'Not yet!' she pleaded, and then, after a moment's hesitation, she broke

into the most appealing smiles, though the tears were in her eyes,

hurrying out the broken, beseeching words. 'I want a friend so much--a

real friend. Since Catherine left I have had no one. I have been running

riot. Take me in hand. Write to me, scold me, advise me, I will be your

pupil, I will tell you everything. You seem to me so fearfully wise, so

much older. Oh, don't be vexed. And--and--in six months----'

She turned away, rosy as her name. He held her still, so rigidly, that

her hands were almost hurt. The shadow of the hat fell over her eyes;

the delicate outlines of the neck and shoulders in the pretty pale dress

were defined against the green hill background. He studied her

deliberately, a hundred different expressions sweeping across his face.

A debate of the most feverish interest was going on within him. Her

seriousness at the moment, the chances of the future, her character, his

own--all these knotty points entered into it, had to be weighed and

decided with lightning rapidity. But Hugh Flaxman was born under a lucky

star, and the natal charm held good.

At last he gave a long breath; he stooped and kissed her hands.

'So be it. For six months I will be your guardian, your friend, your

teasing implacable censor. At the end of that time I will be--well,

never mind what. I give you fair warning.'

He released her. Rose clasped her hands before her and stood drooping.

Now that she had gained her point, all her bright mocking independence

seemed to have vanished. She might have been in reality the tremulous

timid child she seemed. His spirits rose; he began to like the role she

had assigned to him. The touch of unexpectedness, in all she said and

did, acted with exhilarating force on his fastidious romantic sense.

'Now, then,' he said, picking up her gloves from the grass, 'you have

given me my rights; I will begin to exercise them at once. I must take

you home, the clouds are coming up again, and on the way will you

kindly give me a full, true, and minute account of these two months

during which you have been so dangerously left to your own devices?'

She hesitated, and began to speak with difficulty, her eyes on the

ground. But by the time they were in the main Shanmoor path again, and

she was not so weakly dependent on his physical aid, her spirits too

returned. Pacing along with her hands behind her, she began by degrees

to throw into her accounts of her various visits and performances plenty

of her natural malice.

And after a bit, as that strange storm of feeling which had assailed her

on the mountain-top abated something of its bewildering force, certain

old grievances began to raise very lively heads in her. The smart of

Lady Fauntleroy's ball was still there; she had not yet forgiven him all

those relations; and the teasing image of Lady Florence woke up in her.

'It seems to me,' he said at last dryly, as he opened a gate for her not

far from Burwood, 'that you have been making yourself agreeable to a

vast number of people. In my new capacity of censor I should like to

warn you that there is nothing so bad for the character as universal

popularity.'

'_I_ have not got a thousand and one important cousins!' she exclaimed,

her lip curling. 'If I want to please, I must take pains, else "nobody

minds me."'

He looked at her attentively, his handsome face aglow with animation.

'What can you mean by that?' he said slowly.

But she was quite silent, her head well in air.

'Cousins?' he repeated. 'Cousins? And clearly meant as a taunt at me!

Now when did you see my cousins? I grant that I possess a monstrous and

indefensible number. I have it. You think that at Lady Fauntleroy's ball

I devoted myself too much to my family, and too little to----'

'Not at all!' cried Rose hastily, adding, with charming incoherence,

while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in her restless fingers,

'_Some_ cousins of course are pretty.'

He paused an instant: then a light broke over his face, and his burst of

quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. Rose got redder and

redder. She realised dimly that she was hardly maintaining the spirit of

their contract, and that he was studying her with eyes inconveniently

bright and penetrating.

'Shall I quote to you,' he said, 'a sentence of Sterne's? If it violate

our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. Sterne is

admonishing a young friend as to his manners in society: "You are in

love," he says. "_Tant mieux._ But do not imagine that the fact bestows

on you a licence to behave like a bear towards all the rest of the

world. _Affection may surely conduct thee through an avenue of women to

her who possesses thy heart without tearing the flounces of any of their

petticoats_"--not even those of little cousins of seventeen! I say

this, you will observe, in the capacity you have assigned me. In another

capacity I venture to think I could justify myself still better.'

'My guardian and director,' cried Rose, 'must not begin his functions by

misleading and sophistical quotations from the classics!'

He did not answer for a moment. They were at the gate of Burwood, under

a thick screen of wild cherry trees. The gate was half open, and his

hand was on it.

'And my pupil,' he said, bending to her, 'must not begin by challenging

the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he will not answer for the

consequences!'

His words were threatening, but his voice, his fine expressive face,

were infinitely sweet. By a kind of fascination she never afterwards

understood, Rose for answer startled him and herself. She bent her head;

she laid her lips on the hand which held the gate, and then she was

through it in an instant. He followed her in vain. He never overtook her

till at the drawing-room door she paused with amazing dignity.

'Mamma,' she said, throwing it open, 'here is Mr. Flaxman. He is come

from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I will go and speak to

Margaret about tea.'

CHAPTER XLVIII

After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter,

Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that

night towards the farmhouse where he had established himself, he

entertained a very comfortable scepticism as to the permanence of that

curious contract into which Rose had just forced him. However, he was

quite mistaken. Rose's maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on Hugh

Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of Langham. The

restraints, the anomalies, the hairsplittings of the situation delighted

her ingenuous youth. 'I am free--he is free. We will be friends for six

months. Possibly we may not suit one another at all. If we

do--_then_----'

In the thrill of that _then_ lay, of course, the whole attraction of the

position.

So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously

kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the

bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But

he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of

half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy

it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.

How Rose got through Agnes's cross-questioning on the matter history

sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be

sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted to

know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr.

Flaxman's journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start

on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.

But she took everything naively as it came, and as she was told. Nothing

with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It

required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet

sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally

fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative

scantiness of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have

come out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else

to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after

his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.

Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had

interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine's sorrows had raised a

whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the vicar's wife. She

prowled nervously round Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her

placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on

Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of

baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the vicarage in their

company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which

caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes, she

was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar afterwards that 'no one

could tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners were

very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people.'

On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman's stay in the valley he entered the

Burwood drive about eleven o'clock, and Rose came down the steps to meet

him. For a moment he flattered himself that her disturbed looks were due

to the nearness of their farewells.

'There is something wrong,' he said, softly detaining her hand a

moment--so much, at least, was in his right.

'Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Petites Dalles. He has

been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a few days. Catherine

writes bravely, but she is evidently very low.'

Hugh Flaxman's face fell. Certain letters he had received from Elsmere

in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so pitiful was the

half-conscious revelation in them of an incessant physical struggle. An

accident! Elsmere was in no state for accidents. What miserable

ill-luck!

Rose read him Catherine's account. It appeared that on a certain stormy

day a swimmer had been observed in difficulties among the rocks skirting

the northern side of the Petites Dalles bay. The old _baigneur_ of the

place, owner of the still primitive _etablissement des bains_, without

stopping to strip, or even to take off his heavy boots, went out to the

man in danger with a plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to

the people watching, it became evident that the _baigneur_ himself was

in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the water, and the cry rose

that he was sinking. Robert, who happened to be bathing near, ran off to

the spot, jumped in, and swam out. By this time the old man had drifted

some way. Robert succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid

an excited crowd, headed by the _baigneur's_ wailing family, they

carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere was certain

life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. Meanwhile no one seemed

to have any common sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed, but

himself. For two hours he stayed on the beach in his dripping

bathing-clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to him:

rubbing, hot bottles, artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too

old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed his

last, amid the wild and passionate grief of wife and children.

Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to the

doctor, to carry one of the _baigneur's_ sobbing grandchildren to its

mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold of him, and he

submitted to be taken home, shivering, and deeply depressed by the

failure of his efforts. A violent gastric and lung chill declared itself

almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill.

Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how

to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. 'I had not

the heart to write even to you,' she wrote to her mother. 'I could think

of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed

eight days, and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and

declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay

here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so

much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey.

He is not fit for it in any way.'

Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity.

Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides,

considering.

'I shall not go on to Scotland,' he said; 'Mrs. Elsmere must not be

left. I will go off there at once.'

In Rose's soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an

instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it was delicate, not

the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be.

And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he

said good-bye was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him

from her belt.

Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetot to

Petites Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A chilly west wind blew up

the dust before him and stirred the parched leafage of the valley. He

knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered

by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.

'This is kind--this is like yourself!' she said, after a first stare of

amazement, when he had explained himself. 'He is in there, much better.'

Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up

with his old brightness.

'Well, this _is_ friendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow?

Why aren't you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?'

Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make

Robert's eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing

touch upon Flaxman's shoulder.

'I shan't try to thank you--Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she

will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever

so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no

great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she pulled me

through! And now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself a little more

plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together? You need not

try and persuade _me_ that Long Whindale is the natural gate of the

Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from London to Scotland, though I

have no doubt you tried that little fiction on them.'

Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down very deliberately.

'I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that perspicacity

for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the day before yesterday

I asked your sister Rose to marry me. She----'

'Go on, man,' cried Robert, exasperated by his pause.

'I don't know how to put it,' said Flaxman calmly. 'For six months we

are to be rather more than friends, and a good deal less than _fiances_.

I am to be allowed to write to her. You may imagine how seductive it is

to one of the worst and laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms

that his fortunes in love should be made to depend on his

correspondence. I may scold her _if_ she gives me occasion. And in six

months, as one says to a publisher, "the agreement will be open to

revision."'

Robert stared.

'And you are not engaged?'

'Not as I understand it,' replied Flaxman. 'Decidedly not!' he added

with energy, remembering that very platonic farewell.

Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating.

'A fantastic thing, the modern young woman! Still I think I can

understand. There may have been more than mere caprice in it.'

His eye met his friend's significantly.

'I suppose so,' said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert's benefit was

he going to reveal any details of that scene on High Fell 'Never mind,

old fellow, I am content. And, indeed, _faute de mieux_, I should be

content with anything that brought me nearer to her, were it but by the

thousandth of an inch.'

Robert grasped his hand affectionately.

'Catherine,' he called through the door, 'never mind the supper; let it

burn. Flaxman brings news.'

Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly her ways would

never have been as her sister's.

'Are we supposed to know?' she asked, very naturally.

'She never forbade me to tell,' said Flaxman smiling. 'I think, however,

if I were you, I should say nothing about it--yet. I told her it was

part of our bargain that _she_ should explain my letters to Mrs.

Leyburn. I gave her free leave to invent any fairy tale she pleased, but

it was to be _her_ invention, not mine.

Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But there was

something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman

took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself.

Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman's

arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched him critically, did not like

some of his symptoms, but thought on the whole he must be recovering at

the normal rate, considering how severe the attack had been.

'What do you think of him?' Catherine asked him next day, with all her

soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established in a sunny nook, and

were strolling on along the sands.

'I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, and keep

him quiet,' said Flaxman. 'He will be all right presently.'

'How _can_ we keep him quiet?' said Catherine, with a momentary despair

in her fine pale face. 'All day long and all night long he is thinking

of his work. It is like something fiery burning the heart out of him.'

Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of calm autumn

weather he spent with them before the return journey. Robert would talk

to him for hours, now on the sands, with the gray infinity of sea before

them, now pacing the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him

drop heavily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the

religious future of the working-class. He described the scene in the

Club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, presenting them

for Flaxman's criticism, and dealing with them himself, with that

startling mixture of acute common-sense and eloquent passion which had

always made him so effective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously

at first, as he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried

away, not by the beliefs, but by the man. _He_ found his pleasure in

dallying with the magnificent _possibility_ of the Church; doubt with

him applied to all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he

had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for the

provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or social reform

was another matter. Since the Revolution, every generous child of the

century has been open to the fascination of political or social Utopias.

But religion! _What--what is truth?_ Why not let the old things alone?

However, it was through the social passion, once so real in him, and

still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, that Robert

caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining possession of him all these

months.

'Well,' said Flaxman one day, 'suppose I grant you that Christianity of

the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, even in England, and in

spite of the Church expansion we hear so much about; and suppose I

believe with you that things will go badly without religion--what then?

Who can have a religion for the asking?'

'But who can have it without? _Seek_, that you may find. Experiment; try

new combinations. If a thing is going that humanity can't do without,

and you and I believe it, what duty is more urgent for us than the

effort to replace it?'

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders.

'What will you gain? A new sect?'

'Possibly. But what we _stand_ to gain is a new social bond,' was the

flashing answer--'a new compelling force in man and in society. Can you

deny that the world wants it? What are you economists and sociologists

of the new type always pining for? Why, for that diminution of the self

in man which is to enable the individual to see the _world's_ ends

clearly, and to care not only for his own but for his neighbour's

interest, which is to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and

the poor bear with the rich. If man only _would_, he _could_, you say,

solve all the problems which oppress him. It is man's will which is

eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great religions of

the world are the stimulants by which the power at the root of things

has worked upon this sluggish instrument of human destiny. Without

religion you cannot make the will equal to its tasks. Our present

religion fails us; we must, we will have another!'

He rose and began to pace along the sands, now gently glowing in the

warm September evening, Flaxman beside him.

_A new religion!_ Of all words, the most tremendous! Flaxman pitifully

weighed against it the fraction of force fretting and surging in the

thin elastic frame beside him. He knew well, however--few better--that

the outburst was not a mere dream and emptiness. There was experience

behind it--a burning, driving experience of actual fact.

Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, 'I must have that whole

block of warehouses, Flaxman.'

'Must you?' said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to the

practical. 'Why?'

'Look here!' And sitting down again on a sand-hill overgrown with wild

grasses and mats of sea-thistle, the poor pale reformer began to draw

out the details of his scheme on its material side. Three floors of

rooms brightly furnished, well lit and warmed; a large hall for the

Sunday lectures, concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for

the boys' club; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate

entrance; a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well stored

with books, and made beautiful by pictures; three or four smaller rooms

to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the Naturalist Club

which had been started in May on the Murewell plan; and, if possible, a

gymnasium.

'_Money!_' he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. 'There's the

rub, of course. But I shall manage it.'

To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely that he

would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere's stick had made in the

sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, 'I will take the first

expense: and draw on me afterwards up to five hundred a year, for the

first four years.'

Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand.

'I do not thank you,' he said quietly, after a moment's pause; 'the work

itself will do that.'

Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till Flaxman's

pulse beat as fast as Robert's; so full of infectious hope and energy

was the whole being of the man before him.

'I can take in the women and girls now,' Robert said once. 'Catherine

has promised to superintend it all.'

Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he stood an instant

looking at his companion. It was the first time he had mentioned

Catherine's name in connection with the North R---- work. Flaxman could

not mistake the emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned

away, nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two men

understood each other.

CHAPTER XLIX

Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal

better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have

their pet irrationalities. Elsmere's irrationality was an aversion to

doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded

admiration for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as

individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic;

Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating

himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his way. And

for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act

favourably upon him. After his first welcome at the Club he came home

with bright eye and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man.

Flaxman established himself in St. James's Place. Town was deserted; the

partridges at Greenlaws clamoured to be shot; the head-keeper wrote

letters which would have melted the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied

recklessly that any decent fellow in the neighbourhood was welcome to

shoot his birds--a reply which almost brought upon him the resignation

of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and

remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner's duties, inquiring at

the same time what he meant to do with regard to 'that young lady.' To

which Flaxman replied calmly that he had just come back from the Lakes,

where he had done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still

something. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation

for six months, and found London the best place for getting through it.

'So far,' he said, 'I am getting on well, and developing an amount

of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone

ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man.

But we must be left "to dream our dream unto ourselves alone." One

word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on

the subject, and---- But threats are puerile. _For the present_,

dear aunt, I am your devoted nephew,

HUGH FLAXMAN.'

'_On probation!_'

Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter.

He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, and because

he loved the Elsmeres for Rose's sake and his own. He thought moreover

that a cool-headed friend with an eye for something else in the world

than religious reform might be useful just then to Elsmere, and he was

determined at the same time to see what the reformer meant to be at.

In the first place, Robert's attention was directed to getting

possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing school

and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This was a matter of

some difficulty, for the floors above were employed in warehousing goods

belonging to various minor import trades, and were held on tenures of

different lengths. However, by dint of some money and much skill, the

requisite clearances were effected during September and part of October.

By the end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which

refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere's hands.

Meanwhile, at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture--a meeting

composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert's

helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in

the man and his work from all parts--the details of 'The New

Brotherhood of Christ' were being hammered out. Catherine was generally

present, sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew

her well, was always trying to decipher afresh--a sort of sweet

aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw, down the vistas of the

future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present.

Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterwards

that in Robert's attitude towards Edwardes at this time, in his constant

desire to bring him forward, to associate him with himself as much as

possible in the government and formation of the infant society, there

was a half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not

even the tender wife, the watchful friend.

The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority

of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with

Elsmere's teaching and Elsmere's thought, showed a responsiveness, a

receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with

wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of

Robert's address--sour, stolid, brutalised, hostile to all things in

heaven and earth?

'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the role of the

individual lessening day by day! Fool! go and _be_ a saint, go and give

yourself to ideas; go and _live_ the life hid with Christ in God, and

see,'--so would run the quick comment of the observer.

But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of

feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him, it

was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without

carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world.

Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange

debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more

and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly

any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had

not been for long in Robert's mind--thought out and brought into final

shape, perhaps, on the Petites Dalles sands. It was an unobtrusive art,

his art of government, but a most effective one.

At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the early meetings,

the discussions as to the religious practices which were to bind

together the new association might have passed the line, and become

puerile or grotesque. At any moment the jarring characters and ambitions

of the men Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate

atmosphere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole new birth

seemed to have been conceived, and upon the maintenance of which its

fruition and development depended. But as soon as Elsmere appeared,

difficulties vanished, enthusiasm sprang up again. The rules of the new

society came simply and naturally into being, steeped and haloed, as it

were, from the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart.

The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no less than

the sour, half-educated analysis of such a man as Lestrange.

In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There

were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for

instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything

more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and

affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work

he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who

almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on

attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined

to worship one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the

sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert's

part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible

formation of a harassing left wing.

But Robert's manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother.

It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood.

But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the

practical working of it was secured him. And what was more, Robert

succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the

subject, into the men and youths who had profited in the past by

Wardlaw's rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on

now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel

himself an alien or forgotten.

As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach,

and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the

whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no

case. Robert's quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life

since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness,

so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or

nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he

made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the

critical half-patronising approval of the young barrister from the West

who came down to listen to him, and made a favour of teaching in his

night-school, were as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, the

self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had

begun to show towards the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they

had 'seen God.'

At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the

exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt

the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the

library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the

rolls of bright-coloured matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt

in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of

men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever

persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.

Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt

letters over the door, 'The New Brotherhood of Christ,' shone out into

the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of

the Brotherhood took place.

For two hours a continuous stream of human beings surrounded the little

table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing their names, and receiving

from him the silver badge, bearing the head of Christ, which was to be

the outward and conspicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts:

the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant,

stalwart warehousemen, huge carters and draymen, the boy attached to

each by the laws of the profession often straggling lumpishly behind his

master. Women were there: wives who came because their lords came, or

because Mr. Elsmere had been 'that good' to them that anything they

could do to oblige him 'they would, and welcome'; prim pupil-teachers,

holding themselves with straight superior shoulders; children, who came

trooping in, grinned up into Robert's face and retreated again with red

cheeks, the silver badge tight clasped in hands which not even much

scrubbing could make passable.

Flaxman stood and watched it from the side. It was an extraordinary

scene: the crowd, the slight figure on the platform, the two great

inscriptions, which represented the only 'articles' of the new faith,

gleaming from the freshly coloured walls--

_'In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust;'_

_'This do in remembrance of Me;'_

--the recesses on either side of the hall lined with white marble, and

destined, the one to hold the names of the living members of the

Brotherhood, the other to commemorate those who had passed away (empty

this last save for the one poor name of 'Charles Richards'); the copies

of Giotto's Paduan Virtues--faith, fortitude, charity, and the

like--which broke the long wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker

tried to assert itself against the feeling with which the air seemed

overcharged. In vain.

'Whatever comes of it,' Flaxman said to himself with strong involuntary

conviction, 'whether he fails or no, the spirit that is moving here is

the same spirit that spread the Church, the spirit that sent out

Benedictine and Franciscan into the world, that fired the children of

Luther, or Calvin, or George Fox; the spirit of devotion, through a man,

to an idea; through one much-loved, much-trusted soul to some eternal

verity, newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no

approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life;

there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea!'

A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not write to her

of Rose, he did not care to write of himself, and he knew that Elsmere's

club address had left a mark even on her restless and overcrowded mind.

Moreover, he himself was absorbed.

'We are in the full stream of religion-making. I watch it with a

fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, even when my

judgment demurs, and my intelligence protests that the thing cannot live

without Elsmere, and that Elsmere's life is a frail one. After the

ceremony of enrolment which I described to you yesterday the Council of

the New Brotherhood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an

address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are working-men, the

rest of the upper class; Elsmere, of course, president.

'Since then the first religious service under the new constitution has

been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole

is "new bottles for the new wine." The opening prayer is recited by

everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith

than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing

of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the

ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and

perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere's drawing up, I imagine--at

any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit,

answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers

expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.

'Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and

expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage

of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle, his

efforts to make his audience realise the germs of miraculous belief

which each man carries with him in the constitution and inherited

furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious--perhaps the most

convincing--I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very

much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvellous element in

religion.

'But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins.

Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another matter; but that

the Christ he preaches moves the human heart as much as--and in the case

of the London artisan, more than--the current orthodox presentation of

him, I begin to have ocular demonstration.

'I was present, for instance, at his children's Sunday class the other

day. He had brought them up to the story of the Crucifixion, reading

from the Revised Version, and amplifying wherever the sense required it.

Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk before her, and with

choking sobs implored him not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to

do the same. The pure human pity of the story--the contrast between the

innocence and the pain of the sufferer--seemed to be more than they

could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a jugglery by which the

suffering was not real after all, and the sufferer not man but God.

'He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console them. But there

is something piercingly penetrating and austere even in the consolations

of this new faith. He did but remind the children of the burden of

gratitude laid upon them. "Would you let him suffer so much in vain? His

suffering has made you and me happier and better to-day, at this moment,

than we could have been without Jesus. You will understand how, and why,

more clearly when you grow up. Let us in return keep him in our hearts

always, and obey his words! It is all you can do for his sake, just as

all you could do for a mother who died would be to follow her wishes and

sacredly keep her memory."

'That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little scene,

wonderfully suggestive and pathetic.

'But a few more words about the Sunday service. After the address came a

hymn. There are only seven hymns in the little service book, gathered

out of the finest we have. It is supposed that in a short time they will

become so familiar to the members of the Brotherhood that they will be

sung readily by heart. The singing of them in the public service

alternates with an equal number of psalms. And both psalms and hymns are

meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the members, and

to become part of the everyday life of the Brotherhood. They have been

most carefully chosen, and a sort of ritual importance has been attached

to them from the beginning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn

or psalm.

'Then the whole wound up with another short prayer, also repeated

standing, a commendation of the individual, the Brotherhood, the nation,

the world, to God. The phrases of it are terse and grand. One can see at

once that it has laid hold of the popular sense, the popular memory. The

Lord's Prayer followed. Then, after a silent pause of "recollection,"

Elsmere dismissed them.

'"_Go in peace, in the love of God, and in the memory of His servant,

Jesus._"

'I looked carefully at the men as they were tramping out. Some of them

were among the Secularist speakers you and I heard at the club in April.

In my wonder, I thought of a saying of Vinet's: "_C'est pour la religion

que le peuple a le plus de talent; c'est en religion qu'il montre le

plus d'esprit._"'

In a later letter he wrote--

'I have not yet described to you what is perhaps the most

characteristic, the most binding practice of the New Brotherhood. It is

that which has raised most angry comment, cries of "profanity," "wanton

insult," and what not. I came upon it yesterday in an interesting way. I

was working with Elsmere at the arrangement of the library, which is now

becoming a most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian

chosen from the neighbourhood, when he asked me to go and take a message

to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary help in the evenings

after his day's work. He thought that as it was the dinner hour, and the

man worked in the dock close by, I might find him at home. I went off to

the model lodging-house where I was told to look for him, mounted the

common stairs, and knocked at his door. Nobody seemed to hear me, and as

the door was ajar I pushed it open.

'Inside was a curious sight.

'The table was spread with the midday meal. Round the table stood four

children, the eldest about fourteen, and the youngest six or seven. At

one end of it stood the carpenter himself in his working apron, a brawny

Saxon, bowed a little by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and

his horny hands were resting on it. The street was noisy; they had not

heard my knock; and as I pushed open the door there was an old coat

hanging over the corner of it which concealed me.

'Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, kept me where

I was, silent.

'The father lifted his right hand.

'"The Master said, '_This do in remembrance of Me!_'"

'The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the youngest said

slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that touched me

extraordinarily,--

'"_Jesus, we remember Thee always!_"

'It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected the child

perfectly at Elsmere's class. I also remembered that she had no mother;

that her mother had died of cancer in June, visited and comforted to the

end by Elsmere and his wife.

'Well, the great question of course remains--is there a sufficient

strength of _feeling_ and _conviction_ behind these things? If so, after

all, everything was new once, and Christianity was but modified

Judaism.'

* * * * *

'December 22.

'I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. In Elgood

Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. But it will be a

new sort of Christmas. We shall hear very little, it seems, of angels

and shepherds, and a great deal of the humble childhood of a little

Jewish boy whose genius grown to maturity transformed the Western world.

To see Elsmere, with his boys and girls about him, trying to make them

feel themselves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make

them understand something of the lessons that child must have learnt,

the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that must have come to

him, is a spectacle of which I will not miss more than I can help. Don't

imagine, however, that I am converted exactly!--but only that I am more

interested and stimulated than I have been for years. And don't expect

me for Christmas. I shall stay here.'

* * * * *

'New Year's Day.

'I am writing from the library of the New Brotherhood. The amount of

activity, social, educational, religious, of which this great building

promises to be the centre is already astonishing. Everything, of course

including the constitution of the infant society, is as yet purely

tentative and experimental. But for a scheme so young, things are

falling into working order with wonderful rapidity. Each department is

worked by committees under the central council. Elsmere, of course, is

_ex-officio_ chairman of a large proportion; Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a

few other fellows "run" the rest for the present. But each committee

contains working-men; and it is the object of everybody concerned to

make the workman element more and more real and efficient. What with the

"tax" on the members which was fixed by a general meeting, and the

contributions from outside, the society already commands a fair income.

But Elsmere is anxious not to attempt too much at once, and will go

slowly and train his workers.

'Music, it seems, is to be a great feature in the future. I have my own

projects as to this part of the business, which, however, I forbid you

to guess at.

'By the rules of the Brotherhood, every member is bound to some work in

connection with it during the year, but little or much, as he or she is

able. And every meeting, every undertaking of whatever kind, opens with

the special "word" or formula of the society, "This do in remembrance of

Me."'

* * * * *

'January 6.

'Besides the Sunday lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on Saturday

evenings at "The History of the Moral Life in Man." It is a remarkable

course, and very largely attended by people of all sorts. He tries to

make it an exposition of the leading principles of the new movement, of

"that continuous and only revelation of God in life and nature," which

is in reality the basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters

that are pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They show

an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind which are

surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not surprised--says he

always expected it--and that there are thousands who only want a

rallying-point.

'His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the passion and

energy of the nature--never has our generation seen anything to equal

it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it all seriously, and don't

know what to make of him or myself.

'_She_, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with him day after

day, and works away. She no more believes in his _ideas_, I think, than

she ever did; but all her antagonism is gone. In the midst of the stir

about him her face often haunts me. It has changed lately; she is no

longer a young woman, but so refined, so spiritual!

'But he is ailing and fragile. _There_ is the one cloud on a scene that

fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.'

CHAPTER L

One cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of

the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a young Dr. Edmondson, an able

young physician, just set up for himself as a consultant, who had only

lately attached himself to Elsmere, and was now helping him with

eagerness to organise a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman

exchanged a few words on Elsmere's lecture, and then the doctor said

abruptly,--

'I don't like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been hoarse like

that?'

'More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself,

and talks of clergyman's throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once

in the country.'

'Clergyman's throat?' Edmondson shook his head dubiously. 'It may be. I

wish he would let me overhaul him.'

'I wish he would!' said Flaxman devoutly. 'I will see what I can do. I

will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.'

Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. As they entered

the study she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite passion

gleaming in her face.

'You did not explain Him! You never will!'

He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his

face changed, blanched before her--he seemed to gasp for breath--she was

only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon

of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him

all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine's look

would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures

which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste

calamity and grief to the very dregs.

'Robert, to-morrow you _will_ see a doctor?' she implored him when at

last he was safely in bed--white, but smiling.

He nodded.

'Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,' he said, in a

voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.

Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed

to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by ill luck, with the

morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the squire, but

about the squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to

Murewell. The squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on

the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing Elsmere

any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had

absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent

to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was

from old Meyrick. 'The squire has had another bad attack, and is _much_

weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you.

If you can, come to-morrow.'

'_His mind is clear again!_' Horrified by the words and by the images

they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang

up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently

appeared downstairs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for

the morning, was going through some household business.

'I _must_ go, I _must_ go!' he said as he handed her the letter.

'Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!'

Catherine looked at him in despair.

'Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr.

Edmondson.'

'Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my

voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good.' She turned

away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions,

but it was useless. His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt

it a call impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and

Robert drove off to Waterloo.

Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter's day. Robert

breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every

landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year

and a half since he had travelled it. He forgot his weakness, the

exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed

him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day

and was going back to Catherine!

At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.

'Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then you may drive on

my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.'

The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of

the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared

at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a

hallucination--his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so

easy and swift to-day?

By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and

Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the

driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighbourhood, and he

jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a

boy.

'Go on, Tom; see if I am not there as soon as you.'

'Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself as his horse

shambled off. 'Seems as spry as a lark all the same.'

Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were

singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered

with timid half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so

beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he

was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession

to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of

the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or

reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth's

bareness everywhere--curling mists--blue points of distant hill--a gray

luminous depth of sky.

The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old

anguish he stood and blessed God!--not for any personal happiness, but

simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of

common living a revelation.

Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up

the lane leading to the vicarage. One look! he might not be able to

leave the squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just

inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked

child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the

brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing

with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal!

Besides, how could the boys have free access except to that ground-floor

room? And all that pretty stretch of grass under the acacia had been cut

up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer

with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to

Catherine.

He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this

realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his

undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In

that upper room he had lain through that agonised night of crisis; the

dawn-twitterings of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And

there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile

End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not

lie in the wet any longer--thank God! Was there time just to run down to

Irwin's cottage, to have a look at the Institute?

He had been standing on the farther side of the road from the rectory

that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor's

ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him

that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath.

The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a

drowning thing. When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered,

drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black--the sun

seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds of children's

voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart--or was it all sight and

sound alike, mirage and delirium?

With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man of

seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank down, still

gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars near the gate. After

a while the attack passed off and he found himself able to walk on. But

the joy, the leaping pulse of half an hour ago, were gone from his

veins. Was that the river--the house? He looked at them with dull eyes.

All the light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the

familiar things.

However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will and nature had

reasserted themselves, and he knew where he was and what he had to do.

Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.

'Why, sir! _Mr._ Elsmere!'

The butler's voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding at once

into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of the old rector.

Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the dining-room

and give him some wine before announcing him. Vincent ministered to him

with a long face, pressing all the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon

him in turn. The squire was much better, he declared, and had been

carried down to the library.

'But, lor, sir, there ain't much to be said for your looks

neither--seems as if London didn't suit you, sir.'

Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his throat, and

had overtired himself by walking over the common. Then, recognising from

a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror hanging by that

something of his natural colour had returned to him, he rose and bade

Vincent announce him.

'And Mrs. Darcy?' he asked, as they stepped out into the hall again.

'Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she's very well,' said the man, but, as it seemed

to Robert, with something of an embarrassed air.

He followed Vincent down the long passage--haunted by old memories, by

the old sickening sense of mental anguish--to the curtained door.

Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir of feet, and a voice, but at

first he saw nothing. The room was very much darkened. Then Meyrick

emerged into distinctness.

'Squire, here _is_ Mr. Elsmere! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I'm sure we're

very much obliged to you for meeting the squire's wishes so promptly.

You'll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but mending--oh yes, mending,

sir--no doubt of it.'

Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand was advanced

to him out of the gloom.

'That'll do, Meyrick. You won't be wanted till the evening.'

The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden sense of

relief. After all, the squire was still capable of trampling on Meyrick.

In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and the two men

were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to the dim light. Out of it

the squire's face gleamed almost as whitely as the tortured marble of

the Medusa just above their heads.

'It's some inflammation in the eyes,' the squire explained briefly,

'that's made Meyrick set up all this d--d business of blinds and

shutters. I don't mean to stand it much longer. The eyes are better, and

I prefer to see my way out of the world, if possible.'

'But you are recovering?' Robert said, laying his hand affectionately on

the old man's knee.

'I have added to my knowledge,' said the squire drily. 'Like Heine, I am

qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on

earth. And I am not in bed, which I was last week. For Heaven's sake

don't ask questions. If there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the

subject of the human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you

away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you so

hoarse for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of "the people,"

who wouldn't even subscribe to bury you? Have you been working up the

Apocrypha as I recommended you last time we met?'

Robert smiled.

'For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things with

neither of which had you much sympathy in old days--holiday-making and

"slumming."'

'Oh, I remember,' interrupted the squire hastily. 'I was low last week,

and read the Church papers by way of a counter-irritant. You have been

starting a new religion, I see. A new religion! _Humph!_'

The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the

sarcastic gleam of the eyes.

'You are hardly the man to deny,' he said, undisturbed, 'that the old

ones _laissent a desirer_.'

'Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you should go and

set up a brand-new one--an ugly anachronism besides,' retorted the

squire. 'However, you and I have no common ground--never had. I say

_know_, you say _feel_. Where is the difference, after all, between you

and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?'

'I have not seen her for six months,' Robert replied, with equal

abruptness.

The squire laughed a little under his breath.

'What did you think of her?'

'Very much what you told me to think--intellectually,' replied Robert,

facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.

'Well, I certainly never told you to think anything--_morally_,' said

the squire. 'The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see

there?'

The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere

went through with it, the squire watching him for a while with an

expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that

some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always

seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had

tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.

But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle

change in the squire's attitude--a relaxation of his own sense of

tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness.

The squire's head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the

breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had

dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and

defencelessness.

Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so

much to him.

Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the

Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk,

looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of

books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of

ken--they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so--a river

lost in the sands!

Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping squire.

'A bad sign! a bad sign!' he said, and shook his head mournfully.

After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon

him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical _malaise_ than had ever

yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw

Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up

to her with a warm greeting.

'Are you going in to the squire? Let us go together.'

She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day

before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into the room behind her, a

curious film, so it seemed to him, darkening her small gray eyes.

'The squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen my white mice?

Oh, they are such darlings! Only, one of them is ill, and they won't let

me have the doctor.'

Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She stood in the

middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger to a large cage of

white mice which stood in the window. The room seemed full besides of

other creatures. Robert stood rooted, looking at the tiny withered

figure in the black dress, its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in

lace, with a perplexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver.

Suddenly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent,

strong-looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their

eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head towards Mrs.

Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing the mice with the

weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, and went out sick at

heart. The careful exquisite beauty of the great hall struck him as

something mocking and anti-human.

No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. In the

evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in another key. He

insisted on a certain amount of light, and, leaning on Robert's arm,

went feebly round the bookshelves. He took out one of the volumes of the

Fathers that Newman had given him.

'When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rubbish,' he

said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, 'and of the

other hours I maundered away in services and self-examination! Thank

Heaven, however, the germ of revolt and sanity was always there. And

when once I got to it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick.'

Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the shrunken

squire.

'Oh, not one _you_ have any chance of learning, my good friend,' said

the other aggressively. 'And after all it's simple. _Go to your grave

with your eyes open_--that's all. But men don't learn it, somehow.

Newman was incapable--so are you. All the religions are nothing but so

many vulgar anaesthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse.'

'Do you want me to contradict you?' said Robert, smiling; 'I am quite

ready.'

The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his chair again, he

said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau in the window, 'The book is

all there--both parts, first and second. Publish it if you please. If

not, throw it into the fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has

done its work; it has helped me through half a century of living.'

'It shall be to me a sacred trust,' said Elsmere with emotion. 'Of

course if you don't publish it, I shall publish it.'

'As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more rational to tell me

about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood of yours.'

Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The words would

not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the middle that strange

creeping sleep overtook the squire again.

Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been coming in and

out through the evening, eyeing Elsmere, now that there was more light

on the scene, with almost as much anxiety and misgiving as the squire,

was summoned. The squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a

male attendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick

peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a finger to the

performance. They took him up the library stairs, through the empty

book-rooms and that dreary room which had been his father's, and so into

his own. By the time they set him down he was quite awake and conscious

again.

'It can't be said that I follow my own precepts,' he said to Robert

grimly as they put him down. 'Not much of the open eye about this. I

shall sleep myself into the unknown as sweetly as any saint in the

calendar.'

Robert was going when the squire called him back.

'You'll stay to-morrow, Elsmere?'

'Of course, if you wish it.'

The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently.

'Why did you ever go?'

'As I told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else for an

honest man to do.'

The squire turned round with a frown.

'What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get

me out of this.'

By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the

night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches

of the park; the trees shone silverly in the cold light, their black

shadows cast along the grass. Robert found himself quartered in the

Stuart room, where James II. had slept, and where the tartan hangings of

the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls

and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal

preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by

way of distracting his thoughts a little from the squire, and that other

tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took

from his coat-pocket a French _Anthologie_ which had been Catherine's

birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.

Then he slept profoundly--the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found

himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange

noises in his ears.

A cry 'Help!' resounded through the wide empty galleries.

He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the

squire's room.

The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At

that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the squire, ran up.

'My God, sir!' he said, deadly white, 'another attack!'

The squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room

adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.

They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white

figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger.

Those old bloodshot eyes--those wrinkled hands on the throat of the

doctor--horrible!

They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the squire's

room. Then Robert and Benson got the squire back by main force. The

whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron.

Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will

mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson

managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them

they got it swallowed.

But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have had

time to work, the squire shrank together like a puppet of which the

threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors'

hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the

January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white

visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud

breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.

Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw

himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow

of him on the wall, emphasising, as though in mockery, the long straight

back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage.

But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever

spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.

'The last--the last!' he said, choked, the tears falling down his lined

cheeks on to the squire's hand. 'He can never rally from this. And I was

fool enough to think yesterday I had pulled him through!'

Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief; then he looked up at Robert.

'He wouldn't have Benson to-night. I slept in the next room with the

door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him moving. I was up in an instant,

and found him standing by that door, peering through, bare-footed, a

wind like ice coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. "_My

father_," he said--"_my father_--he went that way--what do _you_ want

here? Keep back!" I threw myself on him; he had something sharp which

scratched me on the temple; I got that away from him, but it was his

hands'--and the old man shuddered. 'I thought they would have done for

me before any one could hear, and that then he would kill himself as his

father did.'

Again he hung over the figure on the bed--his own withered hand stroking

that of the squire with a yearning affection.

'When was the last attack?' asked Robert sadly.

'A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere, he

suffered. And he's been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no one to please

him with his food--to put his cushions right--to coax him up a bit, and

that--and his poor sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course

he would stand to it he liked to be alone. But I'll never believe men

are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a

wife or a child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir,

when you went away. Not that he'd say a word, but he moped. His books

didn't seem to please him, nor anything else. I've just broke my heart

over him this last year.'

There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round with the shapes

of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken effect. The squire's

countenance was no longer convulsed. The great brow was calm; a more

than common dignity and peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert

bent over him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away: the dying scholar

and thinker lay before him.

'Will he rally?' he asked, under his breath.

Meyrick shook his head.

'I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. The heart is

failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, Mr. Elsmere, you

go--go and sleep. Benson and I'll watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir.

I'm used to a rough-and-tumble life. But you go. If there's a change

we'll wake you.'

Elsmere bent down and kissed the squire's forehead tenderly, as a son

might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept

away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that

sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.

It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew

back the curtains, made up the fire, and, wrapping himself in a fur coat

which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the

moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.

As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in.

The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness,

suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth-century tapestry

which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the wood-path? Surely

that was Catherine's figure, trailing--and that dome--strange! Was he

still walking in Grey's funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking

sadly down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under

life from the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight

of which men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder,

and he looks shuddering into it.

Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the

river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink; on

the other side were Grey and the squire. But he felt no pang of

separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join

them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harboured

image and expectation alike with perfect calm.

Then the fever-spell broke--the brain cleared--and he was terribly

himself again. Whence came it--this fresh inexorable consciousness? He

tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought,

to God's love and Catherine's. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one

hand, this fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every

nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of

his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the

poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!

'_My God! my God! no time, no future!_'

In his misery he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking

through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed with

ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with

hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an instant, beyond the bridge,

in the unearthly blue?

And quietly--heavily--like an irrevocable sentence, there came, breathed

to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words that he

had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside his

hand--words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though by

accident, the most tragic of all human cries--

'Quittez le long espoir, et les vastes pensees.'

He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing

for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but

their own.

'_Quittez--quittez--le long espoir et les vastes pensees!_'

CHAPTER LI

There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast was no long

time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in all else.

The day after Elsmere's return from Murewell, where he left the squire

still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached Bedford Square a

few hours after Robert's arrival), Edmondson came up to see him and

examine him. He discovered tubercular disease of the larynx, which

begins with slight hoarseness and weakness, and develops into one of the

most rapid forms of phthisis. In his opinion it had been originally set

up by the effects of the chill at Petites Dalles acting upon a

constitution never strong, and at that moment peculiarly susceptible to

mischief. And of course the speaking and preaching of the last four

months had done enormous harm.

It was with great outward composure that Elsmere received his _arret de

mort_ at the hands of the young doctor, who announced the result of his

examination with a hesitating lip and a voice which struggled in vain to

preserve its professional calm. He knew too much of medicine himself to

be deceived by Edmondson's optimist remarks as to the possible effect of

a warm climate like Algiers on his condition. He sat down, resting his

head on his hands a moment; then, wringing Edmondson's hand, he went out

feebly to find his wife.

Catherine had been waiting in the dining-room, her whole soul one dry

tense misery. She stood looking out of the window taking curious heed of

a Jewish wedding that was going on in the square, of the preposterous

bouquets of the coachman and the gaping circle of errand-boys. How

pinched the bride looked in the north wind!

When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come in--her young

husband, to whom she had been married not yet four years--with that

indescribable look in the eyes which seemed to divine and confirm all

those terrors which had been shaking her during her agonised waiting,

there followed a moment between them which words cannot render. When it

ended--that half-articulate convulsion of love and anguish--she found

herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on her breast, his hand

clasping hers.

'Do you wish me to go, Catherine?' he asked her gently,--'to Algiers?'

Her eyes implored for her.

'Then I will,' he said, but with a long sigh. 'It will only prolong it

two months,' he thought; 'and does one not owe it to the people for whom

one has tried to live, to make a brave end among them? Ah, no! no! those

two months are _hers_!'

So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary preparations be

made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could not wring hers by staying.

After his interview with Robert, and his further interview with

Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommendations and

directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed to make the true

state of the case more ghastly plain to the wife than ever, Edmondson

went off to Flaxman.

Flaxman heard his news with horror.

'A _bad_ case, you say--advanced?'

'A bad case!' Edmondson repeated gloomily. 'He has been fighting against

it too long under that absurd delusion of clergyman's throat. If only

men would not insist upon being their own doctors! And, of course, that

going down to Murewell the other day was madness. I shall go with him to

Algiers, and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, that

career, cut short! This is a queer sort of world!'

When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the afternoon, he went like

a man going himself to execution. In the hall he met Catherine.

'You have seen Dr. Edmondson?' she asked, pale and still, except for a

little nervous quivering of the lip.

He stooped and kissed her hand.

'Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come after if you will

have me. The climate may do wonders.'

She looked at him with the most heart-rending of smiles.

'Will you go in to Robert? He is in the study.'

He went, in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up on the sofa,

apparently reading.

'Don't--don't, old fellow,' he said affectionately, as Flaxman almost

broke down. 'It comes to all of us sooner or later. Whenever it comes we

think it too soon. I believe I have been sure of it for some time. We

are such strange creatures! It has been so present to me lately that

life was too good to last. You remember the sort of feeling one used to

have as a child about some treat in the distance--that it was too much

joy--that something was sure to come between you and it? Well, in a

sense, I have had my joy, the first-fruits of it at least.'

But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman

saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish mouth contract, and knew that

under all these brave words there was a heart which hungered.

'How strange!' Robert went on reflectively; 'yesterday I was travelling,

walking like other men, a member of society. To-day I am an invalid; in

the true sense, a man no longer. The world has done with me; a barrier I

shall never recross has sprung up between me and it.--Flaxman, to-night

is the story-telling. Will you read to them? I have the book here

prepared--some scenes from David Copperfield. And you will tell them?'

A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he forget the scene.

Some ominous rumour had spread, and the New Brotherhood was besieged.

Impossible to give the reading. A hall full of strained upturned faced

listened to Flaxman's announcement, and to Elsmere's messages of cheer

and exhortation, and then a wild wave of grief spread through the place.

The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each other's

eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, all feeling

themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When Elsmere heard the news

of it, he turned on his face, and asked even Catherine to leave him for

a while.

The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood had just become the

subject of an animated discussion in the press, and London was touched

by the news of its young founder's breakdown. Catherine found herself

besieged by offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded

her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill above

Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resident on the spot

was to take all trouble off their hands; they were to find servants

ready for them, and every comfort.

Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness, with a

self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to Flaxman that her

heart was broken--that half of her, in feeling, was already on the other

side of this horror which stared them all in the face. Was it his

perception of it which stirred Robert after a while to a greater

hopefulness of speech, a constant bright dwelling on the flowery

sunshine for which they were about to exchange the fog and cold of

London? The momentary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than

his first quiet resignation.

He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters! in which the

feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery under-current through

all the sad brotherly record of the invalid's doings and prospects.

There was deep trouble in Long Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and

hysterical, and wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote

in distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing her own

inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only be an extra burden

on the Elsmeres if the journey were achieved. Rose wrote asking to be

allowed to go with them to Algiers; and after a little consultation it

was so arranged, Mrs. Leyburn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself

writing, to stay where she was.

The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert sent for Murray

Edwardes. They were closeted together for nearly an hour. Edwardes came

out with the look of one who has been lifted into 'heavenly places.'

'I thank God,' he said to Catherine, with deep emotion, 'that I ever

knew him. I pray that I may be found worthy to carry out my pledges to

him.'

When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gazing into the fire

with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up to her with a smile.

'Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to the work. If

necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it on. But we hope it

will be possible to work them together. What a brick he is! What a

blessed chance it was that took me to that breakfast party at

Flaxman's!'

The rest of the time before departure he spent almost entirely in

consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It was terrible how rapidly

worse he seemed to grow directly the situation had declared itself, and

the determination _not_ to be ill had been perforce overthrown. But his

struggle against breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms

of his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day of all,

by his own persistent wish, a certain number of members of the

Brotherhood came to say good-bye to him. They came in one by one,

Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, from the height of his sixty years

of tough weather-beaten manhood, looked down on Robert with a fatherly

concern.

'Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it's a fine place yur gawin' tu, they say.

Ye'll do weel there, sir--ye'll do weel. And as for the wark, sir, we'll

keep it oop--we'll not let the Deil mak' hay o' it, if we knaws it--the

auld leer!' he added, with a phraseology which did more honour to the

Calvinism of his blood than the philosophy of his training.

Lestrange came in, with a pale sharp face, and said little in his ten

minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed curiosity and

excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his feverish eyes towards

_le grand secret_. 'You, who preached to us that consciousness, and God,

and the soul are the only realities--are you so sure of it now you are

dying, as you were in health? Are your courage, your certainty, what

they were?' These were the sort of questions that seemed to underlie the

man's spoken words.

There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best to put aside

his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his help in the past, and

implored him to stand by the young society and Mr. Edwardes.

'I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one man matter? One

soldier falls, another presses forward.'

The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush passing over him.

'We can't stand without you!' he said abruptly; then, seeing Robert's

look of distress, he seemed to cast about for something reassuring to

say, but could find nothing. Robert at last held out his hand with a

smile, and he went. He left Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible

depression. In reality there was no man who worked harder at the New

Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. He worked

under perpetual protest from the _frondeur_ within him, but something

stung him on--on--till a habit had been formed which promises to be the

joy and salvation of his later life. Was it the haunting memory of that

thin figure--the hand clinging to the chair--the white appealing look?

Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the consequences. She

herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, comforting the sobbing

creatures afterwards with a calmness born of her own despair. Robson, in

the last stage himself, sent him a grimly characteristic message. 'I

shall solve the riddle, sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days.

For the first time in my life, I shall know what you are still guessing

at. May the blessing of one who never blessed thing or creature before

he saw you go with you!'

After it all Robert sank on the sofa with a groan.

'No more!' he said hoarsely--'no more! Now for air--the sea! To-morrow,

wife, to-morrow! _Cras ingens iterabimus aequor._ Ah me! I leave _my_ new

Salamis behind!'

But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham and

Newcome.

'I will spare Langham the sight of me' he said, smiling sadly. 'And I

will spare myself the sight of Newcome--I could not bear it, I think!

But I must say good-bye--for I love them both.'

Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove

up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it.

'Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the housemaid, and the priest turned

away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the

passionate heart bore the burden of that 'too late,' believing that even

at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He

might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he

was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.

Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new

and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In

any other circumstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken

down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four

hours he could press no claim of his own.

When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood

watching the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky.

Catherine caught her look and attitude, and could have cried aloud in

her own gnawing pain.

Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival.

Their journey had gone well; even the odious passage from Marseilles had

been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was

luxurious, the weather good.

'I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' wrote

Edmondson. 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January

fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under

a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June--when an

English June behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the bay, the great

plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the

Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds.

His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers,

raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity

and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He

breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I

sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he

were unlike the common sons of men--as though to _him_ it might be

possible to subdue even this fell disease.'

Elsmere himself wrote--

'"I had not heard the half"--O Flaxman! An enchanted land--air, sun,

warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern

beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis--everything that feeds the

outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth

of sunlit air between us and the curve of the bay, is for the moment

heaven! One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous

blue of the morning. I am better--I breathe again.

'Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, and has been

adopted by sixty nuns who inhabit the convent over the way, and sell us

the most delicious butter and cream. I imagine, if she were a trifle

older, her mother would hardly view the proceedings of these dear

berosaried women with so much equanimity.

'As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and receives more

than an editor of the _Times_. I have the strongest views, as you know,

as to the vanity of letter-writing. There was a time when you shared

them, but there are circumstances and conjunctures, alas! in which no

man can be sure of his friend or his friend's principles. Kind friend,

good fellow, go often to Elgood Street. Tell me everything about

everybody. It is possible, after all, that I may live to come back to

them.'

But a week later, alas! the letters fell into a very different strain.

The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp and rainy, the natives

of course declaring that such gloom and storm in January had never been

known before. Edmondson wrote in discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch

of cold, had been confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter was

full of medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that, in spite of

the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the disease was

attacking constantly fresh tissue. 'He is very depressed too,' said

Edmondson; 'I have never seen him so yet. He sits and looks at us in the

evening sometimes with eyes that wring one's heart. It is as though,

after having for a moment allowed himself to hope, he found it a doubly

hard task to submit.'

Ah, that depression! It was the last eclipse through which a radiant

soul was called to pass; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The

implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of

farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigour,

showed itself now in all its stern nakedness--sat down, as it were, eye

to eye with Elsmere--immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features

of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The

long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to withdraw

him so pitifully from their yearning grasp! In these dark days he would

sit crouching over the wood fire in the little _salon_, or lie drawn to

the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering

the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning

sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as

Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.'

But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the wife's

inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third

person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree.

Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we

know, ever since that passionate submission of the wife which had thrown

her morally at her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of

her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type

attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man of

science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain

intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends beforehand that he

is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical

collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the

veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that

the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special

clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in

herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been

patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would

wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own;

or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away

perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light,

the light of the Crucified, shine through.

Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert's serenity, Catherine's

poor last effort would have been much feebler, briefer, more hesitating.

But when she saw him plunged for a short space in mortal discouragement,

in a sombreness that as the days went on had its points and crests of

feverish irritation, her anguished pity came to the help of her creed.

Robert felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being

urging, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and ways, in

her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious books and

prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her maintaining at

night beside him, he felt a persistent attack which nearly--in his

weakness--overthrew him.

For 'reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves.' Some of the

greatest and most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful

longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before

the last farewell. And the simpler Christian faith has still to create

around it those venerable associations and habits which buttress

individual feebleness and diminish the individual effort.

One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert stretched out his

hand for his wife and found her kneeling beside him. The dim mingled

light showed him her face vaguely--her clasped hands, her eyes. He

looked at her in silence, she at him; there seemed to be a strange shock

as of battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him.

'Catherine,' he said to her in a feeble intense whisper, 'would you

leave me without comfort, without help, at the end?'

'Oh, my beloved!' she cried, under her breath, throwing her arms round

him, 'if you would but stretch out your hand to the true comfort--the

true help--the Lamb of God sacrificed for us!'

He stroked her hair tenderly.

'My weakness might yield--my true best self never. I know Whom I have

believed. Oh, my darling, be content. Your misery, your prayers hold me

back from God--from that truth and that trust which can alone be

honestly mine. Submit, my wife! Leave me in God's hands.'

She raised her head. His eyes were bright with fever, his lips

trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself again with a quiet

burst of tears, and an indescribable self-abasement. They had had their

last struggle, and once more he had conquered! Afterwards the cloud

lifted from him. Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her

often as though he lay already on the breast of God; even her wifely

love grew timid and awestruck.

Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was like a

scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more than its father

has allowed it to know. At the same time, it was plain to those about

him that the only realities to him in a world of shadows were

God--love--the soul.

One day he suddenly caught Catherine's hands, drew her face to him, and

studied it with his glowing and hollow eyes, as though he would draw it

into his soul.

'He made it,' he said hoarsely, as he let her go--'this love--this

yearning. And in life He only makes us yearn that He may satisfy. He

cannot lead us to the end and disappoint the craving He Himself set in

us. No, no--could you--could I--do it? And He, the source of love, or

justice----'

* * * * *

Flaxman arrived a few days afterwards. Edmondson had started for London

the night before, leaving Elsmere better again, able to drive and even

walk a little, and well looked after by a local doctor of ability. As

Flaxman, tramping up behind his carriage, climbed the long hill to El

Biar, he saw the whole marvellous place in a white light of beauty--the

bay, the city, the mountains, oliveyard and orange-grove, drawn in pale

tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a steep and narrow

lane, he noticed a slight figure standing--a parasol against the sun.

'We thought you would like to be shown the short cut up the hill,' said

Rose's voice, strangely demure and shy. 'The man can drive round.'

A grip of the hand, a word to the driver, and they were alone in the

high-walled lane, which was really the old road up the hill, before the

French brought zigzags and civilisation. She gave him news of

Robert--better than he had expected. Under the influence of one of the

natural reactions that wait on illness, the girl's tone was cheerful,

and Flaxman's spirits rose. They talked of the splendour of the day, the

discomforts of the steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing--of

anything and everything but the hidden something which was responsible

for the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occasional swift veiling of

her own.

Then, at an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool and brown

into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke joyously through the gray

cloud of olive-wood, where not a sight or sound was to be heard of all

the busy life which hides and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his

hands seizing hers.

'How long?' he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling back from his

strong, well-made frame; 'from August to February--how long?'

No more! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the moment death

stood aside and love asserted itself. But this is no place to chronicle

what it said.

And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, before the same

misgiving, the same shrinking, seized on the lovers themselves. They

sped up the hill, they crept into the house, far apart. It was agreed

that neither of them should say a word.

* * * * *

But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that sometimes goes with

such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the position of things before

he and Flaxman had been half an hour together. He took a boyish pleasure

in making his friend confess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at

once sent for Catherine and told her.

Catherine, coming out afterwards, met Flaxman in the little tiled hall.

How she had aged and blanched! She stood a moment opposite to him, in

her plain long dress with its white collar and cuffs, her face working a

little.

'We are so glad!' she said, but almost with a sob--'God bless you!'

And, wringing his hand, she passed away from him, hiding her eyes, but

without a sound. When they met again she was quite self-contained and

bright, talking much both with him and Rose about the future.

And one little word of Rose's must be recorded here, for those who have

followed her through these four years. It was at night, when Robert,

with smiles, had driven them out of doors to look at the moon over the

bay, from the terrace just beyond the windows. They had been sitting on

the balustrade talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had

lost her mocking ways; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman felt

it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much.

When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little white

suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder.

'You won't--you won't ever be angry with me for making you wait like

that? It was impertinent--it was like a child playing tricks!'

* * * * *

Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He was terribly

emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals in the day, and it was

clear that his nights were often one long struggle for breath. But his

spirits were extraordinarily even, and his days occupied to a point

Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven,

read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street),

write his answers to them--those difficult scrawls are among the

treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to itself some

of the best life in England--then often fall asleep with fatigue. After

food there would come a short drive, or, if the day was very warm, an

hour or two of sitting outside, generally his best time for talking. He

had a wheeled chair in which Flaxman would take him across to the

convent garden--a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy--leaf and

blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; underneath a

revel of every imaginable flower--narcissus and anemones, geraniums and

clematis; and all about, hedges of monthly roses, dark red and pale

alternately, making a roseleaf carpet under their feet. Through the

tree-trunks shone the white sun-warmed convent, and far beyond were

glimpses of downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea.

Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank in beauty

and delight; talking, too, whenever it was possible to him, of all

things in heaven and earth. Then, when he came home, he would have out

his books and fall to some old critical problem--his worn and scored

Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through

some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then

to call Flaxman's attention to some fresh light on an obscure

point--only to relinquish the effort again and again with an unfailing

patience.

But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not keep his

attention fixed to these things very long. Then it would be the turn of

his favourite poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most

frequently. Flaxman would read the AEneid aloud to him, Robert following

the passages he loved best in a whisper, his hand resting the while in

Catherine's. And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie

watching her while she played.

'I have had a letter,' he said to Flaxman one afternoon, 'from a Broad

Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant

in London, protesting against the "absurd and wasteful isolation" of the

New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not

join the Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church

from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in organic

connection with the new Broad Church settlement in East London. I

believe I have written him rather a sharp letter; I could not help it.

It was borne in on me to tell him that it is all owing to him and his

brethren that we are in the muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our

time what the law was to the early Christians. We _must_ make up our

minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over

as Paul threw over the law, then we must _fight_ as he did. There is no

help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity. We must

come out of it. The ground must be cleared; then may come the

re-building. Religion itself, the peace of generations to come, is at

stake. If we could wait indefinitely while the Church widened, well and

good. But we have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or

playing the part assigned us.'

On another occasion, in the convent garden, he broke out with--

'I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which men become the

slaves of some metaphysical word--_personality_, or _intelligence_, or

what not! What meaning can they have as applied to _God_? Herbert

Spencer is quite right. We no sooner attempt to define what we mean by a

Personal God than we lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic.

But why attempt it at all? I like that French saying, "_Quand on me

demande ce que c'est que Dieu, je l'ignore; quand on ne me le demande

pas, je le sais tres-bien!_" No, we cannot realise Him in words--we can

only live in Him, and die to Him!'

On another occasion, he said, speaking to Catherine of the squire and of

Meyrick's account of his last year of life--

'How selfish one is, _always_--when one least thinks it! How could I

have forgotten him so completely as I did during all that New

Brotherhood time? Where, what is he now? Ah! if somewhere, somehow, one

could----'

He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of his look

finished it for him.

But the days passed on, and the voice grew rarer, the strength feebler.

By the beginning of March all coming downstairs was over. He was

entirely confined to his room, almost to his bed. Then there came a

horrible week, when no narcotics took effect, when every night was a

wrestle for life, which it seemed must be the last. They had a good

nurse, but Flaxman and Catherine mostly shared the watching between

them.

One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. Catherine was

sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn-world of sun which reminded

her of the summer sunrises at Petites Dalles. She looked the shadow of

herself. Spiritually, too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was

no longer her own: she lived in him--in every look of those eyes--in

every movement of that wasted frame.

As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unseeing gaze

resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of hallucination took

possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw the form of the Son of

man passing over the misty slope in front of her, that the dim majestic

figure turned and beckoned. In her half-dream she fell on her knees.

'Master!' she cried in agony, 'I cannot leave him! Call me not! My life

is here. I have no heart--it beats in his.'

And the figure passed on, the beckoning hand dropping at its side. She

followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed to her as though mind

and body were alike incapable of moving--that she would not if she

could. Then suddenly a sound from behind startled her. She turned, her

trance shaken off in an instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed.

For a moment her lover, her husband, of the early days was before

her--as she ran to him. But he did not see her.

An ecstasy of joy was on his face; the whole man bent forward listening.

'_The child's cry!--thank God! Oh! Meyrick--Catherine--thank God!_'

And she knew that he stood again on the stairs at Murewell in that

September night which gave them their first-born, and that he thanked

God because her pain was over.

An instant's strained looking, and, sinking back into her arms, he gave

two or three gasping breaths, and died.

* * * * *

Five days later Flaxman and Rose brought Catherine home. It was supposed

that she would return to her mother at Burwood. Instead, she settled

down again in London, and not one of those whom Robert Elsmere had loved

was forgotten by his widow. Every Sunday morning, with her child beside

her, she worshipped in the old ways; every Sunday afternoon saw her

black-veiled figure sitting motionless in a corner of the Elgood Street

Hall. In the week she gave all her time and money to the various works

of charity which he had started. But she held her peace. Many were

grateful to her; some loved her; none understood her. She lived for one

hope only; and the years passed all too slowly.

The New Brotherhood still exists, and grows. There are many who imagined

that as it had been raised out of the earth by Elsmere's genius, so it

would sink with him. Not so! He would have fought the struggle to

victory with surpassing force, with a brilliancy and rapidity none after

him could rival. But the struggle was not his. His effort was but a

fraction of the effort of the race. In that effort, and in the Divine

force behind it, is our trust, as was his.

'Others, I doubt not, if not we,

The issue of our toils shall see;

And (they forgotten and unknown)

Young children gather as their own

The harvest that the dead had sown.

THE END

* * * * *

TRANSCRIBER'S NOTE:

Every effort has been made to replicate this text as faithfully as

possible, including obsolete and variant spellings and other

inconsistencies. Obvious typographical errors in punctuation (misplaced

quotes and the like) have been fixed. Text that has been changed to

correct an error by the publisher is noted below:

page 6: "adminstering" corrected to "administering"

I actually wound up by administering some sal-volatile to her.

page 42: added possible dropped word "the"

But she turned and, with quickened breath, looked out of

[the] window after the retreating figures.

page 121: part of text was added from another source because of unclear

scan:

[and a ]desirable marriage spoilt, all for want of a little

common [sense and ]plain speaking, which _one_ person at

least in the [valley co]uld have supplied them with, had she

not been ignored [and brow] beaten on all sides. She

contained herself, however, [in his pres]ence, but the vicar

suffered proportionately in the [privacy of ]the connubial

chamber. He had never seen his wife [so exasperat]ed. To

think what might have been, what she [might have] done for

the race, but for the whims of two stuck-[up, sup]erior,

impracticable young persons, that would neither [ma]nage

their own affairs nor allow other people to manage [th]em for

them! The vicar behaved gallantly, kept the secret

page 153: "apropos" corrected to "a propos"

Langham's tone _a propos_ of Grey's politics and Grey's dreams

page 228: "enjoys" corrected to "enjoy"

his look, to examine his wine, study his menu, and enjoy his

entrees in silence, undisturbed by the uncertain pleasures of

page 263: added comma:

Two days later Mrs. Leyburn and Agnes made their appearance[,] Mrs.

Leyburn all in a flutter

page 325: "seem" corrected to "seemed"

drawing a long breath when she stopped, which seemed to

relax the fibres

page 341: "everthing" corrected to "everything"

Otherwise everything was forgotten.

page 571: "reasuring" corrected to "reassuring"

But there was something reassuring as well as comic

page 585: "lorldly" corrected to "lordly"

Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.