She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart,

physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle consideration for

him at dinner. M. de Querouelle was made to talk. His hostess wound him

up and set him going, tune after tune. He played them all, and, by dint

of long practice, to perfection, in the French way. A visit of his youth

to the island grave of Chateaubriand; his early memories, as a poetical

aspirant, of the magnificent flatteries by which Victor Hugo made

himself the god of young romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in

the days of _L'Avenir_; his memories of Lamennais's sombre figure, of

Maurice de Guerin's feverish ethereal charm; his account of the

opposition _salons_ under the Empire--they had all been elaborated in

the course of years, till every word fitted and each point led to the

next with the 'inevitableness' of true art. Robert, at first silent and

_distrait_, found it impossible after a while not to listen with

interest. He admired the skill, too, of Madame de Netteville's second in

the duet, the finish, the alternate sparkle and melancholy of it; and at

last he too was drawn in, and found himself listened to with great

benevolence by the Frenchman, who had been informed about him, and

regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of English

religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addlestone, who had won a

European reputation for wisdom by a great scantiness of speech in

society, coupled with the look of Minerva's owl, attached himself to

them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr.

Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party at the other end.

'Are you still in your old quarters, Lady Aubrey?' asked Sir John

Headlam, turning his old roguish face upon her. 'That house of Nell

Gwynne's, wasn't it, in Meade Street?'

'Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then they

made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten years. There

is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and wants to live in it.

I could have left a train of gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so

cross!'

'Ah--"Reculer pour mieux _faire_ sauter!"' said Sir John, mincing out

his pun as though he loved it.

'Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, 'but you have way

to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner,

that positively----'

'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the _Societe de

Londres_,' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen

an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear Lady Aubrey, it was simply

because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been

neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but

one we met, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the

dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the

way, have you read the _Princesse de----_?'

He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.

'I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a

rapier-glance at him, 'but if I had, I should say precisely the same.

Lord Rupert, will you kindly keep Sir John in order?'

Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion

characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern

gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual

spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably assumed that

all 'the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in

adorning his person.' Not at all! The _tenue_ of a dandy was never more

cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of

a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality

going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top

rungs.

It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum

of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own

conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the

other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a

while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of

a personal skirmish, the whole scene--the dainty oval room, the lights,

the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the

tapestried walls--would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a

dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream

never has.

The hard self-confidence of these people--did it belong to the same

world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone

on him that afternoon from Charles Richards's begrimed and blood-stained

face? '_Blessed are the poor in spirit_,' he said to himself once with

an inward groan. 'Why am I here? Why am I not at home with Catherine?'

But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had never seen her so

womanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate social skill. As she

talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of literature, or politics, or

famous folk, flashing her beautiful eyes from one to the other, Sir John

Headlam would, every now and then, turn his odd puckered face

observantly towards the farther end of the table.

'By Jove!' he said afterwards to Wharncliffe as they walked away from

the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more _roles_

than Desforets!' Sir John and his hostess were very old friends.

Upstairs smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining in.

M. de Querouelle, having talked the best of his _repertoire_ at dinner,

was now inclined for amusement, and had discovered that Lady Aubrey

could amuse him, and was, moreover, _une belle personne_. Madame de

Netteville was obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men

stood chatting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious of a

complete failure of social energy, began to look at his watch. Instantly

Madame de Netteville glided up to him.

'Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know how my

affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come into my little

writing-room.' And she led him into a tiny panelled room at the far end

of the drawing-room and shut off from it by a heavy curtain, which she

now left half-drawn.

'The latest?' said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising his eyebrows

with the slightest motion of the head towards the writing-room.

'I suppose so,' she said indifferently; 'she is East-Ending for a

change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy's young man who "liked

bad wine, he was so bored with good."'

Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the open window of

the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her.

'You look as if you had had a strain,' she said to him abruptly, after

they had talked business for a few minutes. 'What has been the matter?'

He told her Richards's story, very shortly. It would have been

impossible to him to give more than the driest outline of it in that

room. His companion listened gravely. She was an epicure in all things,

especially in moral sensation, and she liked his moments of reserve and

strong self-control. They made his general expansiveness more

distinguished.

Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying--

'I was at your lecture last Sunday--you didn't see me!'

'Were you? Ah! I remember a person in black, and veiled, who puzzled me.

I don't think we want you there, Madame de Netteville.'

His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it.

'Why not? Is it only the artisans who have souls? A reformer should

refuse no one.'

'You have your own opportunities,' he said quietly; 'I think the men

prefer to have it to themselves for the present. Some of them are

dreadfully in earnest.'

'Oh, I don't pretend to be in earnest,' she said with a little wave of

her hand; 'or, at any rate, I know better than to talk of earnestness to

_you_.'

'Why to me?' he asked, smiling.

'Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the upper class

and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not

interested in any other, and, indeed, you know nothing of any other.'

She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night was splendid

and regal--her dress of black and white brocade, the diamonds at her

throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the marks of experience and

living on the dark subtle face.

'Perhaps not,' he replied: 'it is enough for one life to try and make

out where the English working class is tending to.'

'You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps his eye only on

the lower class will achieve nothing. What can the idealist do without

the men of action--the men who can take his beliefs and make them enter

by violence into existing institutions? And the men of action are to be

found with _us_.'

'It hardly looks just now as if the upper class was to go on enjoying a

monopoly of them,' he said, smiling.

'Then appearances are deceptive. The populace supplies mass and

weight--nothing else. What _you_ want is to touch the leaders, the men

and women whose voices carry, and then your populace would follow hard

enough. For instance,'--and she dropped her aggressive tone and spoke

with a smiling kindness,--'come down next Saturday to my little Surrey

cottage; you shall see some of these men and women there, and I will

make you confess when you go away that you have profited your workmen

more by deserting them than by staying with them. Will you come?'

'My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de Netteville.

Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper class can produce a Brook

Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future will want a

vast effusion of feeling and passion to carry it into action, and

feeling and passion are only to be generated in sufficient volume among

the masses, where the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous.

You upper-class folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if you

shirk it--but----'

'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. 'I know you

would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We are to

starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses and

everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him--which might be worth

doing--but that he may rule us. It is too much!'

'Very well,' he said drily, his colour rising. 'Very well, let it be too

much.'

And, dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she saw that he

meant to be going. Her look swept over him from head to foot--over the

worn face with its look of sensitive refinement and spiritual force, the

active frame, the delicate but most characteristic hand. Never had any

man so attracted her for years; never had she found it so difficult to

gain a hold. Eugenie de Netteville, _poseuse_, schemer, woman of the

world that she was, was losing command of herself.

'What did you really mean by "worldliness" and the "world" in your

lecture last Sunday?' she asked him suddenly, with a little accent of

scorn. 'I thought your diatribes absurd. What you religious people call

the "world" is really only the average opinion of sensible people which

neither you nor your kind could do without for a day.'

He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and defended himself not

very seriously. But she threw all her strength into the argument, and he

forgot that he had meant to go at once. When she chose she could talk

admirably, and she chose now. She had the most aggressive ways of

attacking, and then, in the same breath, the most subtle and softening

ways of yielding and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly her

antagonist turned upon her he found himself disarmed he knew not how.

The disputant disappeared, and he felt the woman, restless, melancholy,

sympathetic, hungry for friendship and esteem, yet too proud to make any

direct bid for either. It was impossible not to be interested and

touched.

Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. Whether in his

hours of intimacy with her, twelve months before, young Alfred Evershed

had received the same impression may be doubted. In all things Eugenie

de Netteville was an artist.

Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing-room was

drawn back, and Sir John Headlam stood in the doorway. He had the

glittering amused eyes of a malicious child as he looked at them.

'Very sorry, madame,' he began in his high cracked voice, 'but

Wharncliffe and I are off to the New Club to see Desforets. They have

got her there to-night.'

'Go,' she said, waving her hand to him, 'I don't envy you. She is not

what she was.'

'No, there is only one person,' he said, bowing with grotesque little

airs of gallantry, 'for whom time stands still.'

Madame de Netteville looked at him with smiling half-contemptuous

serenity. He bowed again, this time with ironical emphasis, and

disappeared.

'Perhaps I had better go back and send them off,' she said, rising. 'But

you and I have not had our talk out yet.'

She led the way into the drawing-room. Lady Aubrey was lying back on the

velvet sofa, a little green paroquet that was accustomed to wander

tamely about the room perching on her hand. She was holding the field

against Lord Rupert and Mr. Addlestone in a three-cornered duel of wits,

while M. de Querouelle sat by, his plump hands on his knees, applauding.

They all rose as their hostess came in.

'My dear' said Lady Aubrey, 'it is disgracefully early, but my country

before pleasure. It is the Foreign Office to-night, and since James took

office I can't with decency absent myself. I had rather be a

scullerymaid than a minister's wife. Lord Rupert, I will take you on if

you want a lift.'

She touched Madame de Netteville's cheek with her lips, nodding to the

other men present, and went out, her fair stag-like head well in the

air, 'chaffing' Lord Rupert, who obediently followed her, performing

marvellous feats of agility in his desire to keep out of the way of the

superb train sweeping behind her. It always seemed as if Lady Aubrey

could have had no childhood, as if she must always have had just that

voice and those eyes. Tears she could never have shed, not even as a

baby over a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could she

have looked upon a lost possession as anything else than the opportunity

for a new one.

The other men took their departure for one reason or another. It was not

late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Querouelle talked with

gusto of four 'At homes' still to be grappled with.

As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his hand.

'No,' she said, with a quick impetuousness, 'no: I want my talk out. It

is barely half-past ten, and neither of us wants to be racing about

London to-night.'

Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he lingered

rather reluctantly--for another ten minutes, as he supposed.

She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open to the back of

the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane Street came borne in

upon the warm night air. Her superb dark head stood out against a stand

of yellow lilies close behind her, and the little paroquet, bright with

all the colours of the tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back

of her chair, touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers.

Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his dying day with

shame and humiliation.

In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a woman who was

five years his senior had made him what was practically a confession of

love--had given him to understand that she knew what were the relations

between himself and his wife--and had implored him with the quick breath

of an indescribable excitement to see what a woman's sympathy and a

woman's unique devotion could do for the causes he had at heart.

The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in him, when at last

it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repulsion, which his most friendly

biographer can only regard with a kind of grim satisfaction. For after

all there is an amount of innocence and absent-mindedness in matters of

daily human life, which is not only _niaiserie_, but comes very near to

moral wrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to walk about

with his eyes always on the stars. His stumbles may have too many

consequences. A harsh but a salutary truth! If Elsmere needed it, it was

bitterly taught him during a terrible half-hour. When the half-coherent

enigmatical sentences, to which he listened at first with a perplexed

surprise, began gradually to define themselves; when he found a woman

roused and tragically beautiful between him and escape; when no

determination on his part not to understand; when nothing he could say

availed to protect her from herself; when they were at last face to face

with a confession and an appeal which were a disgrace to both--then at

last Elsmere paid 'in one minute glad life's arrears,'--the natural

penalty of an optimism, a boundless faith in human nature, with which

life, as we know it, is inconsistent.

How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a woman who was an

expert in all the arts of fascination he never knew. In memory

afterwards it was all a ghastly mirage to him. The low voice, the

splendid dress, the scented room came back to him, and a confused memory

of his own futile struggle to ward off what she was bent on

saying--little else. He had been maladroit, he thought, had lost his

presence of mind. Any man of the world of his acquaintance, he believed,

trampling on himself, would have done better.

But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart and

humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary life disappeared,

and something took her place which was like a coarse and malignant

underself suddenly brought into the light of day--from that point

onwards, in after days, he remembered it all.

'... I know,' cried Eugenie de Netteville at last, standing at bay

before him, her hands locked before her, her white lips quivering, when

her cup of shame was full, and her one impulse left was to strike the

man who had humiliated her--'I know that you and your puritanical wife

are miserable--_miserable_. What is the use of denying facts that all

the world can see, that you have taken pains,' and she laid a fierce

deliberate emphasis on each word, 'all the world shall see? There--let

your wife's ignorance and bigotry, and your own obvious relation to her,

be my excuse, if I wanted any; but,' and she shrugged her white

shoulders passionately, 'I want _none_! I am not responsible to your

petty codes. Nature and feeling are enough for me. I saw you wanting

sympathy and affection----'

'My wife!' cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. And then,

his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he made a stern step

forward.

'Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget that you

are a woman and I a man, and that in some way I cannot understand my own

blindness and folly----'

'Must have led to this most undesirable scene,' she said with mocking

suddenness, throwing herself, however, effectually in his way. Then a

change came over her, and erect, ghastly white, with frowning brow and

shaking limbs, a baffled and smarting woman from whom every restraint

had fallen away, let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness

which he could not have cut short without actual violence.

He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when what seemed to

him an outbreak of mania should have spent itself. But suddenly he

caught Catherine's name coupled with some contemptuous epithet or other,

and his self-control failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to

her and took her wrists in a grip of iron.

'You shall not,' he said, beside himself, 'you shall not! What have I

done--what has she done--that you should allow yourself such words? My

poor wife!'

A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked

it back. It was desecration that _her_ name should be mentioned in that

room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his

eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.

'Thank God,' he said slowly, 'thank God for yourself and me that I

_love_ my wife! I am not worthy of her--doubly unworthy, since it has

been possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was

ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and

dishonour her! But worthy or not---- No!--no matter! Madame de

Netteville, let me go, and forget that such a person exists.'

She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the

face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude

with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realised what

she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between

herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding

him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she waved

her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, passed her,

and the door shut.

* * * * *

For nearly an hour afterwards Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly

through the darkness and silence of the park.

The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling in

the grip of dark implacable things, upheld by a single thread above that

moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual life

sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man realises

within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all

things hideous and vile. '_Save for the grace of God_,' he says to

himself, shuddering, 'save only for the grace of God----'

Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he had

just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a stinging

self-reproach--all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to

others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of love

and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human

creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason

against both?

Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all

the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of

effort--a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been

cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to

maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?

All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment

in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential

action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been

pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made

mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain

to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.

One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning--to keep his

wife's love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral

lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame!

Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside

interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to

have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no

matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the

more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded

deep on the rock of personal love and duty?

Oh! let him go back to her!--wrestle with her, open his heart again, try

new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of _her_ trial has

been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible

to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature;

he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene

he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of

remorseful love.

* * * * *

So he sped homewards at last through the noise of Oxford Street, seeing,

hearing nothing. He opened his own door, and let himself into the dim,

silent house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment

of his life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs

and softly turned the handle of her room.

Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide open.

The free loosely-growing branches of the plane trees made a dark,

delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air came

to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the

window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and

walked towards him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that

something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused breathless,

expectant.

She came to him. She linked her cold trembling fingers round his neck.

'Robert, I have been waiting so long--it was so late! I thought'--and

she choked down a sob--'perhaps something has happened to him, we are

separated for ever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr.

Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so

hard! I have broken my vow. I don't deserve it; but--_Robert!_----'

She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which

fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little

of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of

woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of

her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband's arms.

He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He

led her to her chair, and, kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the

emotion of both would let him, to make her realise what was in his _own_

heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her.

Without a mention of Madame de Netteville's name, indeed! _That_ horror

she should never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed

his poignant sense of something half-jeopardised and wholly recovered;

it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it

as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making

force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would

hear nothing of his self-blame--nothing. She put her hand across his

lips.

'I have seen things as they are, Robert,' she said very simply; 'while I

have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flaxman left me. You

were right--I _would_ not understand. And, in a sense, I shall never

understand. I cannot change,' and her voice broke into piteousness. 'My

Lord is my Lord always; but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say what you

will! _That_ is what has been hidden from me; that is what my trouble

has taught me; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words. _It is

the spirit that quickeneth._ I should never have felt it so, but for

this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering in strange places,

through strange thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I have

dared to think He had but one, the one I knew. I have dared'--and she

faltered--'to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh! I lay there so long in

the dark downstairs, seeing you by that bed; I heard your voice, I crept

to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was--He was! Leave me that

comfort! What are you saying? Wrong--you? Unkind? Your wife knows

nothing of it. Oh, did you think when you came in just now before dinner

that I didn't care, that I had a heart of stone? Did you think I had

broken my solemn promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell? So I have,

a hundred times over. I made it in ignorance; I had not counted the

cost--how could I? It was all so new, so strange. I dare not make it

again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. But oh! take me

back into your life! Hold me there! Remind me always of this night;

convict me out of my own mouth! But I _will_ learn my lesson; I will

learn to hear the two voices, the voice that speaks to you and the voice

that speaks to me--I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been

appointed me.'

Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back in her

chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish touch over his

hair.

'But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. Words are

nothing.'

Strange ending to a day of torture! As she towered above him in the

dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of nature all dissolved,

lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, he thought of the man who

passed through the place of sin, and the place of expiation, and saw at

last the rosy light creeping along the East, caught the white moving

figures, and that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air,

which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of

those 'shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.' For

eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant.

Dante knew it when he talked of '_quella que imparadisa la mia mente_.'

Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands,

whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of

personality are beaten down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit.

CHAPTER XLIV

The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we

have followed for so long was over and done with. Henceforward to the

end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as of old.

But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert than on

Catherine. Afterwards she gradually came to feel, running all through

his views of life, a note sterner, deeper, maturer than any present

there before. The reasons for it were unknown to her, though sometimes

her own tender, ignorant remorse supplied them. But they were hidden

deep in Elsmere's memory.

A few days afterwards he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had

left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her

again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He saw

things as they were--without morbidness. But a certain boyish

carelessness of mood he never afterwards quite recovered. Men and women

of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and more

tragic--moral truths more awful--to him. It was the penalty of a

highly-strung nature set with exclusive intensity towards certain

spiritual ends.

On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman which

had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied Elsmere to his Sunday

lecture. He tried a little, tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went,

shrinking and yet determined.

She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon of his in

Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brooding had been burnt

into her mind. The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the

high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched quick-eyed

artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved,

implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the

Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was

glad to be there.

Afterwards Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that 'any fool

could see he was getting done up,' insisted on taking the children's

class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised a

little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden

perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had

returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm

word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there

after all?

Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously coddled, and that

Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off to

the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward,

Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them

into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the

river; that, or his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into

Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart,

with flashes of her old sweet gaiety, as she had not talked for months.

Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final

restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life,

in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile,

the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this

afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them,

the trees were green for them!

* * * * *

He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to

him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It

seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that

there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it.

Every day some old St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and

with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left

Oxford he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which

he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man

of our time, Henry Grey's influence was not primarily an influence of

personal contact. His mere life, that he was there, on English soil,

within a measurable distance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments

one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no

longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to conduct,

every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds

a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales,

nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintly life

grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they have always

clung to each other, to the visible and the tangible; as the elders of

Miletus, though the Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set

their feet therein, 'sorrowing most of all that they should see his face

no more.'

The accounts grew worse--all friends shut out, no possibility of last

words--the whole of Oxford moved and sorrowing. Then at last, on a

Friday, came the dreaded expected letter: 'He is gone! He died early

this morning, without pain, conscious almost to the end. He mentioned

several friends by name, you among them, during the night. The funeral

is to be on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.'

Sad and memorable day! By an untoward chance it fell in Commemoration

week, and Robert found the familiar streets teeming with life and noise,

under a showery uncertain sky, which every now and then would send the

bevies of lightly-gowned maidens, with their mothers and attendant

squires, skurrying for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements

glistening. He walked up to St. Anselm's--found, as he expected, that

the first part of the service was to be in the chapel, the rest in the

cemetery, and then mounted the well-known staircase to Langham's rooms.

Langham was apparently in his bedroom. Lunch was on the table--the

familiar commons, the familiar toast-and-water. There, in a recess, were

the same splendid wall maps of Greece he had so often consulted after

lecture. There was the little case of coins, with the gold Alexanders he

had handled with so much covetous reverence at eighteen. Outside, the

irregular quadrangle with its dripping trees stretched before him; the

steps of the new Hall, now the shower was over, were crowded with gowned

figures. It might have been yesterday that he had stood in that room,

blushing with awkward pleasure under Mr. Grey's first salutation.

The bedroom door opened and Langham came in.

'Elsmere! But of course I expected you.'

His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was a flatness in

it, an absence of positive cordiality which was new to him in any

greeting of Langham's to himself, and had a chilling effect upon him.

The face, too, was changed. Tint and expression were both dulled; its

marble-like sharpness and finish had coarsened a little, and the figure,

which had never possessed the erectness of youth, had now the pinched

look and the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian.

'I did not write to you, Elsmere,' he said immediately, as though in

anticipation of what the other would be sure to say; 'I knew nothing but

what the bulletins said, and I was told that Cathcart wrote to you. It

is many years now since I have seen much of Grey. Sit down and have some

lunch. We have time, but not too much time.'

Robert took a few mouthfuls. Langham was difficult, talked

disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon painfully conscious that

the old sympathetic bond between them no longer existed. Presently,

Langham, as though with an effort to remember, asked after Catherine,

then inquired what he was doing in the way of writing, and neither of

them mentioned the name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat

spasmodically talking, in reality expectant. And at last the sound

present already in both minds made itself heard--the first long solitary

stroke of the chapel bell.

Robert covered his eyes.

'Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced us first?'

'I remember,' replied the other abruptly. Then, with a half-cynical,

half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he said, after a pause, 'What

a faculty of hero-worship you have always had, Elsmere!'

'Do you know anything of the end?' Robert asked him presently, as that

tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feeling beneath more

irresistibly to the surface.

'No, I never asked!' cried Langham, with sudden harsh animation. 'What

purpose could be served? Death should be avoided by the living. We have

no business with it. Do what we will, we cannot rehearse our own parts.

And the sight of other men's performances helps us no more than the

sight of a great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do for us is to

imperil the little nerve, break through the little calm, we have left.'

Elsmere's hand dropped, and he turned round to him with a flashing

smile.

'Ah--I know it now--you loved him still.'

Langham, who was standing, looked down on him sombrely, yet more

indulgently.

'How much you always made of feeling,' he said after a little pause, 'in

a world where, according to me, our chief object should be not to feel!'

Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another minute the two

made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, where the rain was

sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden voice of the bell rolled, from

pause to pause, above the gowned figures, spreading thence in wide waves

of mourning sound over Oxford.

The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic dream. The

lines of undergraduate faces, the provost's white head, the voice of the

chaplain reading, the full male unison of the voices replying--how they

carried him back to the day when as a lad from school he had sat on one

of the chancel benches beside his mother, listening for the first time

to the subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the

provost's preaching! Just opposite to where he sat now with Langham,

Grey had sat that first afternoon; the freshman's curious eyes had been

drawn again and again to the dark massive head, the face with its look

of reposeful force, of righteous strength. During the lesson from

Corinthians, Elsmere's thoughts were irrelevantly busy with all sorts of

mundane memories of the dead. What was especially present to him was a

series of Liberal election meetings in which Grey had taken a warm part,

and in which he himself had helped just before he took Orders. A hundred

odd, incongruous details came back to Robert now with poignant force.

Grey had been to him at one time primarily the professor, the

philosopher, the representative of all that was best in the life of the

University; now, fresh from his own grapple with London and its life,

what moved him most was the memory of the citizen, the friend and

brother of common man, the thinker who had never shirked action in the

name of thought, for whom conduct had been from beginning to end the

first reality.

The procession through the streets afterwards, which conveyed the body

of this great son of modern Oxford to its last resting-place in the

citizens' cemetery on the western side of the town, will not soon be

forgotten, even in a place which forgets notoriously soon. All the

University was there, all the town was there. Side by side with men

honourably dear to England, who had carried with them into one or other

of the great English careers the memory of the teacher, were men who had

known from day to day the cheery modest helper in a hundred local

causes; side by side with the youth of Alma Mater went the poor of

Oxford; tradesmen and artisans followed or accompanied the group of

gowned and venerable figures, representing the Heads of Houses and the

Professors, or mingled with the slowly pacing crowd of Masters; while

along the route groups of visitors and merrymakers, young men in

flannels or girls in light dresses, stood with suddenly grave faces here

and there, caught by the general wave of mourning, and wondering what

such a spectacle might mean.

Robert, losing sight of Langham as they left the chapel, found his arm

grasped by young Cathcart, his correspondent. The man was a junior

Fellow who had attached himself to Grey during the two preceding years

with especial devotion. Robert had only a slight knowledge of him, but

there was something in his voice and grip which made him feel at once

infinitely more at home with him at this moment than he had felt with

the old friend of his undergraduate years.

They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain came on again, and

the long black crowd stretched before them was lashed by the driving

gusts. As they went along, Cathcart told him all he wanted to know.

'The night before the end he was perfectly calm and conscious. I told

you he mentioned your name among the friends to whom he sent his

good-bye. He thought for everybody. For all those of his house he left

the most minute and tender directions. He forgot nothing. And all with

such extraordinary simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a

journey! In the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a North-country woman

whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was much attached,

was sitting with him. I was there too. She was a beautiful old figure in

her white cap and kerchief, and it seemed to please him to lie and look

at her. "It'll not be for long, Henry," she said to him once. "I'm

seventy-seven this spring. I shall come to you soon." He made no reply,

and his silence seemed to disturb her. I don't fancy she had known much

of his mind of late years. "You'll not be doubting the Lord's goodness,

Henry?" she said to him, with the tears in her eyes. "No," he said, "no,

never. Only it seems to be His Will, we should be certain of

nothing--_but Himself_! I ask no more." I shall never forget the accent

of those words: they were the breath of his inmost life. If ever man was

_Gottbetrunken_ it was he--and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be

true, beyond what the intellect could grasp!'

Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The rain beat down

on the black concourse of mourners. But there were blue spaces in the

drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light played at intervals over the

Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and over the butter-cupped river meadows,

where the lush hay-grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his

left, the provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was

reading the rest of the service.

As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. 'My friend, my

master,' cried the yearning filial heart, 'oh, give me something of

yourself to take back into life, something to brace me through this

darkness of our ignorance, something to keep hope alive as you kept it

to the end!'

And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a last message,

words which years before he had found marked in a little book of

Meditations borrowed from Grey's table--words long treasured and often

repeated--

'Amid a world of forgetfulness and decay, in the sight of his own

shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the tomb, he alone who

has found his soul in losing it, who in singleness of mind _has lived in

order to love and understand_, will find that the God who is near to him

as his own conscience has a face of light and love!'

Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the triumphant

outbursts of the Christian service.

'Man's hope,' he thought, 'has grown humbler than this. It keeps now a

more modest mien in the presence of the Eternal Mystery; but is it in

truth less real, less sustaining? Let Grey's trust answer for me.'

He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid street

outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round for Langham.

Instead, he found Cathcart, who had just come up with him.

'Is Langham behind?' he asked. 'I want a word with him before I go.'

'Is he here?' asked the other with a change of expression.

'But of course! He was in the chapel. How could you----'

'I thought he would probably go away,' said Cathcart with some

bitterness. 'Grey made many efforts to get him to come and see him

before he became so desperately ill. Langham came once. Grey never asked

for him again.'

'It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,' said Robert troubled;

'his dread of being forced to take a line, to face anything certain and

irrevocable. I understand. He could not say good-bye to a friend to save

his life. There is no shirking that! One must either do it or leave it!'

Cathcart shrugged his shoulders, and drew a masterly little picture of

Langham's life in college. He had succeeded by the most adroit devices

in completely isolating himself both from the older and the younger men.

'He attends college-meeting sometimes, and contributes a sarcasm or two

on the cramming system of the college. He takes a constitutional to

Summertown every day on the least frequented side of the road, that he

may avoid being spoken to. And as to his ways of living, he and I happen

to have the same scout--old Dobson, you remember? And if I would let

him, he would tell me tales by the hour. He is the only man in the

University who knows anything about it. I gather from what he says that

Langham is becoming a complete valetudinarian. Everything must go

exactly by rule--his food, his work, the management of his clothes--and

any little _contretemps_ makes him ill. But the comedy is to watch him

when there is anything going on in the place that he thinks may lead to

a canvass and to any attempt to influence him for a vote. On these

occasions he goes off with automatic regularity to an hotel at West

Malvern, and only reappears when the _Times_ tells him the thing is done

with.'

Both laughed. Then Robert sighed. Weaknesses of Langham's sort may be

amusing enough to the contemptuous and unconcerned outsider. But the

general result of them, whether for the man himself or those whom he

affects, is tragic, not comic; and Elsmere had good reason for knowing

it.

Later, after a long talk with the provost, and meetings with various

other old friends, he walked down to the station, under a sky clear from

rain, and through a town gay with festal preparations. Not a sign now,

in these crowded, bustling streets, of that melancholy pageant of the

afternoon. The heroic memory had flashed for a moment like something

vivid and gleaming in the sight of all, understanding and ignorant. Now

it lay committed to a few faithful hearts, there to become one seed

among many of a new religious life in England.

On the platform Robert found himself nervously accosted by a tall

shabbily-dressed man.

'Elsmere, have you forgotten me?'

He turned and recognised a man whom he had last seen as a St. Anselm's

undergraduate--one MacNiell, a handsome rowdy young Irishman, supposed

to be clever, and decidedly popular in the college. As he stood looking

at him, puzzled by the difference between the old impression and the

new, suddenly the man's story flashed across him; he remembered some

disgraceful escapade--an expulsion.

'You came for the funeral, of course?' said the other, his face flushing

consciously.

'Yes--and you too?'

The man turned away, and something in his silence led Robert to stroll

on beside him to the open end of the platform.

'I have lost my only friend,' MacNiell said at last hoarsely. 'He took

me up when my own father would have nothing to say to me. He found me

work; he wrote to me; for years he stood between me and perdition. I am

just going out to a post in New Zealand he got for me, and next week

before I sail--I--I--am to be married--and he was to be there. He was so

pleased--he had seen her.'

It was one story out of a hundred like it, as Robert knew very well.

They talked for a few minutes, then the train loomed in the distance.

'He saved you,' said Robert, holding out his hand, 'and at a dark moment

in my own life I owed him everything. There is nothing we can do for him

in return but--to remember him! Write to me, if you can or will, from

New Zealand, for his sake.'

A few seconds later the train sped past the bare little cemetery, which

lay just beyond the line. Robert bent forward. In the pale yellow glow

of the evening he could distinguish the grave, the mound of gravel, the

planks, and some figures moving beside it. He strained his eyes till he

could see no more, his heart full of veneration, of memory, of prayer.

In himself life seemed so restless and combative. Surely he, more than

others, had need of the lofty lessons of death!

CHAPTER XLV

In the weeks which followed--weeks often of mental and physical

depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by the influence of

an overworked state he could not be got to admit--Elsmere owed much to

Hugh Flaxman's cheery sympathetic temper, and became more attached to

him than ever, and more ready than ever, should the fates deem it so, to

welcome him as a brother-in-law. However, the fates for the moment

seemed to have borrowed a leaf from Langham's book, and did not

apparently know their own minds. It says volumes for Hugh Flaxman's

general capacities as a human being that at this period he should have

had any attention to give to a friend, his position as a lover was so

dubious and difficult.

After the evening at the Workmen's Club, and as a result of further

meditation, he had greatly developed the tactics first adopted on that

occasion. He had beaten a masterly retreat, and Rose Leyburn was

troubled with him no more.

The result was that a certain brilliant young person was soon sharply

conscious of a sudden drop in the pleasures of living. Mr. Flaxman had

been the Leyburns' most constant and entertaining visitor. During the

whole of May he paid one formal call in Lerwick Gardens, and was then

entertained _tete-a-tete_ by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose's intense subsequent

annoyance, who knew perfectly well that her mother was incapable of

chattering about anything but her daughters.

He still sent flowers, but they came from his head gardener, addressed

to Mrs. Leyburn. Agnes put them in water; and Rose never gave them a

look. Rose went to Lady Helen's because Lady Helen made her, and was

much too engaging a creature to be rebuffed; but, however merry and

protracted the teas in those scented rooms might be, Mr. Flaxman's step

on the stairs, and Mr. Flaxman's hand on the curtain over the door, till

now the feature in the entertainment most to be counted on, were,

generally speaking, conspicuously absent.

He and the Leyburns met, of course; for their list of common friends was

now considerable; but Agnes, reporting matters to Catherine, could only

say that each of these occasions left Rose more irritable, and more

inclined to say biting things as to the foolish ways in which society

takes its pleasures.

Rose certainly was irritable, and at times, Agnes thought, depressed.

But as usual she was unapproachable about her own affairs, and the state

of her mind could only be somewhat dolefully gathered from the fact that

she was much less unwilling to go back to Burwood this summer than had

ever been known before.

Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman left certain other people in no doubt as to his

intentions.

'My dear aunt,' he said calmly to Lady Charlotte, 'I mean to marry Miss

Leyburn if I can at any time persuade her to have me. So much you may

take as fixed, and it will be quite waste of breath on your part to

quote dukes to me. But the other factor in the problem is by no means

fixed. Miss Leyburn won't have me at present, and as for the future I

have most salutary qualms.'

'Hugh!' interrupted Lady Charlotte angrily, 'as if you hadn't had the

mothers of London at your feet for years!'

Lady Charlotte was in a most variable frame of mind; one day hoping

devoutly that the Langham affair might prove lasting enough in its

effects to tire Hugh out; the next, outraged that a silly girl should

waste a thought on such a creature, while Hugh was in her way; at one

time angry that an insignificant chit of a schoolmaster's daughter

should apparently care so little to be the Duke of Sedbergh's niece, and

should even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing a Flaxman; at

another, utterly sceptical as to any lasting obduracy on the chit's

part. The girl was clearly anxious not to fall too easily, but as to

final refusal--pshaw! And it made her mad that Hugh would hold himself

so cheap.

Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman felt himself in no way called upon to answer that

remark of his aunt's we have recorded.

'I have qualms,' he repeated, 'but I mean to do all I know, and you and

Helen must help me.'

Lady Charlotte crossed her hands before her.

'I may be a Liberal and a lion-hunter,' she said firmly, 'but I have

still conscience enough left not to aid and abet my nephew in throwing

himself away.'

She had nearly slipped in 'again'; but just saved herself.

'Your conscience is all a matter of the Duke,' he told her. 'Well, if

you won't help me, then Helen and I will have to arrange it by

ourselves.'

But this did not suit Lady Charlotte at all. She had always played the

part of earthly providence to this particular nephew, and it was

abominable to her that the wretch, having refused for ten years to

provide her with a love affair to manage, should now manage one for

himself in spite of her.

'You are such an arbitrary creature!' she said fretfully; 'you prance

about the world like Don Quixote, and expect me to play Sancho without a

murmur.'

'How many drubbings have I brought you yet?' he asked her laughing. He

was really very fond of her. 'It is true there is a point of likeness; I

won't take your advice. But then why don't you give me better? It is

strange,' he added musing; 'women talk to us about love as if we were

too gross to understand it; and when they come to business, and they're

not in it themselves, they show the temper of attorneys.'

'Love!' cried Lady Charlotte nettled. 'Do you mean to tell me, Hugh,

that you are really, _seriously_ in love with that girl?'

'Well, I only know,' he said, thrusting his hands far into his pockets,

'that unless things mend I shall go out to California in the autumn and

try ranching.'

Lady Charlotte burst into an angry laugh. He stood opposite to her, with

his orchid in his buttonhole, himself the fine flower of civilisation.

Ranching, indeed! However, he had done so many odd things in his life,

that, as she knew, it was never quite safe to decline to take him

seriously, and he looked at her now so defiantly, his clear greenish

eyes so wide open and alert, that her will began to waver under the

pressure of his.

'What do you want me to do, sir?'

His glance relaxed at once, and he laughingly explained to her that what

he asked of her was to keep the prey in sight.

'I can do nothing for myself at present,' he said; 'I get on her nerves.

She was in love with that black-haired, _enfant du siecle_,--or rather,

she prefers to assume that she was--and I haven't given her time to

forget him. A serious blunder, and I deserve to suffer for it. Very

well, then, I retire, and I ask you and Helen to keep watch. Don't let

her go. Make yourselves nice to her; and, in fact, spoil me a little now

I am on the high road to forty, as you used to spoil me at fourteen.'

Mr. Flaxman sat down by his aunt and kissed her hand, after which Lady

Charlotte was as wax before him. 'Thank heaven,' she reflected, 'in ten

days the Duke and all of them go out of town.' Retribution, therefore,

for wrong-doing would be tardy, if wrong-doing there must be. She could

but ruefully reflect that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted;

moreover, if Hugh would force her to befriend him in this criminality,

there might be a certain joy in thereby vindicating those Liberal

principles of hers, in which a scornful family had always refused to

believe. So, being driven into it, she would fain have done it boldly

and with a dash. But she could not rid her mind of the Duke, and her

performance all through, as a matter of fact, was blundering.

However, she was for the time very gracious to Rose, being in truth

really fond of her; and Rose, however high she might hold her little

head, could find no excuse for quarrelling either with her or Lady

Helen.

Towards the middle of June there was a grand ball given by Lady

Fauntleroy at Fauntleroy House, to which the two Miss Leyburns, by Lady

Helen's machinations, were invited. It was to be one of the events of

the season, and when the cards arrived 'to have the honour of meeting

their Royal Highnesses,' etc. etc., Mrs. Leyburn, good soul, gazed at

them with eyes which grew a little moist under her spectacles. She

wished Richard could have seen the girls dressed, 'just once.' But Rose

treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. 'If one could but put them

up to auction,' she said flippantly, holding them up, 'how many German

opera tickets I should get for nothing! I don't know what Agnes feels.

As for me, I have neither nerve enough for the people, nor money enough

for the toilette.'

However, with eleven o'clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh vision of blue

and white, to suggest certain dresses for the sisters which had occurred

to her in the visions of the night, 'original, adorable,--cost, a mere

nothing!'

'My harpy,' she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker,'would ruin you

over them, of course. Your maid'--the Leyburns possessed a remarkably

clever one--'will make them divinely for twopence-halfpenny. Listen.'

Rose listened; her eye kindled; the maid was summoned; and the

invitation accepted in Agnes's neatest hand. Even Catherine was roused

during the following ten days to a smiling indulgent interest in the

concerns of the workroom.

The evening came, and Lady Helen fetched the sisters in her carriage.

The ball was a magnificent affair. The house was one of historical

interest and importance, and all that the ingenuity of the present could

do to give fresh life and gaiety to the pillared rooms, the carved

galleries and stately staircases of the past, had been done. The

ball-room, lined with Vandycks and Lelys, glowed softly with electric

light; the picture gallery had been banked with flowers and carpeted

with red, and the beautiful dresses of the women trailed up and down it,

challenging the satins of the Netschers and the Terburgs on the walls.

Rose's card was soon full to overflowing. The young men present were of

the smartest, and would not willingly have bowed the knee to a nobody,

however pretty. But Lady Helen's devotion, the girl's reputation as a

musician, and her little nonchalant disdainful ways, gave her a kind of

prestige, which made her, for the time being at any rate, the equal of

anybody. Petitioners came and went away empty. Royalty was introduced,

and smiled both upon the beauty and the beauty's delicate and becoming

dress; and still Rose, though a good deal more flushed and erect than

usual, and though flesh and blood could not resist the contagious

pleasure which glistened even in the eyes of that sage Agnes, was more

than half-inclined to say with the Preacher, that all was vanity.

Presently, as she stood waiting with her hand on her partner's arm

before gliding into a waltz, she saw Mr. Flaxman opposite to her, and

with him a young _debutante_ in white tulle--a thin, pretty, undeveloped

creature, whose sharp elbows and timid movements, together with the

blushing enjoyment glowing so frankly from her face, pointed her out as

the school-girl of sweet seventeen, just emancipated, and trying her

wings.

'Ah, there is Lady Florence!' said her partner, a handsome young Hussar.

'This ball is in her honour, you know. She comes out to-night. What,

another cousin? Really she keeps too much in the family!'

'Is Mr. Flaxman a cousin?'

The young man replied that he was, and then, in the intervals of

waltzing, went on to explain to her the relationships of many of the

people present, till the whole gorgeous affair began to seem to Rose a

mere family party. Mr. Flaxman was of it. She was not.

'Why am I here?' the little Jacobin said to herself fiercely as she

waltzed; 'it is foolish, unprofitable. I do not belong to them, nor they

to me!'

'Miss Leyburn! charmed to see you!' cried Lady Charlotte, stopping her;

and then, in a loud whisper in her ear, 'Never saw you look better. Your

taste, or Helen's, that dress? The roses--exquisite!'

Rose dropped her a little mock curtsey and whirled on again.

'_Lady Florences_ are always well dressed,' thought the child angrily;

'and who notices it?'

Another turn brought them against Mr. Flaxman and his partner. Mr.

Flaxman came at once to greet her with smiling courtesy.

'I have a Cambridge friend to introduce to you--a beautiful youth. Shall

I find you by Helen? Now, Lady Florence, patience a moment. That corner

is too crowded. How good that last turn was!'

And bending with a sort of kind chivalry over his partner, who looked at

him with the eyes of a joyous excited child, he led her away. Five

minutes later Rose, standing flushed by Lady Helen, saw him coming again

towards her, ushering a tall blue-eyed youth, whom he introduced to her

as 'Lord Waynflete.' The handsome boy looked at her with a boy's open

admiration, and beguiled her of a supper dance, while a group standing

near, a mother and three daughters, stood watching with cold eyes and

expressions which said plainly to the initiated that mere beauty was

receiving a ridiculous amount of attention.

'I wouldn't have given it him, but it is _rude_--it is _bad manners_,

not even to ask!' the supposed victress was saying to herself, with

quivering lips, her eyes following not the Trinity freshman, who was

their latest captive, but an older man's well-knit figure, and a head on

which the fair hair was already growing scantily, receding a little from

the fine intellectual brows.

An hour later she was again standing by Lady Helen, waiting for a

partner, when she saw two persons crossing the room, which was just

beginning to fill again for dancing, towards them. One was Mr. Flaxman,

the other was a small wrinkled old man, who leant upon his arm,

displaying the ribbon of the Garter as he walked.

'Dear me,' said Lady Helen, a little fluttered, 'here is my uncle

Sedbergh. I thought they had left town.'

The pair approached, and the old Duke bowed over his niece's hand with

the manners of a past generation.

'I made Hugh give me an arm,' he said quaveringly. 'These floors are

homicidal. If I come down on them I shall bring an action.'

'I thought you had all left town?' said Lady Helen.

'Who can make plans with a Government in power pledged to every sort of

villainy and public plunder?' said the old man testily. 'I suppose

Varley's there to-night, helping to vote away my property and

Fauntleroy's.'

'Some of his own too, if you please!' said Lady Helen smiling. 'Yes, I

suppose he is waiting for the division, or he would be here.'

'I wonder why Providence blessed _me_ with such a Radical crew of

relations?' remarked the Duke. 'Hugh is a regular Communist. I never

heard such arguments in my life. And as for any idea of standing by his

order----' The old man shook his bald head and shrugged his small

shoulders with almost French vivacity. He had been handsome once, and

delicately featured, but now the left eye drooped, and the face had a

strong look of peevishness and ill-health.

'Uncle,' interposed Lady Helen, 'let me introduce you to my two great

friends, Miss Leyburn, Miss Rose Leyburn.'

The Duke bowed, looked at them through a pair of sharp eyes, seemed to

cogitate inwardly whether such a name had ever been known to him, and

turned to his nephew.

'Get me out of this, Hugh, and I shall be obliged to you. Young people

may risk it, but if _I_ broke I shouldn't mend.'

And still grumbling audibly about the floor, he hobbled off towards the

picture gallery. Mr. Flaxman had only time for a smiling backward glance

at Rose.

'Have you given my pretty boy a dance?'

'Yes,' she said, but with as much stiffness as she might have shown to

his uncle.

'That's over,' said Lady Helen with relief. 'My uncle hardly meets any

of us now without a spar. He has never forgiven my father for going over

to the Liberals. And then he thinks we none of us consult him enough. No

more we do--except Aunt Charlotte. _She's_ afraid of him!'

'Lady Charlotte afraid!' echoed Rose.

'Odd, isn't it? The Duke avenges a good many victims on her, if they

only knew!'

Lady Helen was called away, and Rose was left standing, wondering what

had happened to her partner.

Opposite, Mr. Flaxman was pushing through a doorway, and Lady Florence

was again on his arm. At the same time she became conscious of a morsel

of chaperons' conversation such as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a

girl is tolerably sure to hear under similar circumstances.

The _debutante's_ good looks, Hugh Flaxman's apparent susceptibility to

them, the possibility of results, and the satisfactory disposition of

the family goods and chattels that would be brought about by such a

match, the opportunity it would offer the man, too, of rehabilitating

himself socially after his first matrimonial escapade--Rose caught

fragments of all these topics as they were discussed by two old ladies,

presumably also of the family 'ring,' who gossiped behind her with more

gusto than discretion. Highmindedness, of course, told her to move away;

something else held her fast, till her partner came up for her.

Then she floated away into the whirlwind of waltzers. But as she moved

round the room on her partner's arm, her delicate half-scornful grace

attracting look after look, the soul within was all aflame--aflame

against the serried ranks and phalanxes of this unfamiliar, hostile

world! She had just been reading Trevelyan's _Life of Fox_ aloud to her

mother, who liked occasionally to flavour her knitting with literature,

and she began now to revolve a passage from it, describing the upper

class of the last century, which had struck that morning on her quick

retentive memory: '"_A few thousand people who thought that the world

was made for them_"--did it not run so?--"_and that all outside their

own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each

other an amount of attention quite inconceivable.... Within the charmed

precincts there prevailed an easy and natural mode of intercourse, in

some respects singularly delightful._" Such, for instance, as the Duke

of Sedbergh was master of! Well, it was worth while, perhaps, to have

gained an experience, even at the expense of certain illusions, as to

the manners of dukes, and--and--as to the constancy of friends. But

never again--never again!' said the impetuous inner voice. 'I have my

world--they theirs!'

But why so strong a flood of bitterness against our poor upper class, so

well intentioned for all its occasional lack of lucidity, should have

arisen in so young a breast it is a little difficult for the most

conscientious biographer to explain. She had partners to her heart's

desire; young Lord Waynflete used his utmost arts upon her to persuade

her that at least half a dozen numbers of the regular programme were

extras and therefore at his disposal; and when royalty supped, it was

graciously pleased to ordain that Lady Helen and her two companions

should sup behind the same folding-doors as itself, while beyond these

doors surged the inferior crowd of persons who had been specially

invited to 'meet their Royal Highnesses,' and had so far been held

worthy neither to dance nor to eat in the same room with them. But in

vain. Rose still felt herself, for all her laughing outward

_insouciance_, a poor, bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel

of a world which was intolerably powerful, rich, and self-satisfied, the

odious product of 'family arrangements.'

Mr. Flaxman sat far away at the same royal table as herself. Beside him

was the thin tall _debutante_. 'She is like one of the Gainsborough

princesses,' thought Rose, studying her with involuntary admiration. 'Of

course it is all plain. He will get everything he wants, and a Lady

Florence into the bargain. Radical, indeed! What nonsense!'

Then it startled her to find that the eyes of Lady Florence's neighbour

were, as it seemed, on herself; or was he merely nodding to Lady

Helen?--and she began immediately to give a smiling attention to the man

on her left.

An hour later she and Agnes and Lady Helen were descending the great

staircase on their way to their carriage. The morning light was flooding

through the chinks of the carefully veiled windows; Lady Helen was

yawning behind her tiny white hand, her eyes nearly asleep. But the two

sisters, who had not been up till three, on four preceding nights, like

their chaperon, were still almost as fresh as the flowers massed in the

hall below.

'Ah, there is Hugh!' cried Lady Helen. 'How I hope he has found the

carriage!'

At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which had dropped

from the bouquet of some predecessor. To prevent herself from falling

downstairs, she caught hold of the stem of a brazen chandelier fixed in

the balustrade. It saved her, but she gave her arm a most painful

wrench, and leant limp and white against the railing of the stairs. Lady

Helen turned at Agnes's exclamation, but before she could speak, as it

seemed, Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just below them, was

on the stairs.

'You have hurt your arm? Don't speak--take mine. Let me get you

downstairs out of the crush.'

She was too far gone to resist, and when she was mistress of herself

again she found herself in the library with some water in her hand which

Mr. Flaxman had just put there.

'Is it the playing hand?' said Lady Helen anxiously.

'No,' said Rose, trying to laugh; 'the bowing elbow.' And she raised it,

but with a contortion of pain.

'Don't raise it,' he said peremptorily. 'We will have a doctor here in a

moment, and have it bandaged.'

He disappeared. Rose tried to sit up, seized with a frantic longing to

disobey him, and get off before he returned. Stinging the girl's mind

was the sense that it might all perfectly well seem to him a planned

appeal to his pity.

'Agnes, help me up,' she said with a little involuntary groan; 'I shall

be better at home.'

But both Lady Helen and Agnes laughed her to scorn, and she lay back

once more overwhelmed by fatigue and faintness. A few more minutes, and

a doctor appeared, caught by good luck in the next street. He pronounced

it a severe muscular strain, but nothing more; applied a lotion and

improvised a sling. Rose consulted him anxiously as to the interference

with her playing.

'A week,' he said; 'no more, if you are careful.'

Her pale face brightened. Her art had seemed specially dear to her of

late.

'Hugh!' called Lady Helen, going to the door. '_Now_ we are ready for

the carriage.'

Rose leaning on Agnes walked out into the hall. They found him there

waiting.

'The carriage is here,' he said, bending towards her with a look and

tone which so stirred the fluttered nerves, that the sense of faintness

stole back upon her. 'Let me take you to it.'

'Thank you,' she said coldly, but by a superhuman effort; 'my sister's

help is quite enough.'

He followed them with Lady Helen. At the carriage door the sisters

hesitated a moment. Rose was helpless without a right hand. A little

imperative movement from behind displaced Agnes, and Rose felt herself

hoisted in by a strong arm. She sank into the farther corner. The glow

of the dawn caught her white delicate features, the curls on her

temples, all the silken confusion of her dress. Hugh Flaxman put in

Agnes and his sister, said something to Agnes about coming to inquire,

and raised his hat. Rose caught the quick force and intensity of his

eyes, and then closed her own, lost in a languid swoon of pain, memory,

and resentful wonder.

Flaxman walked away down Park Lane through the chill morning quietness,

the gathering light striking over the houses beside him on to the misty

stretches of the Park. His hat was over his eyes, his hands thrust into

his pockets; a close observer would have noticed a certain trembling of

the lips. It was but a few seconds since her young warm beauty had been

for an instant in his arms; his whole being was shaken by it, and by

that last look of hers. 'Have I gone too far?' he asked himself

anxiously. 'Is it divinely true--_already_--that she resents being left

to herself? Oh, little rebel! You tried your best not to let me see. But

you _were_ angry, you were! Now, then, how to proceed? She is all fire,

all character; I rejoice in it. She will give me trouble; so much the

better. Poor little hurt thing! the fight is only beginning; but I will

make her do penance some day for all that loftiness to-night.'

If these reflections betray to the reader a certain masterful note of

confidence in Mr. Flaxman's mind, he will perhaps find small cause to

regret that Rose _did_ give him a great deal of trouble.

Nothing could have been more 'salutary,' to use his own word, than the

dance she led him during the next three weeks. She provoked him indeed

at moments so much that he was a hundred times on the point of trying to

seize his kingdom of heaven by violence, of throwing himself upon her

with a tempest shock of reproach and appeal. But some secret instinct

restrained him. She was wilful, she was capricious; she had a real and

powerful distraction in her art. He must be patient and risk nothing.

He suspected, too, what was the truth--that Lady Charlotte was doing

harm. Rose, indeed, had grown so touchily sensitive that she found

offence in almost every word of Lady Charlotte's about her nephew. Why

should the apparently casual remarks of the aunt bear so constantly on

the subject of the nephew's social importance? Rose vowed to herself

that she needed no reminder of that station whereunto it had pleased God

to call her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those

anxieties and reluctances which the girl's quick sense detected, in

spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwick Gardens.

The end of it all was that Hugh Flaxman found himself again driven into

a corner. At the bottom of him was still a confidence that would not

yield. Was it possible that he had ever given her some tiny involuntary

glimpse of it, and that but for that glimpse she would have let him make

his peace much more easily? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end

of his resources.

'I must change the venue,' he said to himself; 'decidedly I must change

the venue.'

So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish in Norway

with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the news with a callousness

which made even Lady Helen want to shake her.

On the eve of his journey, however, Hugh Flaxman had at last confessed

himself to Catherine and Robert. His obvious plight made any further

scruples on their part futile, and what they had they gave him in the

way of sympathy. Also Robert, gathering that he already knew much, and

without betraying any confidence of Rose's, gave him a hint or two on

the subject of Langham. But more not the friendliest mortal could do for

him, and Flaxman went off into exile announcing to a mocking Elsmere

that he should sit pensive on the banks of Norwegian rivers till fortune

had had time to change.

BOOK VII

GAIN AND LOSS

CHAPTER XLVI

A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood

Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine

and the child he had driven away more than once, but the claims upon

himself were becoming so absorbing he did not know how to go even for a

few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on

him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor

desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had

sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated,

and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children,

and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbour, whom

he had succeeded in interesting in the case.

Another was a young 'secret springer,' to use the mysterious terms of

the trade--Robson by name--whom Elsmere had originally known as a clever

workman belonging to the watchmaking colony, and a diligent attendant

from the beginning on the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave

his lodgings, and his sickly pessimist personality had established a

special hold on Robert. He was dying of tumour in the throat, and had

become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was a spark

of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled him to bear his ills

with a mixture of savage humour and clear-eyed despair. In general

outlook he was much akin to the author of the _City of Dreadful Night_,

whose poems he read; the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him

with a kind of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that

he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for hours,

startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly

Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew

how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle

in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances

felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself

and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman

willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained

any hold upon him no one could guess. But from the moment when Elsmere,

struck in the lecture-room by the pallid ugly face and swathed neck,

began regularly to go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that

virtue had gone out of him, and that in some subtle way yet another life

had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of strength

and comfort.

His lecturing and teaching work also was becoming more and more the

instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore more and more difficult

to leave. The thoughts of God, the image of Jesus, which were active and

fruitful in his own mind, had been gradually passing from the one into

the many, and Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion, once

nurtured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men and women

his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a trembling joy, a humble

prostration of the soul before the Eternal Truth, no words can fitly

describe. With an ever-increasing detachment of mind from the objects of

self and sense, he felt himself a tool in the Great Workman's hand.

'Accomplish Thy purposes in me,' was the cry of his whole heart and

life; 'use me to the utmost; spend every faculty I have, O "Thou who

mouldest men"!'

But in the end his work itself drove him away. A certain memorable

Saturday evening brought it about. It had been his custom of late to

spend an occasional evening hour after his night-school work in the

North R---- Club, of which he was now by invitation a member. Here, in

one of the inner rooms, he would stand against the mantelpiece chatting,

smoking often with the men. Everything came up in turn to be discussed;

and Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical workers

about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates

became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and

the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion

with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm

and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing

natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence

so well as these moments of free discursive intercourse. The mere

orator, the mere talker, indeed, would never have gained any permanent

hold; but the life behind gave weight to every acute or eloquent word,

and importance even to those mere sallies of a boyish enthusiasm which

were still common enough in him.

He had already visited the club once during the week preceding this

Saturday. On both occasions there was much talk of the growing

popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street work, of the numbers

attending the lectures, the story-telling, the Sunday school, and of the

way in which the attractions of it had spread into other quarters of the

parish, exciting there, especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid's, an

anxious and critical attention. The conversation on Saturday night,

however, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and curious

note of _responsibility_. The men present were evidently beginning to

regard the work as _their_ work also, and its success as their interest.

It was perfectly natural, for not only had most of them been his

supporters and hearers from the beginning, but some of them were now

actually teaching in the night-school or helping in the various branches

of the large and overflowing boys' club. He listened to them for a while

in his favourite attitude, leaning against the mantelpiece, throwing in

a word or two now and then as to how this or that part of the work might

be amended or expanded. Then suddenly a kind of inspiration seemed to

pass from them to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he

asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of

this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him

and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new

departure.

'Suppose I drop my dictatorship,' he said, 'suppose we set up

parliamentary government, are you ready to take your share? Are you

ready to combine, to commit yourselves? Are you ready for an effort to

turn this work into something lasting and organic?'

The men gathered round him smoked on in silence for a minute. Old

Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing away in a corner

peculiarly his own, and dedicated to the glorification--in broad

Berwickshire--of the experimental philosophers, laid down his pipe and

put on his spectacles, that he might grasp the situation better. Then

Lestrange, in a dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself

further.

Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye

kindling.

But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking

rapid gestures characteristic of him.

'But no mere social and educational body, mind you!' and his bright

commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good thing surely, "yet is

there better than it." The real difficulty of every social effort--you

know it and I know it--lies, not in the planning of the work, but in the

kindling of will and passion enough to carry it _through_. And that can

only be done by religion--by faith.'

He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind him. The men

gazed at him--at the slim figure, the transparent changing face--with a

kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly,

taking off his glasses again and clearing his throat--

'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther Elsmere?'

'If you like,' said Robert impetuously. 'I have no fear of the great

words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you

can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them

choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles if

it must, and never mind words. Be content to be a new "sect,"

"conventicle," or what not, so long as you feel that you are _something_

with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.'

Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat with his elbows

on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from

the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it

was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert's next

words.

'However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something

much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these

suggestions of mine. "Association," "society," "brotherhood," what you

will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and

everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it life

rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested on _trust_

and _memory_!--_trust_ in the God of experience and history; _memory_ of

that God's work in man, by which alone we know Him and can approach Him.

Well, of that work--I have tried to prove it to you a thousand

times--Jesus of Nazareth has become to _us_, by the evolution of

circumstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and

epitomes. We have made our protest--we are daily making it--in the face

of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present

time are excluding him more and more from human love. But now, suppose

we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose

we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of

faith, the gathering and organising of a new Company of Jesus!'

Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room

was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid

modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the

Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the

smoke, the lines and groups of working-men in every sort of working

dress, the occasional rumbling of huge waggons past the window, the

click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir

of spiritual passion which any competent observer might have felt

sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was

passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of

the world.

After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up.

He was commonly known among his fellow-potters as 'the hartist,' because

of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his aesthetic

susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him their target,

but the teasing of him that went on was more or less tempered by the

knowledge that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two

young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart had been

killed before his eyes a year before in a railway accident.

'I dun know,' he said in a high treble voice, 'I dun know whether I

speak for anybody but myself--very likely not; but what I _do_ know,'

and he raised his right hand and shook it with a gesture of curious

felicity, 'is this--what Mr. Elsmere starts I'll join; where he goes

I'll go; what's good enough for him's good enough for me. He's put a new

heart and a new stomach into me, and what I've got he shall have,

whenever it pleases 'im to call for it! So if he wants to run a new

thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with

it--I don't know as I'm very clear what he's driving at, nor what good I

can do 'im--but when Tom Wheeler's asked for he'll be there!'

A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent ran through the

little assembly. Robert bent forward, his eye glistening, a moved

acknowledgment in his look and gesture. But in reality a pang ran

through the fiery soul. It was 'the personal estimate,' after all, that

was shaping their future and his and the idealist was up in arms for his

idea, sublimely jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its

power and place.

A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the possible

outlines of a possible organisation, and as to the observances which

might be devised to mark its religious character. As it flowed on the

atmosphere grew more and more electric. A new passion, though still

timid and awestruck, seemed to shine from the looks of the men standing

or sitting round the central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under

the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy about him; and when

Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon him an almost

awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future.

He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he sank into a

chair and fainted. He was probably not unconscious very long, but after

he had struggled back to his senses, and was lying stretched on the sofa

among the books with which it was littered, the solitary candle in the

big room throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression

overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of death.

How was it he had come to feel so ill? Suddenly, as he looked back over

the preceding weeks, the physical weakness and disturbance which had

marked them, and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed

as possible, took shape, spectre-like, in his mind.

And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against weakness and

disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, his head in his hands.

'Rest--strength,' he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, 'for

the work's sake!'

He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine till the

morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to take him and the

babe off without delay to the Norman coast, vowing that he would lounge

and idle for six whole weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks,

she gradually got from him the story of the night before. As he told it,

his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual

drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her.

The contrast, however, between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through

him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart

within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one sensitive

dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed

by a strange and desolate sense of her comparatively small share in this

ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as

though he were no longer hers--as though a craving hungry world, whose

needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her,

claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind

and delicate frame.

As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take them in

whether for protest or sympathy. She could think only of where to go,

what doctor to consult, how she could persuade him to stay away long

enough.

There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere announced that

he must go off for a while. He so announced it that everybody who heard

him understood that his temporary withdrawal was to be the mere

preparation for a great effort--the vigil before the tourney; and the

eager friendliness with which he was met sent him off in good heart.

* * * * *

Three or four days later he, Catherine and Mary were at Petites Dalles,

a little place on the Norman coast, near Fecamp, with which he had first

made acquaintance years before, when he was at Oxford.

Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered

'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was

fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock,

Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy

silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a

blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into

a quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they

would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of

the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for

the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who

wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and

pluck of the two-year-old English _bebe_. By eleven the heat out of

doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back--father and mother

and trailing child--past the hotels on the _plage_, along the irregular

village lane, to the little house where they had established

themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French _bonne_ to look after them;

would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the _dejeuner_ waiting

for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating

from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual

warfare. Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be

tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep,

till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated

one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of

mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless

_salon_, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only

luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but

quite another _comedie humaine_ unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in

the contriving optimist mind.

Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it

could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College

de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist or two, and a

sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among

them, _more suo_, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the

most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through

many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new

acquaintances.

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and

mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which

was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed

to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy

country lay all round them--the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of

white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees

which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On

the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even

for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half

tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their

own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the

patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze,

there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them

poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded

happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.

One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little

dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard

the purring sound of the night-jar, and immediately after the bird

itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they

caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.

Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears

dropped on to her cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her

always smote him to the heart.

'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if

you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for

myself, but----'

For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?--of

youth, of hope, of memory?

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-coloured

waves, while he held her hand close and tenderly. No--she was not

unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone for ever out of that early joy. Her

life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things.

It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter

self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her

husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had

conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her

present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married

life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy

of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there

was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment

from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the

epoch-making fact of our day. 'Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher,

'is sin, and implies it': and while he speaks, the saint in the

unbeliever gently smiles down his argument, and suddenly, in the rebel

of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.

CHAPTER XLVII

Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose's summer, indeed, was

much varied by visits to country houses--many of them belonging to

friends and acquaintances of the Flaxman family--by concerts, and the

demands of several new and exciting artistic friendships. But she was

seldom loth to come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled

house. Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed by any

consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as intolerable to her

as in past days.

The girl was not herself; there was visible in her not only that general

softening and deepening of character which had been the consequence of

her trouble in the spring, but a painful _ennui_ she could hardly

disguise, a longing for she knew not what. She was beginning to take the

homage paid to her gift and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was

in no sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision,

curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when

she came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long

walks, breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to their

austerest solitudes alone, as though haunted by that profound saying of

Obermann, 'Man is not made for enjoyment only--_la tristesse fait aussi

partie de ses vastes besoins_.'

What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonely moments, especially

in those moments among the high fells, beside some little tarn or

streamlet, while the sheets of mist swept by her, or the great clouds

dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of

Langham--of that first thrill of passion which had passed through her,

delusive and abortive, like one of those first thrills of spring which

bring out the buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her

again 'a moral east wind was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought

of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her

heartstrings. But was it really she, really this very Rose, who had

rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast? She felt a sort

of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She must surely be

a poor creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and have

left so little trace behind?

And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised to the blind

friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far afield. Little vignettes

of London would come and go on the inner retina; smiles and sighs would

follow one another.

'_How kind he was that time! how amusing this!_'

Or, '_How provoking he was that afternoon! how cold that evening!_'

Nothing else--the pronoun remained ambiguous.

'I want a friend!' she said to herself once as she was sitting far up in

the bosom of High Fell, 'I want a friend badly. Yet my lover deserts me,

and I send away my friend!'

One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the vicar, and Rose were wandering round

the churchyard together, enjoying a break of sunny weather after days of

rain. Mrs. Thornburgh's personal accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps

a little more defined, a little more emphatic even, than when we first

knew her. The vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle grayer, a trifle

more submissive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal contest of

life, he was getting clearly worsted as the years went on. But the

performance through which his wife was now taking him tried him

exceptionally, and she only kept him to it with difficulty. She had had

an attack of bronchitis in the spring, and was still somewhat

delicate--a fact which to his mind gave her an unfair advantage of him.

For she would make use of it to keep constantly before him ideas which

he disliked, and in which he considered she took a morbid and unbecoming

pleasure. The vicar was of opinion that when his latter end overtook him

he should meet it on the whole as courageously as other men. But he was

altogether averse to dwelling upon it, or the adjuncts of it,

beforehand. Mrs. Thornburgh, however, since her illness had awoke to

that inquisitive affectionate interest in these very adjuncts which

many women feel. And it was extremely disagreeable to the vicar.

At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the precise spots in

the little churchyard where it seemed to her it would be pleasant to

rest. There was one corner in particular which attracted her, and she

stood now looking at it with measuring eyes and dissatisfied mouth.

'William, I wish you would come here and help me!'

The vicar took no notice, but went on talking to Rose.

'William!' imperatively.

The vicar turned unwillingly.

'You know, William, if you wouldn't mind lying with your feet _that_

way, there would be just room for me. But, of course, if you _will_ have

them the other way----' The shoulders in the old black silk mantle went

up, and the gray curls shook dubiously.

The vicar's countenance showed plainly that he thought the remark worse

than irrelevant.

'My dear,' he said crossly, 'I am not thinking of those things, nor do I

wish to think of them. Everything has its time and place. It is close on

tea, and Miss Rose says she must be going home.'

Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a disapproving

sigh.

'You talk, William,' she said severely, 'as if you were a young man,

instead of being turned sixty-six last birthday.'

And again she measured the spaces with her eye, checking the results

aloud. But the vicar was obdurately deaf. He strolled on with Rose, who

was chattering to him about a visit to Manchester, and the little church

gate clicked behind them. Hearing it, Mrs. Thornburgh relaxed her

measurements. They were only really interesting to her after all when

the vicar was by. She hurried after them as fast as her short squat

figure would allow, and stopped midway to make an exclamation.

'A carriage!' she said, shading her eyes with a very plump hand,

'stopping at Greybarns!'

The one road of the valley was visible from the churchyard, winding

along the bottom of the shallow green trough, for at least two miles.

Greybarns was a farmhouse just beyond Burwood, about half a mile away.

Mrs. Thornburgh moved on, her matronly face aglow with interest.

'Mary Jenkinson taken ill!' she said. 'Of course, that's Doctor Baker!

Well, it's to be hoped it won't be twins _this_ time. But, as I told her

last Sunday, "It's constitutional, my dear." I knew a woman who had

three pairs! Five o'clock now. Well, about _seven_ it'll be worth while

sending to inquire.'

When she overtook the vicar and his companion, she began to whisper

certain particulars into the ear that was not on Rose's side. The vicar,

who, like Uncle Toby, was possessed of a fine natural modesty, would

have preferred that his wife should refrain from whispering on these

topics in Rose's presence. But he submitted lest opposition should

provoke her into still more audible improprieties; and Rose walked on a

step or two in front of the pair, her eyes twinkling a little. At the

vicarage gate she was let off without the customary final gossip. Mrs.

Thornburgh was so much occupied in the fate hanging over Mary Jenkinson

that she, for once, forgot to catechise Rose as to any marriageable

young men she might have come across in a recent visit to a great

country-house of the neighbourhood; an operation which formed the

invariable pendant to any of Rose's absences.

So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homewards. As she

did so she became aware of a man's figure walking along the space of

road between Greybarns and Burwood, the western light behind it.

Dr. Baker? But even granting that Mrs. Jenkinson had brought him five

miles on a false alarm, in the provoking manner of matrons, the shortest

professional visit could not be over in this time.

She looked again, shading her eyes. She was nearing the gate of Burwood,

and involuntarily slackened step. The man who was approaching, catching

sight of the slim girlish figure in the broad hat and pink and white

cotton dress, hurried up. The colour rushed to Rose's cheek. In another

minute she and Hugh Flaxman were face to face.

She could not hide her astonishment.

'Why are you not in Scotland?' she said after she had given him her

hand. 'Lady Helen told me last week she expected you in Ross-shire.'

Directly the words left her mouth she felt she had given him an opening.

And why had Nature plagued her with this trick of blushing?

'Because I am here!' he said smiling, his keen dancing eyes looking down

upon her. He was bronzed as she had never seen him. And never had he

seemed to bring with him such an atmosphere of cool pleasant strength.

'I have slain so much since the first of July that I can slay no more. I

am not like other men. The Nimrod in me is easily gorged, and goes to

sleep after a while. So this is Burwood?

He had caught her just on the little sweep leading to the gate, and now

his eye swept quickly over the modest old house, with its trim garden,

its overgrown porch and open casement windows. She dared not ask him

again why he was there. In the properest manner she invited him 'to come

in and see mamma.'

'I hope Mrs. Leyburn is better than she was in town? I shall be

delighted to see her. But must you go in so soon? I left my carriage

half a mile below, and have been revelling in the sun and air. I am loth

to go indoors yet awhile. Are you busy? Would it trouble you to put me

in the way to the head of the valley? Then, if you will allow me, I will

present myself later.'

Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of things as his

appearance. But she turned and walked beside him, pointing out the crags

at the head, the great sweep of High Fell, and the pass over to

Ullswater, with as much _sangfroid_ as she was mistress of.

He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland he had

bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, that he had stopped

at Whinborough, was bent on walking over the High Fell pass to

Ullswater, and making his way thence to Ambleside, Grasmere, and

Keswick.

'But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater?' cried Rose

incautiously.

'Certainly. You see my hotel,' and he pointed, smiling, to a white

farmhouse standing just at the bend of the valley, where the road turned

towards Whinborough. 'I persuaded the good woman there to give me a bed

for the night, took my carriage a little farther, then, knowing I had

friends in these parts, I came on to explore.'

Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper.

'You are the first tourist,' she said coolly, 'who has ever stayed in

Whindale.'

'Tourist! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of

Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being

with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my

Murray in the railway carriage.'

He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection of his strong

sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had been so easy to stand

on her dignity, to remember whenever he was friendly that the night

before he had been distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to

be anything but natural--the child of the moment!

'You are neither more practical nor more economical than when I saw you

last,' she said demurely. 'When did you leave Norway?'

They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flaxman, who had

been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete, was

giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles shown by

the primitive democrats of Norway. As they passed a gap in the vicarage

hedge, laughing and chatting. Rose became aware of a window and a gray

head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash,

instantly suppressed, that shot across her face.

Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the house where

Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and the poor bedridden Jim

still lived. They mounted the path behind it, and plunged into the hazel

plantation which had sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable

night. But when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a

scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of High

Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it seemed to Rose

that when she had once let him help her over a rock her hand was never

her own again. He kept it an almost constant prisoner on one pretext or

another till they were at the top.

Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside her, lifting

his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below had been warm and

relaxing. Here it played upon them both with a delicious life-giving

freshness. He looked round on the great hollow bosom of the fell, the

crags buttressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the

valley, the white sparkle of the river.

'It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and frugal

beauty--the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no peaks, no fiords!'

'No!' said Rose scornfully, 'we are not Norway, and we are not

Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at once inform you that we

have no glaciers, and that there is perhaps only one place in the

district where a man who was not an idiot could succeed in killing

himself.'

He looked at her, calmly smiling.

'You are angry,' he said, 'because I make comparisons. You are wholly on

a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in the world that pleased me half as

much as this bare valley, that gray roof'--and he pointed to Burwood

among its trees--'and this knoll of rocky ground.'

His look travelled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. He threw

himself down on the short grass beside her.

'It rained this morning,' she still had the spirit to murmur under her

breath.

He took not the smallest heed.

'Do you know,' he said--and his voice dropped--'can you guess at all why

I am here to-day?'

'You had never seen the Lakes,' she repeated in a prim voice, her eyes

still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitching. 'You stopped at

Whinborough, intending to take the pass over to Ullswater, thence to

make your way to Ambleside and Keswick--or was it to Keswick and

Ambleside?'

She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met abashed her

again.

'_Taquine!_' he said, 'but you shall not laugh me out of countenance. If

I said all that to you just now, may I be forgiven. One purpose, one

only, brought me from Norway, forbade me to go to Scotland, drew me to

Whinborough, guided me up your valley--the purpose of seeing your face!'

It could not be said at that precise moment that he had attained it.

Rather she seemed bent on hiding that face quite away from him. It

seemed to him an age before, drawn by the magnetism of his look, her

hands dropped, and she faced him, crimson, her breath fluttering a

little. Then she would have spoken, but he would not let her. Very

tenderly and quietly his hand possessed itself of hers as he knelt

beside her.

'I have been in exile for two months--you sent me. I saw that I troubled

you in London. You thought I was pursuing you--pressing you. Your manner

said "Go!" and I went. But do you think that for one day, or hour, or

moment I have thought of anything else in those Norway woods but of you

and of this blessed moment when I should be at your feet, as I am now?'

She trembled. Her hand seemed to leap in his. His gaze melted, enwrapped

her. He bent forward. In another moment her silence would have so

answered for her that his covetous arms would have stolen about her for

good and all. But suddenly a kind of shiver ran through her--a shiver

which was half memory, half shame. She drew back violently, covering her

eyes with her hand.

'Oh no, no!' she cried, and her other hand struggled to get free,

'don't, don't talk to me so--I have a--a--confession.'

He watched her, his lips trembling a little, a smile of the most

exquisite indulgence and understanding dawning in his eyes. Was she

going to confess to him what he knew so well already? If he could only

force her to say it on his breast.

But she held him at arm's length.

'You remember--you remember Mr. Langham?'

'Remember him!' echoed Mr. Flaxman fervently.

'That thought-reading night at Lady Charlotte's, on the way home, he

spoke to me. I said I loved him. I _did_ love him; I let him kiss me!'

Her flush had quite faded. He could hardly tell whether she was yielding

or defiant as the words burst from her.

An expression, half trouble, half compunction, came into his face.

'I knew,' he said very low; 'or rather, I guessed.' And for an instant

it occurred to him to unburden himself, to ask her pardon for that

espionage of his. But no, no; not till he had her safe. 'I guessed, I

mean, that there had been something grave between you. I saw you were

sad. I would have given the world to comfort you.'

Her lip quivered childishly.

'I said I loved him that night. The next morning he wrote to me that it

could never be.'

He looked at her a moment embarrassed. The conversation was not easy.

Then the smile broke once more.

'And you have forgotten him as he deserved. If I were not sure of that I

could wish him all the tortures of the _Inferno_! As it is, I cannot

think of him; I cannot let you think of him. Sweet, do you know that

ever since I first saw you the one thought of my days, the dream of my

nights, the purpose of my whole life, has been to win you? There was

another in the field; I knew it. I stood by and waited. He failed you--I

knew he must in some form or other. Then I was hasty, and you resented

it. Little tyrant, you made yourself a Rose with many thorns! But, tell

me, tell me, it is all over--your pain, my waiting. Make yourself sweet

to me! unfold to me at last?'

An instant she wavered. His bliss was almost in his grasp. Then she

sprang up, and Flaxman found himself standing by her, rebuffed and

surprised.

'No, no!' she cried, holding out her hands to him though all the time.

'Oh, it is too soon! I should despise myself, I do despise myself. It

tortures me that I can change and forget so easily; it ought to torture

you. Oh, don't ask me yet to--to----'

'To be my wife,' he said calmly, his cheek a little flushed, his eye

meeting hers with a passion in it that strove so hard for self-control

it was almost sternness.