me

that--he made a mistake--and he is very sorry! So am I! It is

so--so--bewildering!'

She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with

cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The elder

sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her, pressed the slim

irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips

quivering.

'That he should _dare_!' she cried. 'Rose--my poor little Rose.'

'Don't blame him!' said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while

Catherine fell into the armchair again. 'It doesn't seem to count, from

you--you have always been so ready to blame him!'

Her brow contracted; she looked frowning into the fire, her still

colourless mouth working painfully.

Catherine was cut to the heart. 'Oh, Rose!' she said, holding out her

hands, 'I will blame no one, dear. I seem hard--but I love you so. Oh,

tell me--you would have told me everything once!'

There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless

right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched palms. But she made

no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell towards

Catherine.

'Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him--he kissed me--I could

kill myself and him.'

Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour

that followed--the little familiar morning sounds in and about the

house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells

ringing,--and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental

struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost

heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose--a sense of

shock, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation, and a strange

intervening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which

seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder

questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly

piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question

filling her own indignant heart, 'Does she love him?'

At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a

white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from

eyes that were dry and feverish.

'If I could only be angry--downright angry,' she said, more to herself

than Catherine, 'it would do one good.'

'Give others leave to be angry for you!' cried Catherine.

'Don't!' said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 'You don't

know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you

must--you misjudge him--you always have. No, no'--and she nervously

crushed the letter in her hand--'not yet. But you shall read it some

time--you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is

due to him, perhaps due to me too,' and a hot flush transfigured her

paleness for an instant. 'Oh, my head! Why does one's mind affect one's

body like this? It shall not--it is humiliating! "Miss Leyburn has been

jilted and cannot see visitors,"--that is the kind of thing. Catherine,

when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me

practise my last Raff--I am going. Good-bye.'

She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or

she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.

'Miserable!' she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, 'I must go and lie

down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine,

not a word to any one but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not

to speak to me! No, don't come--I will go alone.'

And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her

room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the

letter in her hand,--the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had

for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished

sentence pleaded with her--even in the first smart of her wrong--for

pardon, for compassion, as towards something maimed and paralysed from

birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over

her cheeks.

'I was not good enough--I was not good enough--God would not let me!'

And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper

crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what? _To

save?_

How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the

task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that

shakes her as she kneels and weeps, nor is it mere wounded woman's

pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she

is--more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive--he could not

have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of

character stir within her. She feels herself judged,--and with a

righteous judgment--issuing inexorably from the facts of life and

circumstance.

* * * * *

Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert, who had come

over early to see how the household fared.

Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonishment and

dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had gone out of his mind

for some time. He had been busy in his East End work. Catherine had been

silent. Over how many matters they would once have discussed with open

heart was she silent now?

'I ought to have been warned,' he said with quick decision, 'if you knew

this was going on. I am the only man among you, and I understand Langham

better than the rest of you. I might have looked after the poor child a

little.'

Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart the more.

However, what had she known? She had seen nothing unusual of late,

nothing to make her think a crisis was approaching. Nay, she had

flattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, whom she liked, was gaining ground.

Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be done. Could

anything be done?

'I must go and see him,' he said presently. 'Yes, dearest, I must.

Impossible the thing should be left so! I am his old friend,--almost her

guardian. You say she is in great trouble--why, it may shadow her whole

life! No--he must explain things to us--he is bound to--he shall. It may

be something comparatively trivial in the way after all--money or

prospects or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you

say? It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for

her--but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him----'

He turned to her--appealing, remonstrating. Catherine stood pale and

rigid. Incredible that he should think it right to intermeddle--to take

the smallest step towards reversing so plain a declaration of God's

will! She could not sympathise--she would not consent. Robert watched

her in painful indecision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to

her true reason for finding some comfort even in her sister's

trouble--that he seemed to her mindful only of the passing human misery,

indifferent to the eternal risk.

They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched up his hat.

'I must go,' he said in a low voice; 'it is right.'

And he went--stepping, however, with the best intentions in the world,

into a blunder.

Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had left her.

Then some one came into the room--some one with pale looks and flashing

eyes. It was Agnes.

'She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,' said the

girl--her whole, even, cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. 'What

are such creatures made for, Catherine--why do they exist?'

Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty morning streets to

Langham's lodgings. His mood was very hot by the time he reached his

destination, and he climbed the staircase to Langham's room in some

excitement. When he tried to open the door after the answer to his knock

bidding him enter, he found something barring the way. 'Wait a little,'

said the voice inside, 'I will move the case.'

With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. Seeing his

visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre astonishment. The room was

littered with books and packing-cases with which he had been busy.

'Come in,' he said, not offering to shake hands.

Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, stood

leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to him. Langham

paused opposite to him, his waving jet-black hair falling forward over

the marble pale face which had been Robert's young ideal of manly

beauty.

The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong is old

association that Robert's feeling towards his friend had always remained

in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate towards the don. His

sense of it now filled him with a curious awkwardness.

'I know why you are come,' said Langham slowly, after a scrutiny of his

visitor.

'I am here by a mere accident,' said the other, thinking perfect

frankness best. 'My wife was present when her sister received your

letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had gone up to ask after them

all, and came on to you,--of course on my own responsibility entirely!

Rose knows nothing of my coming--nothing of what I have to say.'

He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man before him.

Whatever he had done during the past twenty-four hours he had clearly

had the grace to suffer in the doing of it.

'You can have nothing to say!' said Langham, leaning against the

chimney piece and facing him with black, darkly-burning eyes. 'You know

me.'

Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the despair, all the

bitterness hidden under the languid student's exterior of every day,

had, as it were, risen to the surface. He stood at bay, against his

friend, against himself.

'No!' exclaimed Robert stoutly, 'I do not know you in the sense you

mean. I do not know you as the man who could beguile a girl on to a

confession of love, and then tell her that for you marriage was too

great a burden to be faced!'

Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. Robert

repented him a little. Langham's strange individuality always impressed

him against his will.

'I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,' he went on, 'though I

confess to being very hot! I came to try and find out--for myself only,

mind--whether what prevents you from following up what I understand

happened last night is really a matter of feeling, or a matter of

outward circumstance. If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling

for Rose is not what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion

about your conduct--but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you

have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply afraid of

yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities of practical

married life, I cannot help begging you to talk the matter over with me,

and let us face it together. Whether Rose would ever, under any

circumstances, get over the shock of this morning I have not the

remotest idea. But'--and he hesitated--'it seems the feeling you

appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well

what havoc a thing of this kind _may_ make in a girl's life. I don't say

it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not

hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I

am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to

take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!'

There was a moment's dead silence.

'You cannot pretend to believe,' said Langham at last, with the same

sombre self-containedness, 'that a marriage with me would be for your

sister-in-law's happiness?'

'I don't know what to believe!' cried Robert. 'No,' he added frankly,

'no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the

idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; _a priori_, I never

thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when a

thing is wholly in the air looks very different when a man has committed

himself and another, as you have done.'

Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from

his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.

'Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as you

please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even

greater fiend and weakling than you think me if, in cold blood, I could

let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust

myself--you may think of the statement as you like--I should make her

_miserable_. Last night I had not parted from her an hour before I was

utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are my masters. I

believe,' he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond

Robert, 'I could even grow to _hate_ what came between me and them!'

Was it the last word of the man's life? It struck Robert with a kind of

shiver.

'Pray heaven,' he said with a groan, getting up to go, 'you may not have

made her miserable already!'

'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham almost inaudibly, turning away,

Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in the

subtle brain tissue.

'I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly; 'but when I came in I found

my wife--who has no light tears--weeping for her sister.'

His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too

pitiful and too intimate for speech.

Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.

'Good-bye!' said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having

got foolishly through a fool's errand. 'As I said to you before, what

Rose's feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she

would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And I

see that you will not talk to me--you will not take me into your

confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend.

And--and--are you going? What does this mean?'

He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.

'I am going back to Oxford,' said the other briefly. 'I cannot stay in

these rooms, in these streets.'

Robert was sore perplexed. What real--nay, what terrible suffering--in

the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself

wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly

unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over

human life.

'It is very hard,' he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that our old

friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You are

always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council

sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities?

Your own perceptions are all warped!'

Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and

one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.

'I will write to you, Elsmere,' he said, holding out his hand, 'speech

is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.'

Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.

But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the middle of the day

sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again

more feverishly than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose,

suffering and paling.

And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of

this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married

life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life

had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion

and fierce practical interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his

mental balance.

He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last rehearsal at

Searle House. Afterwards her custom was to come back from St. James's

Park to High Street, Kensington, and walk up the hill to her own home.

He knew it, for on two occasions after these rehearsals he had been at

Lerwick Gardens, waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she

go this afternoon? A subtle instinct told him that she would.

* * * * *

It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Rose, stepping out from the

High Street station, crossed the main road and passed into the darkness

of one of the streets leading up the hill. She had forced herself to go,

and she would go alone. But as she toiled along she felt weary and

bruised all over. She carried with her a heart of lead--a sense of utter

soreness--a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only

thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent

memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill?

She flushed hotly at the thought, and then realised again, with a sense

of childish comfort, the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in

shielding her from any unnecessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of the

hand with which he had put her into the cab that took her to the

Underground.

Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she saw a man

standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was Langham.

'You!' she cried, stopping.

He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway of a large

detached house not far off, which threw a certain illumination over him,

though it left her in shadow. He said nothing, but he held out both his

hands mutely. She fancied rather than saw the pale emotion of his look.

'What?' she said, after a pause. 'You think to-night is last night! You

and I have nothing to say to each other, Mr. Langham.'

'I have everything to say,' he answered, under his breath; 'I have

committed a crime--a villainy.'

'And it is not pleasant to you?' she said, quivering. 'I am sorry--I

cannot help you. But you are wrong--it was no crime--it was necessary

and profitable, like the doses of one's childhood! Oh! I might have

guessed you would do this; No, Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an

interesting decline. I have just played my _concerto_ very fairly. I

shall not disgrace myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at

peace--I have learnt several things to-day that have been salutary--very

salutary.'

She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him,--unresisting,

helplessly silent.

'Don't come any farther,' she said resolutely after a minute, turning to

face him. 'Let us be quits! I was a temptingly easy prey. I bear no

malice. And do not let me break your friendship with Robert; that began

before this foolish business--it should outlast it. Very likely _we_

shall be friends again, like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine

your wound is very deep, and----'

But no! Her lips closed; not even for pride's sake, and retort's sake,

will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first love.

She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see nothing among her

furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. The whole personality

seemed centred in the voice--the half-mocking vibrating voice. He took

her hand and dropped it instantly.

'You do not understand,' he said hopelessly--feeling as though every

phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally fatuous, equally

shameful. 'Thank heaven, you never will understand.'

'I think I do,' she said with a change of tone, and paused. He raised

his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. What _was_ the

expression in them? It was yearning--but not the yearning of passion.

'If things had been different--if one could change the self--if the past

were nobler!'--was that the cry of them? A painful humility--a boundless

pity--the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither measure

nor explain--these were some of the impressions which passed from her to

him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her transformed on the

farther side, with, as it were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature,

than had ever yet been hers.

He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for an instant to

his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and was gone.

He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his books, his

only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever tampered with any other?

'_It was not love--not love!_' he said to himself, with an accent of

infinite relief as he sank into his chair. '_Her_ smart will heal.'

BOOK VI

NEW OPENINGS

CHAPTER XXXVII

Ten days after Langham's return to Oxford Elsmere received a

characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to

be considered as still existing or at an end. The calm and even proud

melancholy of the letter showed a considerable subsidence of that state

of half-frenzied irritation and discomfort in which Elsmere had last

seen him. The writer, indeed, was clearly settling down into another

period of pessimistic quietism such as that which had followed upon his

first young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second

period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all the vital

forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, half-angry,

half-relenting, put down the letter, he felt the conviction that no

fresh influence from outside would ever again be allowed to penetrate

the solitude of Langham's life. In comparison with the man who had just

addressed him, the tutor of his undergraduate recollections was a

vigorous and sociable human being.

The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible affectionate letter

in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings of resentment, he

said, he could not realise, now that the crisis was past, that he cared

less about his old friend. 'As far as we two are concerned, let us

forget it all. I could hardly say this, you will easily imagine, if I

thought that you had done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife

and I agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to

her own surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no

doubt, before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal to her

past. But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send you our

opinion for what it is worth, believing that it will and must be welcome

to you.'

Rose, however, was not so long in admitting it. One marked result of

that new vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of that

February morning was a great softening towards Catherine. Whatever might

have been Catherine's intense relief when Robert returned from his

abortive mission, she never afterwards let a disparaging word towards

Langham escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy

itself, and Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, and

against the noisy world of flattery and excitement in which she had been

living, turned to Catherine as she had never done since she was a tiny

child. She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square

drawing-room, pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality

recovering, like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing

influence of thought and silence.

One day, when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine

by saying with one of her old odd smiles--

'Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of

hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a

fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great

astonishment, there is no bone broken!'

And she held herself back from Catherine's knee lest her sister should

attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow an

answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush

after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.

In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Langham had been a

kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had

crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and

longing, when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of

her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities.

His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very

strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl's

immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the

interval of angry resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it. As

to the months in London, they had been one long duel between herself and

him--a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncertainty,

but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large

proportion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory,

Langham's endangered habits and threatened individuality had asserted

themselves once for all. And from the whole long struggle--passion,

exultation, and crushing defeat--it often seemed to her that she had

gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character,

a soul!

It may be easily imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen

interest in Langham's disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle

House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's coming in a state of extraordinary

irritation. He expected a blushing _fiancee_, in a fool's paradise,

asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a

decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him.

And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some

double-edged congratulations.

Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale tired girl,

who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and

said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.

His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way

up to her, and was her watchful unobtrusive guardian for the rest of the

afternoon.

He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient

conjecture.

'As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had

an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he

did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot--and if he did,

_a fortiori_, for clearly she is _miserable_. But what a brave child!

How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that _I_ saw

nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!'

Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and

by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had

left London.

Gone! But not without a crisis--that was evident. During the din of

preparations for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings which

it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the house of some other

connection of his--for the concert was the work of his friends, and

given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel--he had

many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft indefinable

change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of

sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost

her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been so

marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did

everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was

to his fancy absent and _distraite_, pursuing through the tumult of

which she was often the central figure some inner meditations of which

neither he nor any one else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over

the girl's light self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of

experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she

was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.

Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very near the

truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received

his own conjectures amused himself.

'To think,' he said to himself once with a long breath, 'that that

creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without

any one of the kickings due to him!'

Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude

towards this same 'creature,' towards the man who had released a prize

he had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. _Free_

again--to be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.

His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly

at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions

carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state

of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask

of her friends was not to be made to feel.

He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady

Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh's behalf,

Lady Helen had been dumfoundered by the sudden emergence of Langham at

Lady Charlotte's party for their common discomfiture. Who was the

man?--why, what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of

giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love,

and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was

probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen

made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a

whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected,

that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf

allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for

him which at the moment he could not play for himself.

So in the cheeriest daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother

and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked

Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to

Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally,

to Mrs. Pierson's disgust, became the girls' chief chaperon in a

fast-filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend

or amuse his sister's _proteges_--always there, but never in the way. He

was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all

the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a

bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone towards her which made his

companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced

Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose's health, a few

unexplained stares and 'humphs' and grunts, a few irrelevant

disquisitions on her nephew's merits of head and heart, were all she was

able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething with a mass of

sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant to give

expression--anger with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous

as to prefer some one else to Hugh; anger with Hugh for his persistent

disregard of her advice and the duke's feelings; and a burning desire to

know the precise why and wherefore of Langham's disappearance. She was

too lofty to become Rose's aunt without a struggle, but she was not too

lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs.

* * * * *

But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited most by

Rose's shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming over, restless under

her own smart, would fall to watching the trial of the woman and the

wife, and would often perforce forget herself and her smaller woes in

the pity of it. She stayed in Bedford Square once for a week, and then

for the first time she realised the profound change which had passed

over the Elsmeres' life. As much tenderness, between husband and wife as

ever--perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though from an

instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from each other and

from the world. But Robert went his way, Catherine hers. Their spheres

of work lay far apart; their interests were diverging fast; and though

Robert at any rate was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh

invading silences were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the

number of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in the

East End under Murray Edwardes's auspices. He was already known to

certain circles as a seceder from the Church who was likely to become

both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the _Nineteenth

Century_, on disputed points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made

their mark, and several of the veterans of philosophical debate had

already taken friendly and flattering notice of the new writer.

Meanwhile Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon's Sunday school, and

attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert's energies

became, the more she suffered, and the more the small daily

opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could hardly bear to

hear him talk about his work, and she never opened the number of the

_Nineteenth Century_ which contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to

ask her to read them.

Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appearance in R----,

with a cordiality and a helpfulness of the most self-effacing kind.

Robert had begun with assuring his new friend that he saw no chance, at

any rate for the present, of his formally joining the Unitarians.

'I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet! And I own I look

rather for a combination from many sides than for the development of any

now existing sect. But supposing,' he added, smiling, 'supposing I do in

time set up a congregation and a service of my own, is there really room

for you and me? Should I not be infringing on a work I respect a great

deal too much for anything of the sort?'

Edwardes laughed the notion to scorn.

The parish, as a whole, contained 20,000 persons. The existing churches,

which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid's, were miserably attended,

provided accommodation at the outside for 3000. His own chapel held 400,

and was about half full.

'You and I may drop our lives here,' he said, his pleasant friendliness

darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy which London work seems

to develop even in the most buoyant of men, 'and only a few hundred

persons, at the most, be ever the wiser. Begin with us--then make your

own circle.'

And he forthwith carried off his visitor to the point from which, as it

seemed to him, Elsmere's work might start, viz. a lecture-room half a

mile from his own chapel, where two helpers of his had just established

an independent venture.

Murray Edwardes had at the time an interesting and miscellaneous staff

of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to religious opinions, but in

general the men who volunteered under him--civil servants, a young

doctor, a briefless barrister or two--were men who had drifted from

received beliefs, and found a pleasure and freedom in working for and

with him they could hardly have found elsewhere. The two who had planted

their outpost in what seemed to them a particularly promising corner of

the district were men of whom Edwardes knew personally little. 'I have

really not much concern with what they do,' he explained to Elsmere,

'except that they get a small share of our funds. But I know they want

help, and if they will take you in, I think you will make something of

it.'

After a tramp through the muddy winter streets, they came upon a new

block of warehouses, in the lower windows of which some bills announced

a night-school for boys and men. Here, to judge from the commotion round

the doors, a lively scene was going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs

were hammering at the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the

keyhole. Inside, as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, by dint of good

humour and strong shoulders, had succeeded in shoving their way through

and shutting the door behind them, they found a still more animated

performance in progress. The schoolroom was in almost total darkness;

the pupils, some twenty in number, were racing about, like so many

shadowy demons, pelting each other and their teachers with the 'dips'

which, as the buildings were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been

provided to light them through their three R's. In the middle stood the

two philanthropists they were in search of, freely bedaubed with tallow,

one employed in boxing a boy's ears, the other in saving a huge

inkbottle whereon some enterprising spirit had just laid hands by way of

varying the rebel ammunition. Murray Edwardes, who was in his element,

went to the rescue at once, helped by Robert. The boy-minister, as he

looked, had been, in fact, 'bow' of the Cambridge eight, and possessed

muscles which men twice his size might have envied. In three minutes he

had put a couple of ringleaders into the street by the scruff of the

neck, relit a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest of the

rioters in hand. Elsmere backed him ably, and in a very short time they

had cleared the premises.

Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off into a shout

of laughter.

'My dear Wardlaw, my condolences to your coat! But I don't believe if I

were a rough myself I could resist "dips." Let me introduce a

friend--Mr. Elsmere--and if you will have him, a recruit for your work.

It seems to me another pair of arms will hardly come amiss to you!'

The short red-haired man addressed shook hands with Elsmere,

scrutinising him from under bushy eyebrows. He was panting and

beplastered with tallow, but the inner man was evidently quite

unruffled, and Elsmere liked the shrewd Scotch face and gray eyes.

'It isn't only a pair of arms we want,' he remarked drily, 'but a bit of

science behind them. Mr. Elsmere, I observed, can use his.'

Then he turned to a tall affected-looking youth with a large nose and

long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands upon his sides, his

eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the wreck and disarray of the

schoolroom.

'Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you? My friend and

helper--Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, won't you, a minute. They've

left us the chairs, I perceive, and there's a spark or two of fire. Do

you smoke? Will you light up?'

The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw and Elsmere

walked home together. It had been all arranged. Mackay, a curious morbid

fellow, who had thrown himself into Unitarianism and charity mainly out

of opposition to an orthodox and _bourgeois_ family, and who had a great

idea of his own social powers, was somewhat grudging and ungracious

through it all. But Elsmere's proposals were much too good to be

refused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his

clergyman's experience, and as much money as might be wanted. Wardlaw

listened to him cautiously for an hour, took stock of the whole man

physically and morally, and finally said, as he very quietly and

deliberately knocked the ashes out of his pipe,--

'All right, I'm your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, I vote we make

you captain of this venture.'

'Nothing of the sort,' said Elsmere. 'In London I am a novice; I come to

learn, not to lead.'

Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mackay faintly

endorsed his companion's offer, and the party broke up.

That was in January. In two months from that time, by the natural force

of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his own most sincere wish

to avoid a premature leadership, had become the head and heart of the

Elgood Street undertaking, which had already assumed much larger

proportions. Wardlaw was giving him silent approval and invaluable help,

while young Mackay was in the first uncomfortable stages of a

hero-worship which promised to be exceedingly good for him.

CHAPTER XXXVIII

There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of

Elsmere's venture in North R----, one of which may just be noticed here.

Wardlaw, his predecessor and colleague, had speculatively little or

nothing in common with Elsmere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted and

orthodox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for the

philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging to far

stranger and remoter faiths.

By profession he was a barrister, with a small and struggling practice.

On this practice, however, he had married, and his wife, who had been a

doctor's daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardours as

himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell

Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to

do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been

seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a

dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative

to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them

was done, she would throw herself into charity organisation cases, into

efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest

acts of ministry towards the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her

face, which but for the stress of London, of labour, and of poverty,

would have had a blunt fresh-coloured dairymaid's charm, became symbols

of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining

men and women.

The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings

to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe

even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them

than the neighbourhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain

narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances

like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound

became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our

generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us

who are but moderately influenced by Comte's philosophy, and can make

nothing of the religion of Humanity.

Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere's work in North R----.

In spite of Robert's efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner

gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive

something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth.

And we shall see that in time Robert's energies took a direction which

Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning

Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of

honouring.

In the first place, Wardlaw's choice of the Elgood Street room as a

fresh centre for civilising effort had been extremely shrewd. The

district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number

of promising elements.

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their schoolroom rose the

great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north

side of the river to Doulton's immense works on the south. The old

winding streets near it, and the blocks of workmen's dwellings recently

erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its

innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of

skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation,

earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great

many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been

largely instrumental in establishing within easy distance of their

houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as

the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working,

when Robert, after a few weeks' work in the place, set up a popular

historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and

white poster in the schoolroom windows, it was the potters who provided

him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock

labourers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran

up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and

a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together

in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and

specialised training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from

which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these

well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a

mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the

riverside streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in

the neighbourhood of St. Wilfrid's.

St. Wilfrid's at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very

successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one

end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents

who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses of which the district

was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly

drawn.

The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and

persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations

went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and

'process' in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where

it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its

natural fruits.

A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere's

mind--after he had been working some six weeks in the district--the

forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid's was the very church where

Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten

wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of

inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had

written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately

after his interview with the bishop. The letter had remained unanswered,

and it was by now tolerably clear that the silence of its recipient

meant a withdrawal from all friendly relations with the writer.

Elsmere's affectionate sensitive nature took such things hardly,

especially as he knew that Newcome's life was becoming increasingly

difficult and embittered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine

how Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend's 'infidel

propaganda,' established on the very ground where he himself had all but

died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over.

But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London life which was

not without its uses to character. Hitherto he had always swum with the

stream, cheered by the support of all the great and prevailing English

traditions. Here, he and his few friends were fighting a solitary fight

apart from the organised system of English religion and English

philanthropy. All the elements of culture and religion already existing

in the place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid's passed them

with cold averted eyes; the old and _faineant_ rector of the parish

church very soon let it be known what he thought as to the taste of

Elsmere's intrusion on his parish, or as to the eternal chances of those

who might take either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious.

His enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the Church,

in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly no

relation at all to the facts. But every little incident in this new

struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost

other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high Utopian vision

drove him on from day to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be,

alone and for himself, approved only by conscience and the inward voice.

'Tasks in hours of insight willed

Can be in hours of gloom fulfilled;'

and it was that moment by the river which worked in him through all the

prosaic and perplexing details of this new attempt to carry enthusiasm

into life.

It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of London the

chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the _upper working

class_. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and

intelligent among the working class holds itself aloof--broadly

speaking--from all existing spiritual agencies, whether of Church or

Dissent.

Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically no hold

whatever; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar

material in the great towns of the North. Towards religion in general

the prevailing attitude is one of indifference tinged with hostility.

'Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous

proportion belong to the working class, and among them, Church and

Dissent nowhere--_Christianity not in possession_.' Such is the estimate

of an Evangelical of our day; and similar laments come from all parts of

the capital. The Londoner is on the whole more conceited, more

prejudiced, more given over to crude theorising, than his North-country

brother, the mill-hand, whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous and

tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline of

intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly speaking,

means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its

contradictions and absurdities; he has no dread of losing what he never

valued; his sense of antiquity, of history, is _nil_; and his life

supplies him with excitement enough without the stimulants of

'other-worldliness.' Religion has been on the whole irrationally

presented to him, and the result on his part has been an irrational

breach with the whole moral and religious order of ideas.

But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which

welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same

elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working

class--elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. The mere

intermingling of races, which a modern capital shares with those old

towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and

receptiveness, whether for good or evil.

As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despondency

produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun to

wear off, Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and

ardour of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with religion. He

made himself quickly felt in the night-school, and as soon as he

possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room,

on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the

story-telling, which had been so great a success at Murewell. The

story-telling struck the neighbourhood as a great novelty. At first only

a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and

draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive sway. The next night

the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room

was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that

it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for

story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.

In these performances Elsmere's aim had always been twofold--the rousing

of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and

simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it would be

merely some feature of London life itself--the history of a great fire,

for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in the river; a

string of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be

made of the way in which the poor help one another. Sometimes it would

be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties of particular

trades--a colliery explosion and the daring of the rescuers; incidents

from the life of the great Northern ironworks, or from that of the

Lancashire factories; or stories of English country life and its

humours, given sometimes in dialect--Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or

Cumberland--for which he had a special gift. Or, again, he would take

the sea and its terrors--the immortal story of the _Birkenhead_; the

deadly plunge of the _Captain_; the records of the lifeboats, or the

fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by step,

through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys

of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mont Blanc might be

buried without showing even his topmost snowfield above the plain of

waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of

fiction--fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes

from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on

the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the

people--of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or

even of Thomas Carlyle.

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing from

Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new

acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo's escape from the Chateau

d'If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an

admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid's hearing

vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and

this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At

the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious

conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it often

gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or

Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them.

His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current

'isms.' Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church

divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions,

but it should be added that with equal regularity _he_ dropped the

pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very

decipherable person in religious matters--as Rose had already

discovered.

The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid's to the bare

warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough.

Here were no bowed figures, no _recueillement_. In the blaze of crude

light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the

platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long

arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the

attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a

band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their

neighbours had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the

room cried out for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in

the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to cut

the strings of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at

last he reached _terra firma_ there was a ringing cheer.

'What is he, d'ye know?' Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbour, as

Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb

in the story-teller's direction meanwhile. 'Seems like a parson somehow.

But he ain't a parson.'

'Not he,' said the other laconically. 'Knows better. Most of 'em as

comes down 'ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as an

egg's full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn't catch _me_ here.

Never heard him say anything in the "dear brethren" sort of style, and

I've been 'ere most o' these evenings and to his lectures besides.'

'Perhaps he's one of your d--d sly ones,' said the first speaker

dubiously. 'Means to shovel it in by and by.'

'Well, I don't know as I couldn't stand it if he did,' returned his

companion. 'He'd let other fellers have their say, anyhow.'

Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young man, a

gasfitter--to judge by the contents of the basket he seemed to have

brought in with him on his way from work--with eyes like live birds',

and small emaciated features. During the story Flaxman had noticed the

man's thin begrimed hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him,

trembling with excitement.

Another project of Robert's, started as soon as he had felt his way a

little in the district, was the scientific Sunday school. This was the

direct result of a paragraph in Huxley's Lay Sermons, where the hint of

such a school was first thrown out. However, since the introduction of

science teaching into the Board schools, the novelty and necessity of

such a supplement to a child's ordinary education is not what it was.

Robert set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the

streets in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for

fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dreadfuls. A little

simple chemical and electrical experiment went down greatly; so did a

botany class, to which Elsmere would come armed with two stores of

flowers, one to be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed

according to memory and attention. A year before he had had a number of

large coloured plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by

a Kew assistant. These he would often set up on a large screen, or put

up on the walls, till the dingy schoolroom became a bower of superb

blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple and orange. And

then--still by the help of pictures--he would take his class on a tour

through strange lands, talking to them of China or Egypt or South

America, till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pyramids or

through the Pampas, or into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as

the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper.

Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, while almost

all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. He knew it, and had

laid his plans for such a result. Such work as he had at heart has no

chance with the lowest in the social scale, in its beginnings. It must

have something to work upon, and must penetrate downwards. He only can

receive who already hath--there is no profounder axiom.

And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brooding, still

waiting. At last the spark fell.

There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street, rose the famous

Workmen's Club of North R----. It had been started by a former Liberal

clergyman of the parish, whose main object, however, had been to train

the workmen to manage it for themselves. His training had been, in fact,

too successful. Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it

had come to be a centre of active, nay, brutal, opposition to the Church

and faith which had originally fostered it. In organic connection with

it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist

lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under

its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing

with the coarsest free-thinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll's books

occupying the place of honour in the window and the _Freethinker_

placard flaunting at the door. Inside there was still more highly

seasoned literature even than the _Freethinker_ to be had. There was in

particular a small halfpenny paper which was understood to be in some

sense the special organ of the North R---- Club; which was at any rate

published close by, and edited by one of the workmen founders of the

club. This unsavoury sheet began to be more and more defiantly

advertised through the parish as Lent drew on towards Passion week, and

the exertions of St. Wilfrid's and of the other churches, which were

being spurred on by the Ritualists' success, became more apparent. Soon

it seemed to Robert that every bit of hoarding and every waste wall was

filled with the announcement:--

'Read _Faith and Fools_. Enormous success. Our _Comic Life of Christ_

now nearly completed. Quite the best thing of its kind going. Woodcut

this week--Transfiguration.'

His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Passion week he left the

night-school about ten o'clock. His way led him past the club, which was

brilliantly lit up, and evidently in full activity. Round the door there

was a knot of workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and

the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of _Faith and Fools_,

and were showing the week's woodcut to those about them, with chuckles

and spirts of laughter.

Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and stirred by a

sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, and asked for the paper. The

woman handed it to him, and gave him his change with a business-like

_sangfroid_, which struck on his tired nerves almost more painfully than

the laughing brutality of the men he had just passed.

Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under a

lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll

emanating from Mary Magdalene's mouth, in particular, containing

obscenities which cannot be quoted here.

Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.

'This is Wednesday in Passion week,' he said to himself. 'The day after

to-morrow is Good Friday!'

He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself

within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But

he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East,

among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany,

the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with

the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical

perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum

and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem

preaching--all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life

within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of

dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and

befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace

such a temper of mind towards such an object--present and militant as

that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout

modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love

Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he

could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately

discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from

simplicity and verity?--is it the last and most terrible illustration of

a great axiom: '_Faith has a judge--in truth_'?

He went home and lay awake half the night pondering. If he could but

pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his

youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are

alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will

not hear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more

painfully from exercising.

The next night was a story-telling night. He spent it in telling the

legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait a

moment, and there and then--with the tender imaginative Franciscan

atmosphere, as it were, still about them--he delivered a short and

vigorous protest in the name of decency, good feeling, and common sense,

against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate

neighbourhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had

approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting

together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant

grimace or two.

When Robert ceased speaking one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up

and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin

lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a

Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He

complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a

good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an

attack upon an institution in which many of them were deeply interested;

and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the

matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.

The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the

men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday

visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week.

Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with

him had an unusual piquancy.

Robert sprang up. 'When you will,' he said. 'I am ready to stand by what

I have just said in the face of you all, if you care to hear it.'

Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval of

the club committee, and Elsmere's audience separated in a glow of

curiosity and expectation.

'Didn't I tell ye?' the gasfitter's snarling friend said to him.

'Scratch him and you find the parson. These upper-class folk, when they

come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls, as

those Injuns he was talking about last week hunt for scalps. They can't

get to heaven without a certain number of 'em slung about 'em.'

'Wait a bit!' said the gasfitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a

certain raised inner temperature.

Next morning the North R---- Club was placarded with announcements that

on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver a lecture in the

Debating Hall on 'The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life'; to be followed,

as usual, by general discussion.

CHAPTER XXXIX

It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at St.

Paul's, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had

accompanied her. Their midday meal was over, and Robert had been

devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his

wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he

had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which

wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils round the cabinet at the

end of the room. It was Mary's weekly task to embrace this horror, and

the performance went by the name of 'kissing the Jabberwock.' It had

been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary was

being carried round the room on her father's shoulder, holding on

mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the

defeated monster.

At last Robert deposited her on the rug beside a fascinating farmyard

which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child,

but at his wife.

'Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!'

She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion

of the eyes, contradicted it.

'I want courage,' he went on--'courage to tell you something that may

hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it.'

Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But

she waited quietly for what he had to say.