The following day the two girls made their way over to Bedford Square,

where the Elsmeres had taken a house in order to be near the British

Museum. They pushed their way upstairs through a medley of packing-cases

and a sickening smell of paint. There was a sound of an opening door,

and a gentleman stepped out of a back room, which was to be Elsmere’s

study, on to the landing.

It was Edward Langham. He and Rose stood and stared at each other a

moment. Then Rose in the coolest lightest voice introduced him to Agnes.

Agnes, with one curious glance, took in her sister’s defiant, smiling

ease and the stranger’s embarrassment; then she went on to find

Catherine. The two left behind exchanged a few banal questions and

answers, Langham had only allowed himself one look at the dazzling, face

and eyes framed in fur cap and boa. Afterward he stood making a study

of the ground, and answering her remarks in his usual stumbling fashion.

What was it had gone out of her voice--simply the soft callow sounds

of first youth? And what a personage she had grown in these twelve

months--how formidably, consciously brilliant in look and dress and

manner!

Yes, he was still in town--settled there, indeed, for some time. And

she--was there any special day on which Mrs. Leyburn received visitors?

He asked the question, of course, with various hesitations and

circumlocutions.

‘Oh dear, yes! Will you come next Wednesday, for instance, and inspect

a musical menagerie? The animals will go through their performances from

four till seven. And I can answer for it that some of the specimens will

be entirely new to you.’

The prospect offered could hardly have been more repellent to him, but

he got out an acceptance somehow. She nodded lightly to him and passed

on, and he went downstairs, his head in a whirl. Where had the crude

pretty child of yesteryear departed to--impulsive, conceited, readily

offended, easily touched, sensitive as to what all the world might think

of her and her performances? The girl he had just left had counted all

her resources, tried the edge of all her weapons, and knew her own

place too well to ask for anybody else’s appraisement. What beauty--good

heavens!--what _aplomb!_ The rich husband Elsmere talked of would hardly

take much waiting for.

So cogitating, Langham took his way westward to his Beaumont Street

rooms. They were on the second floor, small, dingy, choked with books.

Ordinarily he shut the door behind him with a sigh of content. This

evening they seemed to him intolerably confined and stuffy. He thought

of going out to his club and a concert, but did nothing, after all, but

sit brooding over the fire till midnight, alternately hugging and hating

his solitude.

And so we return to the Wednesday following this unexpected meeting.

The drawing-room at No. 27 was beginning to fill. Rose stood at the door

receiving the guests as they flowed in, while Agnes in the background

dispensed tea. She was discussing with herself the probability of

Langham’s appearance. ‘Whom shall I introduce him to first?’ she

pondered, while she shook hands. ‘The poet? I see Mamma is now

struggling with him. The ‘cellist with the hair--or the lady in Greek

dress--or the esoteric Buddhist? What a fascinating selection! I had

really no notion we should be quite so curious!’

‘Mees Rose, they wait for you,’ said a charming golden-bearded young

German, viola in hand, bowing before her. He and his kind were most of

them in love with her already, and all the more so because she knew so

well how to keep them at a distance.

She went off, beckoning to Agnes to take her place, and the quartet

began. The young German aforesaid played the viola, while the ‘cello was

divinely played by a Hungarian, of whose outer man it need only be said

that in wild profusion of much-tortured hair, in Hebraism of feature,

and swarthy smoothness of cheek, he belonged to that type which Nature

would seem to have already used to excess in the production of the

continental musician. Rose herself was violinist, and the instruments

dashed into the opening allegro with a precision and an _entrain_ that

took the room by storm.

In the middle of it, Langham pushed his way into the crowd round the

drawing-room door. Through the heads about him he could see her standing

a little in advance of the others, her head turned to one side, really

in the natural attitude of violin-playing, but, as it seemed to him, in

a kind of ravishment of listening--cheeks flushed, eyes shining, and the

right arm and high-curved wrist managing the bow with a grace born of

knowledge and fine training.

‘Very much improved, eh?’ said an English professional to a German

neighbor, lifting his eyebrows interrogatively.

The other nodded with the business-like air of one who knows. ‘Joachim,

they say, war darüber entzückt, and did his best vid her, and now D----

has got her--‘naming a famous violinist--‘she vill make fast brogress.

He vill schtamp upon her treecks!’

‘But will she ever be more than a very clever amateur? Too pretty, eh?’

And the questioner nudged his companion, dropping his voice.

Langham would have given worlds to get on into the room, over the

prostrate body of the speaker by preference, but the laws of mass and

weight had him at their mercy, and he was rooted to the spot.

The other shrugged his shoulders. ‘Vell, vid a bretty

woman--_überhaupt_--it _doesn’t_ mean business! It’s zoziety--the dukes

and the duchesses--that ruins all the young talents!’

This whispered conversation went on during the andante. With the scherzo

the two hirsute faces broke into broad smiles. The artist behind each

woke up, and Langham heard no more, except guttural sounds of delight

and quick notes of technical criticism.

How that Scherzo danced and coquetted, and how the Presto flew as though

all the winds were behind it, chasing it, chasing its mad eddies

of notes through listening space! At the end, amid a wild storm of

applause, she laid down her violin, and, proudly smiling, her breast

still heaving with excitement and exertion, received the praises of

those crowding round her. The group round the door was precipitated

forward, and Langham with it. She saw him in a moment. Her white brow

contracted, and she gave him a quick but hardly smiling glance of

recognition through the crowd. He thought there was no chance of getting

at her, and moved aside amid the general hubbub to look at a picture.

‘Mr. Langham, how do you do?’

He turned sharply and found her beside him. She had come to him with

malice in her heart--malice born of smart, and long smouldering pain;

but as she caught his look, the look of the nervous, short-sighted

scholar and recluse, as her glance swept over the delicate refinement

of the face, a sudden softness quivered in her own. The game was so

defenceless!

‘You will find nobody here you know,’ she said abruptly, a little under

her breath. ‘I am morally certain you never saw a single person in the

room before! Shall I introduce you?’

‘Delighted, of course. But don’t disturb yourself about me, Miss

Leyburn. I come out of my hole so seldom, everything amuses me--but

especially looking and listening.’

‘Which means,’ she said, with frank audacity, ‘that you dislike new

people!’

His eye kindled at once. ‘Say rather that it means a preference for the

people that are not new! There is such a thing as concentrating one’s

attention. I came to hear you play, Miss Leyburn!’

‘Well?’

She glanced at him from under her long lashes, one hand playing with the

rings on the other. He thought, suddenly, with a sting of regret, of the

confiding child who had flushed under his praise that Sunday evening at

Murewell.

‘Superb!’ he said, but half mechanically. ‘I had no notion a winter’s

work would have done so much for you. Was Berlin as stimulating as you

expected? When I heard you had gone, I said to myself--“Well, at least,

now, there is one completely happy person in Europe!”’

‘Did you? How easily we all dogmatize about each other!’ she said

scornfully. Her manner was by no means simple. He did not feel himself

at all at ease with her. His very embarrassment, however, drove him into

rashness, as often happens.

‘I thought I had enough to go upon!’ he said in another tone; and his

black eyes, sparkling as though a film had dropped from then, supplied

the reference his words forbore.

She turned away from him with a perceptible drawing up of the whole

figure.

‘Will you come and be introduced?’ she asked him coldly. He bowed as

coldly and followed her. Wholesome resentment of her manner was denied

him. He had asked for her friendship, and had then gone away and

forgotten her. Clearly what she meant him to see now was that they were

strangers again. Well, she was amply in her right. He suspected that

his allusion to their first talk over the fire had not been unwelcome to

her, as an opportunity.

And he had actually debated whether he should come, lest in spite of

himself she might beguile him once more into those old lapses of will

and common-sense! Coxcomb!

He made a few spasmodic efforts at conversation with the lady to whom

she had introduced him, then awkwardly disengaged himself and went to

stand in a corner and study his neighbors.

Close to him, he found, was the poet of the party, got up in the most

correct professional costume--long hair, velvet coat, eye-glass and all.

His extravagance, however, was of the most conventional type. Only his

vanity had a touch of the sublime. Langham, who possessed a sort

of fine-ear gift for catching conversation, heard him saying to an

open-eyed _ingénue_ beside him,--

‘Oh, my literary baggage is small as yet. I have only done, perhaps,

three things that will live.’

‘Oh, Mr. Wood!’ said the maiden, mildly protesting against so much

modesty.

He smiled, thrusting his hand into the breast of the velvet coat. ‘But

then,’ he said in a tone of the purest candor, ‘at my age I don’t think

Shelley had done more!’

Langham, who, like all shy men, was liable to occasional explosions,

was seized with a convulsive fit of coughing and had to retire from the

neighborhood of the bard, who looked round him, disturbed and slightly

frowning.

At last he discovered a point of view in the back room whence he could

watch the humors of the crowd without coming too closely in contact with

them. What a miscellaneous collection it was! He began to be irritably

jealous for Rose’s place in the world. She ought to be more adequately

surrounded than this. What was Mrs. Leyburn--what were the Elsmeres

about? He rebelled against the thought of her living perpetually

among her inferiors, the centre of a vulgar publicity, queen of the

second-rate.

It provoked him that she should be amusing herself so well. Her

laughter, every now and then, came ringing into the back room. And

presently there was a general hubbub. Langham craned his neck forward,

and saw a struggle going on over a roll of music, between Rose and the

long-haired, long-nosed violoncellist. Evidently, she did not want to

play some particular piece, and wished to put it out of sight. Whereupon

the Hungarian, who had been clamoring for it, rushed to its rescue and

there was a mock fight over it. At last, amid the applause of the room,

Rose was beaten, and her conqueror, flourishing the music on high,

executed a kind of _pas seul_ of triumph.

‘_Victoria!_’ he cried. ‘Now denn for de conditions of peace. Mees Rose,

vill you kindly tune up? You are as moch beaten as the French at Sedan.’

‘Not a stone of my fortresses, not an inch of my territory!’ said Rose,

with fine emphasis, crossing her white wrists before her.

The Hungarian looked at her, the wild poetic strain in him, which was

the strain of race, asserting itself.

‘But if de victor bows,’ he said, dropping on one knee before her. ‘If

force lay down his spoils at de feet of beauty?’

The circle round them applauded hotly, the touch of theatricality

finding immediate response. Langham was remorselessly conscious of the

man’s absurd _chevelure_ and ill-fitting clothes. But Rose herself had

evidently nothing but relish for the score. Proudly smiling, she held

out her hand for her property, and as soon as she had it safe, she

whisked it into the open drawer of a cabinet standing near, and drawing

out the key, held it up a moment in her taper fingers, and then,

depositing it in a little velvet bag hanging at her girdle, she closed

the snap upon it with a little vindictive wave of triumph. Every

movement was graceful, rapid, effective.

Half a dozen German throats broke into guttural protest. Amid the storm

of laughter and remonstrance, the door suddenly opened. The fluttered

parlor-maid mumbled a long name, with a port of soldierly uprightness,

there advanced behind her a large fair-haired woman, followed by a

gentleman, and in the distance by another figure.

Rose drew back a moment astounded, one hand on the piano, her dress

sweeping round her. An awkward silence fell on the chattering circle of

musicians.

‘Good heavens!’ said Langham to himself, ‘Lady Charlotte Wynnstay!’

How do you do, Miss Leyburn?’ said one of the most piercing of voices.

‘Are you surprised to see me? You didn’t ask me--perhaps you don’t want

me. But I have come, you see, partly because my nephew was coming,’

and she pointed to the gentleman behind her, ‘partly because I meant to

punish you for not having come to see me last Thursday. Why didn’t you?’

‘Because we thought you were still away,’ said Rose, who had by this

time recovered her self-possession. ‘But if you meant to punish me,

Lady Charlotte, you have done it badly. I am delighted to see you. May

I introduce my sister? Agnes, will you find Lady Charlotte Wynnstay a

chair by mamma?’

‘Oh, you wish, I see, to dispose of me at once,’ said the other

imperturbably. ‘What is happening? Is it music?’

‘Aunt Charlotte, that is most disingenuous on your part. I gave you

ample warning.’

Rose, turned a smiling face toward the speaker. It was Mr. Flaxman, Lady

Charlotte’s companion.

‘You need not have drawn the picture too black, Mr. Flaxman. There is an

escape. If Lady Charlotte will only let my sister take her into the next

room, she will find herself well out of the clutches of the music.

Oh, Robert! Here you are at last! Lady Charlotte, you remember my

brother-in-law? Robert, will you get Lady Charlotte some tea?’

‘_I_ am not going to be banished,’ said Mr. Flaxman, looking down

upon her, his well-bred, slightly worn face aglow with animation and

pleasure.

‘Then you will be deafened,’ said Rose, laughing, as she escaped from

him a moment, to arrange for a song from a tall formidable maiden, built

after the fashion of Mr. Gilbert’s contralto heroines, with a voice

which bore out the ample promise of her frame.

‘Your sister is a terribly self-possessed young person, Mr. Elsmere,’

said Lady Charlotte, as Robert piloted her across the room.

‘Does that imply praise or blame on your part, Lady Charlotte?’ asked

Robert, smiling.

‘Neither at present. I don’t know Miss Leyburn well enough. I merely

state a fact. No tea, Mr. Elsmere. I have had three teas already, and I

am not like the American woman who could always worry down another cup.’

She was introduced to Mrs. Leyburn; but the plaintive invalid was

immediately seized with terror of her voice and appearance, and was

infinitely grateful to Robert for removing her as promptly as possible

to a chair on the border of the two rooms where she could talk or listen

as she pleased. For a few moments she listened to Fraülein Adelmann’s

veiled unmanageable contralto; then she turned magisterially to Robert

standing behind her--

‘The art of singing has gone out,’ she declared ‘since the Germans have

been allowed to meddle in it. By the way, Mr. Elsmere how do you manage

to be here? Are you taking a holiday?’

Robert looked at her with a start.

‘I have left Murewell, Lady Charlotte.’

‘Left Murewell!’ she said in astonishment, turning round to look at him,

her eyeglass at her eye. ‘Why has Helen told me nothing about it? Have

you got another living?’

‘No. My wife and I are settling in London. We only told Lady Helen of

our intentions a few weeks ago.’

To which it may be added that Lady Helen, touched and dismayed by

Elsmere’s letter to her, had not been very eager to hand over the woes

of her friends to her aunt’s cool and irresponsible comments.

Lady Charlotte deliberately looked at him a minute longer through her

glass. Then she let it fall.

‘You don’t mean to tell me any more, I can see, Mr. Elsmere. But you

will allow me to be astonished?’

‘Certainly,’ he said, smiling sadly, and immediately afterward relapsing

into silence.

‘Have you heard of the Squire, lately?’ he asked her after a pause.

‘Not from him. We are excellent friends when we meet, but he doesn’t

consider me worth writing to. His sister--little idiot--writes to me

every now and then. But she has not vouchsafed me a letter since the

summer. I should say from the last accounts that he was breaking.’

‘He had a mysterious attack of illness just before I left’ said Robert

gravely. ‘It made one anxious.’

‘Oh, it is the old story. All the Wendovers have died of weak hearts

or queer brains--generally of both together. I imagine you had some

experience of the Squire’s queerness at one time, Mr. Elsmere. I can’t

say you and he seemed to be on particularly good terms on the only

occasion I ever had the pleasure of meeting you at Murewell.’

She looked up at him, smiling grimly. She had a curiously exact memory

for the unpleasant scenes of life.

‘Oh, you remember that unlucky evening!’ said Robert, reddening a

little--‘We soon got over that. We became great friends.’

Again, however, Lady Charlotte was struck by the quiet melancholy of his

tone. How strangely the look of youth--which had been so attractive in

him the year before--had ebbed from the man’s face--from complexion,

eyes, expression! She stared at him, full of a brusque, tormenting

curiosity as to the how and why.

‘I hope there is some one among you strong enough to manage Miss Rose,’

she said presently, with an abrupt change of subject. ‘That little

sister-in-law of yours is going to be the rage.’

‘Heaven forbid!’ cried Robert fervently.

‘Heaven will do nothing of the kind. She is twice as pretty as she was

last year; I am told she plays twice as well. She had always the sort of

manner that provoked people one moment and charmed them the next.

And, to judge by my few words with her just now, I should say she had

developed it finely. Well, now, Mr. Elsmere, who is going to take care

of her?’

‘I suppose we shall all have a try at it, Lady Charlotte.’

‘Her mother doesn’t look to me a person of nerve enough,’ said Lady

Charlotte coolly. ‘She is a girl certain--absolutely certain--to have

adventures, and you may as well be prepared for them.’

‘I can only trust she will disappoint your expectations, Lady

Charlotte,’ said Robert, with a slightly sarcastic emphasis.

‘Elsmere, who is that man talking to Miss Leyburn?’ asked Langham as the

two friends stood side by side, a little later, watching the spectacle.

‘A certain Mr. Flaxman, brother to a pretty little neighbor of ours in

Surrey--Lady Helen Varley--and nephew to Lady Charlotte. I have not seen

him here before; but I think the girls like him.’

‘Is he the Flaxman who got the mathematical prize at Berlin last year?’

‘Yes, I believe so. A striking person altogether. He is enormously rich,

Lady Helen tells me, in spite of an elder brother. All the money in his

mother’s family has come to him, and he is the heir to Lord Daniel’s

great Derbyshire property. Twelve years ago I used to hear him talked

about incessantly by the Cambridge men one met. “Citizen Flaxman” they

called him, for his opinion’s sake. He would ask his scout to dinner,

and insist on dining with his own servants, and shaking hands with his

friends’ butlers. The scouts and the butlers put an end to that, and

altogether, I imagine, the world disappointed him. He has a story, poor

fellow, too--a young wife who died with her first baby ten years ago.

The world supposes him never to have got over it, which makes him all

the more interesting. A distinguished face, don’t you think?--the good

type of English aristocrat.’

Langham assented. But his attention was fixed on the group in which

Rose’s bright hair was conspicuous; and when Robert left him and went

to amuse Mrs. Leyburn, he still stood rooted to the same spot watching.

Rose was leaning against the piano, one hand behind her, her whole

attitude full of a young, easy, self-confident grace. Mr. Flaxman

was standing beside her, and they were deep in talk--serious talk

apparently, to judge by her quiet manner and the charmed, attentive

interest of his look. Occasionally, however, there was a sally on her

part, and an answering flash of laughter on his; but the stream of

conversation closed immediately over the interruption, and flowed on as

evenly as before.

Unconsciously Langham retreated further and further into the comparative

darkness of the inner room. He felt himself singularly insignificant and

out of place, and he made no more efforts to talk. Rose played a violin

solo, and played it with astonishing delicacy and fire. When it was over

Langham saw her turn from the applauding circle crowding in upon her and

throw a smiling interrogative look over her shoulder at Mr. Flaxman. Mr.

Flaxman bent over her, and as he spoke Langham caught her flush, and the

excited sparkle of her eyes. Was this the ‘someone in the stream?’ No

doubt!--no doubt!

When the party broke up Langham found himself borne toward the outer

room, and before he knew where he was going he was standing beside her.

‘Are _you_ still here?’ she said to him, startled, as he held out his

hand. He replied by some comments on the music, a little lumbering

and infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She hardly listened, but

presently she looked up nervously, compelled as it were by the great

melancholy eves above her.

We are not always in this turmoil Mr. Langham. Perhaps some other day

you will come and make friends with my mother?’

CHAPTER XXXII.

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere

and Catherine first realized in detail what Elsmere’s act was to mean

to them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the

most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life

will need to be told that even for these two finely natured people such

resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out.

‘I will not preach to you--I will not persecute you!’ Catherine had said

to her husband at the moment of her first shock and anguish. And she did

her utmost, poor thing! to keep her word. All through the innumerable

bitternesses which accompanied Elsmere’s withdrawal from Murewell--the

letters which followed them, the remonstrances of public and private

friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they would, into

the newspapers--the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain poor

and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and Robert,

and whose bewildered lamentations came to them through young,

Armitstead--through all this she held her peace; she did her best to

soften Robert’s grief; she never once reproached him with her own.

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes and

beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely strengthened that

Puritan independent fibre in her which her youth had developed, and

which her happy marriage had only temporarily masked, not weakened.

Never had Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the

husband who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious life, had

given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous

instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidity in her. Often

when she was alone--or at night--she was seized with a lonely, an awful

sense of responsibility. Oh! let her guard her faith, not only for her

own sake, her child’s, her Lord’s, but for his that it might be given to

her patience at last to lead him back.

And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard it was to

set up certain barriers of silence. She feared that fiery persuasive

quality in Robert she had so often seen at work on other people. With

him conviction was life--it was the man himself, to an extraordinary

degree. How was she to resist the pressure of those now ardors with

which his mind was filling--she who loved him!--except by building,

at any rate for the time, an inclosure of silence round her Christian

beliefs? It was in some ways a pathetic repetition of the situation

between Robert and the Squire in the early days of their friendship,

but in Catherine’s mind there was no trembling presence of new knowledge

conspiring from within with the forces without. At this moment of

her life, she was more passionately convinced than ever that the only

knowledge truly worth having in this world was: the knowledge of God’s

mercies in Christ.

So, gradually, with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain parts of

herself from Robert’s ken; she avoided certain subjects, or anything

that might lead to them; she ignored the religious and philosophical

books he was constantly reading; she prayed and thought alone--always

for him, of him--but still resolutely alone. It was impossible, however,

that so great a change in their life could be effected without a

perpetual sense of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds

and griefs on both sides. There came a moment, when, as he sat alone one

evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly awoke

to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and illusions, their

relation to each other was altering, dwindling, impoverishing; the

terror of that summer night at Murewell was being dismally justified.

His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual discovery,

‘sailing the seas where there was never sand’--the vast shadowy seas of

speculative thought. All his life, reserve to those nearest to him had

been pain and grief to him. He was one of those people, as we know, who

throw off readily; to whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who

suffer physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them.

And now, at every turn in their talk, their reading, in many of the

smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere began to feel the

presence of this cold and rigid something. He was ever conscious of

self-defence on her side, of pained drawing back on his. And with every

succeeding effort of his at self-repression, it seemed to him as though

fresh nails were driven into the coffin of that old free habit of

perfect confidence which had made the heaven of their life since they

had been man and wife.

He sat on for long, through the September evening, pondering, wrestling.

Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of his own act, and of her

antecedents, to which he must submit himself, as to any mutilation or

loss of power in the body? The young lover and husband rebelled--the

believer rebelled--against the admission. Probably if his change had

left him anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have

been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness should

bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual confusion which

inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction of a man’s platform of

action, he had never been more sure of God, or the Divine aims of the

world, than now; never more open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine

world, to those passionate moments of religious trust which are man’s

eternal defiance to the iron silences about him. Originally, as we know,

he had shrunk from the thought of change in her corresponding to his

own; now that his own foothold was strengthening, his longing for a new

union was overpowering that old dread. The proselytizing instinct may

be never quite morally defensible, even as between husband and wife.

Nevertheless, in all strong, convinced, and ardent souls it exists, and

must be reckoned with.

At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse which

neutralized for the moment his nervous dread of hurting her. Some little

incident of their day together was rankling, and it was borne in

upon him that almost any violent protest on her part would have been

preferable to this constant soft evasion of hers, which was gradually,

imperceptibly dividing heart from heart.

They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the huge

newly-built hotels which during the last twenty years have invaded all

the high places of Switzerland. The August, which had been so hot in

England, had been rainy and broken in Switzerland. But it had been

followed by a warm and mellow September, and the favorite hotels below a

certain height were still full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les Avants

this scantily furnished garret out of which some servants had been

hurried to make room for them, was all that could be found. They,

however, liked it for its space and its view. They looked sideways from

their windows on to the upper end of the lake, three thousand feet

below them. Opposite, across the blue water, rose a grandiose rampart of

mountains, the stage on which from morn till night the sun went through

a long transformation scene of beauty. The water was marked every now

and then by passing boats and steamers--tiny specks which served to

measure the vastness of all around them. To right and left, spurs of

green mountains shut out alike the lower lake and the icy splendors of

the ‘Valais depths profound.’ What made the charm of the narrow prospect

was, first, the sense it produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily

above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the magical

effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist would blot out the

valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face

across the fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain mass, and its

attendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he were alone in the

universe.

It was a peaceful September night. From the open window beside him,

Robert could see a world of high moonlight, limited and invaded on all

sides by sharp black masses of shade. A few rare lights glimmered on the

spreading alp below, and every now and then a breath of music came to

them wafted from a military band playing a mile or two away. They had

been climbing most of the afternoon, and Catherine was lying down, her

brown hair loose about her, the thin oval of her face and clear line of

brow just visible in the dim candle-light.

Suddenly he stretched out his hand for his Greek Testament, which was

always near him, though there had been no common reading since that

bitter day of his confession to her. The mark still lay in the well-worn

volume at the point reached in their last reading at Murewell. He opened

upon it, and began the eleventh chapter of St. John.

Catherine trembled when she saw him take up the book. He began without

preface, treating the passage before him in his usual way,--that is to

say, taking verse after verse in the Greek, translating and commenting.

She never spoke all through, and at last he closed the little Testament,

and bent toward her, his look full of feeling.

‘Catherine! can’t you let me--will you never let me tell you, now, how

that story--how the old things--affect me, from the new point of view?

You always stop me when I try. I believe you think of me as having

thrown it all away. Would it not comfort you sometimes, if you knew

that although much of the Gospels, this very raising of Lazarus, for

instance, seems to me no longer true in the historical sense, still they

are always full to me of an ideal, a poetical truth? Lazarus may not

have died and come to life, may never have existed; but still to me, now

as always, love for Jesus of Nazareth is “resurrection” and “life?”’

He spoke with the most painful diffidence, the most wistful tenderness.

There was a pause. Then Catherine said, in a rigid, constrained voice,--

‘If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, as reality, I cannot

see how they are true at all, or of any value.’

The next minute she rose, and, going to the little wooden

dressing-table, she began to brush out and plat for the night her

straight silky veil of hair. As she passed him Robert saw her face pale

and set.

He sat quiet another moment or two, and then he went toward her and took

her in his arms.

‘Catherine,’ he said to her, his lips trembling, ‘am I never to speak my

mind to you anymore? Do you mean always to hold me at arm’s length--to

refuse always to hear what I have to say in defence of the change which

has cost us both so much?’

She hesitated, trying hard to restrain herself. But it was of no use.

She broke into tears--quiet but most bitter tears.

‘Robert, I cannot! Oh! you must see I cannot. It is not because I am

hard, but because I am weak. How can I stand up against you? I dare

not--I dare not. If you were not yourself--not my husband--’

Her voice dropped. Robert guessed that at the bottom of her resistance

there was an intolerable fear of what love might do with her if she once

gave it an opening. He felt himself cruel, brutal, and yet an urgent

sense of all that was at stake drove him on.

‘I would not press or worry you, God knows!’ he said, almost piteously,

kissing her forehead as she lay against him. ‘But remember, Catherine, I

cannot put these things aside. I once thought I could--that I could fall

back on my historical work, and leave religious matters alone as far as

criticism was concerned. But I cannot. They fill my mind more and

more. I feel more and more impelled to search them out, and to put my

conclusions about them into shape. And all the time this is going on,

are you and I to remain strangers to one another, and all that concerns

our truest life--are we, Catherine?’

He spoke in a low voice of intense feeling. She turned her face and

pressed her lips to his hand. Both had the scene in the wood-path

after her flight and return in their minds, and both were filled with a

despairing sense of the difficulty of living, not through great crises,

but through the detail of every day.

‘Could you not work at other things?’ she whispered.

He was silent, looking straight before him into the moon-lit shimmer and

white spectral hazes of the valley, his arms still round her.

‘No!’ he burst out at last; ‘not till I have satisfied myself. I feel it

burning within me, like a command from God, to work out the problem, to

make it clearer to myself--and to others,’ he added deliberately.

Her heart sank within her. The last words called up before her a dismal

future of controversy and publicity, in which at every stop she would be

condemning her husband.

‘And all this time, all these years, perhaps,’ he went on--before, in

her perplexity, she could find words--‘is my wife never going to let me

speak freely to her? Am I to act, think, judge, without her knowledge?

Is she to know less of me than a friend, less even than the public for

whom I write or speak?’

It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every moment they stood

there together it was being impressed upon him that in fact this was

what she meant, what she had contemplated from the beginning.

‘Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,’ she cried, again clinging

to him. ‘Oh, think for me! You know what I feel; that I dare not risk

what is not mine!’

He kissed her again and then moved away from her to the window. It began

to be plain to him that his effort was merely futile, and had better not

have been made. But his heart was very sore.

‘Do you ever ask yourself--’ he said presently, looking steadily

into the night--‘no, I don’t think you can, Catherine--what part the

reasoning faculty, that faculty which marks us out from the animal,

was meant to play in life? Did God give it to us simply that you might

trample upon it and ignore it both in yourself and me?’

She had dropped into a chair, and sat with clasped hands, her hair

falling about her white dressing-gown, and framing the nobly-featured

face blanched by the moonlight. She did not attempt a reply, but the

melancholy of an invincibly resolution, which was, so to speak, not

her own doing, but rather was like a necessity imposed upon her from

outside, breathed through her silence.

He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the gesture

reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in the Murewell

library--the same delicate austere beauty, the same tenderness, the same

underlying reserve. He took her outstretched hands and held them against

his breast. His hotly-beating heart told him that he was perfectly

right, and that to accept the barriers she was setting up would

impoverish all their future life together. But he could not struggle

with the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a practical

trial. Moreover, he felt strangely as he stood there the danger of

rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of the religious temper,

the dread of which had once before risen spectre-like in his heart.

So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the charm, all the

delightfulness, of which under the circumstances she was mistress.

They wandered up the Rhone valley, through the St. Gothard, and spent a

fortnight between Como and Lugano. During these days her one thought was

to revive and refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself

to the various heroic futilities by which she would try as part of her

nursing mission--to make the future look less empty and their distress

less real. Of course under all this delicate give and take both

suffered; both felt that the promise of their marriage had failed them,

and that they had come dismally down to a second best. But after all

they were young, and the autumn was beautiful--and though they hurt

each other, they were alone together, and constantly, passionately,

interested in each other. Italy, too, softened all things--even

Catherine’s English tone and temper. As long as the delicious luxury

of the Italian autumn, with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, was

still round them, as long as they were still among the cities of the

Lombard plain--that battleground and highway of nations, which roused

all Robert’s historical enthusiasm, and set him reading, discussing,

thinking--in his old impetuous way--about something else than minute

problems of Christian evidence, the newborn friction between them was

necessarily reduced to a minimum.

But with their return home, with their plunge into London life, the

difficulties of the situation began to define themselves more sharply.

In after years, one of Catherine’s dreariest memories was the memory of

their first instalment in the Bedford Square house. Robert’s anxiety to

make it pleasant and homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the

modern passion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of what

was æsthetically correct. But during their furnishing days, he was never

tired of wandering about in search of pretty things--a rug, a screen, an

engraving which might brighten the rooms in which Catherine was to live.

He would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness, and then

Catherine would be called in, and would play her part bravely. She would

smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when Robert had gone, she

would move slowly to the window and look out at the great mass of the

British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a

sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the

village, the free air-bathed spaces of heath and common. Oh! this huge

London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless wealth--how it

oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky,

poisoned atmosphere were a perpetual trial to the country-woman

brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain

pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as did the child.

But morally? With Catherine everything really depended on the moral

state. She could have followed Robert to a London living with a joy and

hope which would have completely deadened all these repulsions of

the senses, now so active in her. But without this inner glow, in the

presence of the profound spiritual difference circumstance had developed

between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her

religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity,

failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed

to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make

something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to

have been alive with conflict--_All Thy waves and Thy storms have gone

over me!_

Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do to soften

such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encouraged her to find work

among the poor; he tried in the tenderest ways to interest her in the

great spectacle of London life which was already, in spite of yearning

and regret, beginning to fascinate and absorb himself. But their

standards were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from

what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him merely

curious and interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her

intellectual limitations, though never consciously would he have allowed

himself to admit them, and she was more and more bewildered by what

constantly seemed to her a breaking up of principles, a relaxation of

moral fibre.

And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert instinctively felt

that for him to offer his services in charitable work to the narrow

Evangelical whose church Catherine had joined, would have been merely to

invite rebuff. So that even in the love and care of the unfortunate they

were separated. For he had not yet found a sphere of work, and if he

had, Catherine’s invincible impulse in these matters was always to

attach herself to the authorities and powers that be. He could only

acquiesce when she suggested applying to Mr. Clarendon for some

charitable occupation for herself.

After her letter to him, Catherine had an interview with the Vicar at

his home. She was puzzled by the start and sudden pause for recollection

with which he received her name, the tone of compassion which crept into

his talk with her, the pitying look and grasp of the hand with which he

dismissed her. Then, as she walked home, it flashed upon her that she

had seen a copy, some weeks old, of the _Record_ lying on the good man’s

table, the very copy which contained Robert’s name among the list of men

who during the last ten years had thrown up the Anglican ministry. The

delicate face flushed miserably from brow to chin. Pitied for being

Robert’s wife! Oh, monstrous!--incredible!

Meanwhile Robert, man-like, in spite of all the griefs and sorenesses of

the position, had immeasurably the best of it. In the first place such

incessant activity of mind as his is in itself both tonic and narcotic.

It was constantly generating in him fresh purposes and hopes, constantly

deadening regret, and pushing the old things out of sight. He was full

of many projects literary and social, but they were all in truth the

fruits of one long experimental process, the passionate attempt of the

reason to justify to itself the God in whom the heart believed. Abstract

thought, as Mr. Grey saw, had had comparatively little to do with

Elsmere’s relinquishment of the Church of England. But as soon as the

Christian bases of faith were overthrown, that faith had naturally to

find for itself other supports and attachments. For faith itself--in God

and a spiritual order--had been so wrought into the nature by years of

reverent and adoring living, that nothing could destroy it. With Elsmere

as with all men of religious temperament, belief in Christianity and

faith in God had not at the outset been a matter of reasoning at all,

but of sympathy, feeling, association, daily experience. Then the

intellect had broken in, and destroyed or transformed the belief in

Christianity. But after the crash, _faith_ emerged as strong as ever,

only craving and eager to make a fresh peace, a fresh compact with the

reason.

Elsmere had heard Grey say long ago in one of the few moments of real

intimacy he had enjoyed with him at Oxford, ‘My interest in philosophy

springs solely from the chance it offers me of knowing something more

of God!’ Driven by the same thirst he too threw himself into the

same quest, pushing his way laboriously through the philosophical

border-lands of science, through the ethical speculation of the day,

through the history of man’s moral and religious past. And while on the

one hand the intellect was able to contribute an ever stronger support

to the faith which was the man; on the other, the sphere in him of a

patient ignorance, which abstains from all attempts at knowing what man

cannot know, and substitutes trust for either knowledge or despair,

was perpetually widening. ‘I take my stand on conscience and the moral

life!’ was the upshot of it all. ‘In them I find my God! As for all

these various problems, ethical and scientific, which you press upon me,

my pessimist friend, I, too, am bewildered; I, too, have no explanations

to offer. But I trust and wait. In spite of them--beyond them--I have

abundantly enough for faith--for hope--for action!’

We may quote a passage or two from some letters of his written at this

time to that young Armitstead who had taken his place at Murewell

and was still there till Mowbray Elsmere should appoint a new man.

Armitstead had been a college friend of Elsmere’s. He was a High

Churchman of a singularly gentle and delicate type, and the manner

in which he had received Elsmere’s story on the day of his arrival at

Murewell had permanently endeared him to the teller of it. At the same

time the defection from Christianity of a man who at Oxford had been to

him the object of much hero-worship, and, since Oxford, an example of

pastoral efficiency, had painfully affected young Armitstead, and he

began a correspondence with Robert which was in many ways a relief

to both. In Switzerland and Italy, when his wife’s gentle inexorable

silence became too oppressive to him, Robert would pour himself out in

letters to Armitstead, and the correspondence did not altogether cease

with his return to London. To the Squire during the same period Elsmere

also wrote frequently, but rarely or never on religious matters.

On one occasion Armitstead had been pressing the favorite Christian

dilemma--Christianity or nothing. Inside Christianity, light and

certainly; outside it, chaos. ‘If it were not for the Gospels and

the Church I should be a Positivist to-morrow. Your Theism is a mere

arbitrary hypothesis, at the mercy of any rival philosophical theory.

How, regarding our position as precarious, you should come to regard

your own as stable, is to me incomprehensible!’

‘What I conceive to be the vital difference between Theism and

Christianity,’ wrote Elsmere in reply, ‘is that as an explanation of

things _Theism can never be disproved_. At the worst it must always

remain in the position of an alternative hypothesis, which the hostile

man of science cannot destroy, though he is under no obligation to adopt

it. Broadly speaking, it is not the facts which are in dispute, but the

inference to be drawn from them.’

‘Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic

inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always

command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance

of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the

field.

‘Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not

philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact,

but upon a special group of facts. It is and will always remain, a

great literary and historical problem, a _question of documents and

testimony_. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in

which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention

at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had

the special training required, and in whom this training has not been

neutralized by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as

clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on

a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian

Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a

pious fraud, or that the mediæval belief in witchcraft was the product

of physical ignorance and superstition.’

‘You say,’ he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead from

Milan, ‘you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive

and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own

mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle

of Italy, I wonder--of a country practically without religion--the

spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, ad the practical Atheism

in which it is engulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at

this moment is--_how to find a religion?_--some great conception

which shall be once more capable, as the old was capable, of welding

societies, and keeping man’s brutish elements in check. Surely

Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere--less

obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but notoriously,

in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently of the decline of

Buddhism. But what have we to say of the decline of Christianity? And

yet this last is infinitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as

it affects a more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not

one of those who would seek to minimize the results of this decline

for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positivism or

“evolutional morality” will ever satisfy the race.’

‘In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before us, both

in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a war of classes,

unsoftened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith? It looks like

it. What does the artisan class, what does the town democracy throughout

Europe, care any longer for Christian checks or Christian sanctions as

they have been taught to understand them? Superstition, in certain parts

of rural Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence

and therefore movement, you got at once either indifference to, or a

passionate break with Christianity. And consider what it means, what

it will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are to be

our masters! The world has never seen anything like it; such spiritual

anarchy and poverty combined with such material power and resource.

Every society--Christian and non-Christian--has always till now had its

ideal, of greater or less ethical value, its appeal to something beyond

man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are

to be the first in the world’s history to try the experiment of a life

without faith--that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in

thinking a life worthy only of the brute?

‘Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you--they would have hurt me in

old days--but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it

be God himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you,

to the world? What does it mean: this gradual growth of what we call

infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death

of the old traditions on the other? _Sin_, you answer, _the enmity of

the human mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan_. And so you

acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God’s present defeat, looking for vengeance

and requital here-after. I am not so ready to believe in man’s capacity

to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent

process of Divine education, God’s steady ineluctable command “to put

away childish things,” the pressure of His spirit on ours toward new

ways of worship and new forms of love!’

And after a while it was with these ‘new ways of worship and now forms

of love’ that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with

the old things was no sooner complete, than the eager soul, incapable

then, as always, of resting in negation or oppositions pressed

passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but

practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another

palace of faith--another church or company of the faithful, which was to

become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy

caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone

through the same strait as itself--how many must be watching with it

through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!

One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament

Square, on his way toward Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The

beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood

leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.

The day before, he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His

companion--a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been

brought up however in England and knew it well--had stopped before the

Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: ‘I never find myself in this

particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence.

Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the

centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome;

your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol of a nationality to which the

modern world owes obligations it can never repay. You are rooted deep

in the past; you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching

before you. Among European nations at this moment you alone have freedom

in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a year of life

to know what you will have made of your freedom and your religion two

hundred years hence!’

As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, wrapped in the

bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the towers rose out of the

mist, gray and black against the red bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons

circled round them, as careless and free in flight as though they were

alone with the towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of

people; the omnibuses rolled to and fro; the lamps were just lit; lines

of straggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the street

here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl below, the quiet of

the Abbey and the infinite red distances of sky gave a peculiar pathos

and significance.

Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly away toward the

Embankment. Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England’s past with him,

he turned his face east-ward to the great new-made London on the other

side of St. Paul’s, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth

century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to one

of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems once more to

restore to us the power of choice, of distributing a Yes or a No among

the great solicitations which meet the human spirit on its path from

silence to silence. The thought of his friend’s reverence, and of his

own personal debt toward the country to whose long travail of centuries

he owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him.

Here and here did England help me--how can I help England,--say!

Ah! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great church! He

already knew something of it. A Liberal clergyman there, settled in the

very blackest, busiest heart of it, had already made him welcome on Mr.

Grey’s introduction. He had gone with this good man on several occasions

through some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and

peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled rays

of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good deal, the quick mind

caught at once by the differences, some tragic, some merely curious and

stimulating, between the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and

the mad rush, the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and

disappearances, the sudden engulfments, of working London.

Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among the East End

churches. There, rather than among the streets and courts outside, as

it had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of the city. Such emptiness, such

desertion, such a hopeless breach between the great craving need outside

and the boon offered it within! Here and there, indeed, a patch of

bright colored success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive

tendency of man toward the organized excitement of religious ritual,

visible in all nations and civilizations, had been appealed to with more

energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank failure, or

rather obvious want of success--as the devoted men now beating the

void there were themselves the first to admit, with pain, and patient

submission to the inscrutable Will of God.

But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, whether

God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his

brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy,

had power. But now--What if all these processes of so-called destruction

and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which

is forever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable

things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his follows,

represented, in the present stage of the world’s history, not the props,

but the hinderances, of man?

And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what should be

the individual’s part in this transition England? Surely, at the least,

a part of plain sincerity of act and speech--a correspondence as perfect

as could be reached between the inner faith and the outer word and deed.

So much, at the least, was clearly required of him!

‘Do not imagine,’ he said to himself, as though with a fierce dread

of possible self-delusion, ‘that it is in you to play any great, any

commanding part. Shun the thought of it, if it were possible! But let

me do what is given me to do! Here in this human wilderness, may I

spend whatever of time or energy or faculty may be mine, in the faithful

attempt to help forward the new House of Faith that is to be, though my

utmost efforts should but succeed in laying some obscure stone in still

unseen foundations! Let me try and hand on to some other human soul,

or souls, before I die, the truth which has freed, and which is now

sustaining my own heart. Can any do more? Is not every man who feels any

certainty in him, whatever, bound to do as much? What matter if the

wise folk scoff, if even at times, and in a certain sense, one seem to

oneself ridiculous--absurdly lonely and powerless! All great changes are

preceded by numbers of sporadic, and as the bystander thinks, impotent

efforts. But while the individual effort sinks, drowned perhaps in

mockery, the general movement quickens, gathers force we know not how,

and--’

‘While the tired wave vainly breaking,

Seems here no painful Inch to gain,

Far back through creeks and inlets making,

Comes silent, flooding in the main!’

Darkness sank over the river; all the gray and purple distance with its

dim edge of spires and domes against the sky, all the vague intervening

blackness of street, or bridge or railway station were starred and

patterned with lights. The vastness, the beauty of the city filled him

with a sense of mysterious attraction, and as he walked on with his face

uplifted to it, it was as though he took his life in his hand and flung

it afresh into the human gulf.

‘What does it matter if one’s work be raw and uncomely! All that lies

outside the great organized traditions of an age must always look so.

Let me bear my witness bravely, not spending life in speech, but not

undervaluing speech--above all, not being ashamed or afraid of it,

because other wise people may prefer a policy of silence. A man has but

the one pure life, the one tiny spark of faith. Better be venturesome

with both for God’s sake, than over-cautious, over-thrifty. And--to his

own Master he standeth or falleth!’

Plans of work of all kinds, literary and practical, thoughts of

preaching in some bare bidden room to men and women orphaned and

strangled like himself, began to crowd upon him. The old clerical

instinct in him winced at some of them. Robert had nothing of the

sectary about him by nature; he was always too deeply and easily

affected by the great historic existences about him. But when the Oxford

man or the ex-official of one of the most venerable and decorous of

societies protested, the believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put

the protest by.

And so the dream gathered substance and stayed with him, till at last

he found himself at his own door. As he closed it behind him, Catherine

came out into the pretty old hall from the dining-room.

‘Robert, have you walked all the way?’

‘Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful evening!’

He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs together.

She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly aware that these months

were to him months of incessant travail of spirit, and she caught at

this moment the old strenuous look of eye and brow she knew so well.

A year ago, and every thought of his mind had been open to her--and

now--she herself had shut them out--but her heart sank within her.

She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over her. But

inwardly all the ardor of his mood collapsed at the touch of her.

For the protest of a world in arms can be withstood with joy, but the

protest that steals into your heart, that takes love’s garb and uses

love’s ways--_there_ is the difficulty!

CHAPTER XXXIII.

But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realizing any

fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad

Church Vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He undertook some

rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on elementary science to

boys and men. But after a while he began to feel his position false and

unsatisfactory. In truth, his opinions were in the main identical with

those of the Vicar under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a

Broad Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it

absolutely necessary to ‘keep things going,’ and by a policy of prudent

silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great ‘plant’

of the Establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of the High

Churchmen. In consequence, he was involved, as Robert held, in endless

contradictions and practical falsities of speech and action. His large

church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons.

Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach, more

than what was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe. He was

hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought

and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting

and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of

power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.

But if these became Robert’s views as to Vernon, Vernon’s feeling toward

Elsmere after six weeks’ acquaintance was not less decided. He was

constitutionally timid, and he probably divined in his new helper a man

of no ordinary calibre, whose influence might very well turn out some

day to be of the ‘incalculably diffusive’ kind. He grew uncomfortable,

begged Elsmere to beware of any ‘direct religious teaching,’ talked in

warm praise of a ‘policy of omissions,’ and in equally warm denunciation

of ‘anything like a policy of attack.’ In short, it became plain that

two men so much alike and yet so different, could not long co-operate.

However, just as the fact was being brought home to Elsmere, a friendly

chance intervened.

Hugh Flaxman, the Leyburns’ new acquaintance and Lady Helen’s brother,

had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight; and a meeting or two, now at

Lady Charlotte’s, now at the Leyburns’, had led both men far on the way

to a friendship. Of Hugh Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all

that need be recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman’s house, overlooking

St. James’s Park, Robert first met a man who was to give him the opening

for which he was looking.

Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast parties à la Rogers, and on the first

occasion when Robert could be induced to attend one of these functions,

he saw opposite to him what he supposed to be a lad of twenty, a

young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of fun and invincible good humor

attracted him greatly.

Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humor and pugnacity, ‘lockës

crull as they were layde in presse,’ the same look of ‘wonderly’

activity too, in spite of his short stature and dainty make, as Chaucer

lends his Squire--the type was so fresh ad pleasing that Robert was more

and more held by it, especially when he discovered to his bewilderment

that the supposed stripling must be from his talk a man quite as old as

himself, an official besides, filling what was clearly some important

place in the world. He took his full share in the politics and

literature started at the table, and presently, when conversation fell

on the proposed municipality for London, said things to which the whole

party listened. Robert’s curiosity was aroused, and after breakfast

he questioned his host and was promptly introduced to ‘Mr. Murray

Edwardes.’

Whereupon it turned out that this baby-faced sage was filling a post, in

the work of which perhaps few people in London could have taken so much

interest as Robert Elsmere.

Fifty years before, a wealthy merchant who had been one of the chief

pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and died. His great

warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside districts of the city,

and in his will he endeavored to do something according to his lights

for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly

large bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found

certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of

the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long

time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the

idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the

old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly

it has never been the creed of the poor. In old days it required the

presence of a certain arid stratum of the middle classes to live and

thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R----, which rejoiced

instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith

the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of

grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square Socialist.

Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking of the

dry bones of religious England which we call the Tractarian movement.

For many years the new force left R---- quite undisturbed. The parish

church droned away, the Unitarian minister preached decorously to empty

benches, knowing nothing of the agitations outside. At last however,

toward the end of the old minister’s life, a powerful church of the

new type, staffed by friends and pupils of Pussy, rose in the centre of

R----, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more snuffed out

than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally with the parish

church. As generally happened, however, in those days, the proceedings

at this now and splendid St. Wilfrid’s were not long in stirring up the

Protestantism of the British rough,--the said Protestantism being always

one of the finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is

master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war--hectic clergy

heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant Litanies on the one

side,--mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and blatant Protestant orators on

the other.

The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging,

the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned

chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister,

a Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant

attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including

some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was

then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to

be up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his

entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition

to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of

three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an

aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings

was of a much quieter, sterner sort, and among whom the uproar had

mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon

this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded.

He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living;

he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before

he had been five years in the harness had not only made himself a power

in R----, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small

interest by many outsiders.

This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked

twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-by to

their host, and wandered out together into St. James’s Park, where the

trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the

fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to

attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a

familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the

Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of

a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could

rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity too of the Unitarian

temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes,

it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The

young man’s creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness even

unction: and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a

fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other’s heart.

They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and

the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying

little, asking much.

At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.

‘You cannot work with the Church!’ he said--‘it is impossible. You

will only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain what you could do

infinitely more good, as things stand now, by pouring out. Come to

us!--I will put you in the way. You shall be hampered by no pledges of

any sort. Come and take the direction of some of my workers. We have all

got our hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would be

invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England just now for

men of your way of thinking and mine. Come! Who knows what we may be

putting our Hands to--what fruit may grow from the smallest seed?’

The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robert gathered

that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating

dream of a recorganized Christendom, a new wide-spreading, shelter of

faith for discouraged, brow-beaten man, as in his own. ‘I will!’ he said

briefly, after a pause, his own look kindling--‘it is the opening I

have been pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the

chance.’

That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of various

engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for ‘Fader,’ had just been

carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs kicking, off to

bed. Catherine was straightening the room, which had been thrown into

confusion by the child’s romps.

It was with an effort--for he knew it would be a shock to her--that he

began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. Flaxman’s, and

his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had made it a rule with himself to

tell her everything that he was doing or meant to do. She would not let

him tell her what he was thinking. But as much openness as there could

be between them, there should be.

Catherine listened--still moving about the while--the thin beautiful

lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was hard to her,

very hard; the people among whom she had been brought up, her father

especially, would have held out the hand of fellowship to any body of

Christian people, but not to the Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling

divided them from any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them

and the Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces--forces of

thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time.

‘He is going to work with them now,’ she thought bitterly; ‘soon he will

be one of them--perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.’

And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find nothing

but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embarrassed silences,

wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once

more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.

Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her

head against his knee, saying nothing; but gathering his hand closely in

both her own.

Poor woman’s heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He

bent down quickly and kissed her.

‘Would you like,’ he said presently, after both had sat silent awhile

in the firelight, ‘would you care to go to Madame de Netteville’s

to-night?’

‘By all means’ said Catherine, with a sort of eagerness. It _was_ Friday

she asked us for, wasn’t it? We will be quick over dinner, and I will go

and dress.’

In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the Squire in his

bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked,

Mr. Wendover had dryly recommended Elsmere to cultivate Madame de

Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical,

and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to

the Elsmere move.

‘You had better go there,’ he said huskily, ‘it will do you good. She

gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte

can’t. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte’s; she waters the wine too

much.’

And he had persisted with the subject--using it as Elsmere thought, as

a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere’s

plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.

There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with

signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which

evidently troubled the doctor most. But behind the physical breakdown,

there was to Robert’s sense something else, a spiritual something,

infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the

elder man’s will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of

sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his

correspondence with the Squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night

chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville’s that he might write an

account of it to Murewell.

Still the Squire’s talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had

made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The Squire’s ways

of describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert

sometimes imagined that he himself had been at one time more under her

spell than he cared to confess. If so, it must have been when she was

still in Paris, the young English widow of a man of old French family,

rich, fascinating, distinguished, and the centre of a small _salon_,

admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris.

Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her headquarters in

London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that the Squire wrote to

her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger Wendover debts of various kinds,

and she had an encouraging memory of the young clergyman on the

terrace at Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the

intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings.

‘I have never seen the wife,’ she meditated, as her delicate jewelled

hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of Elsmere’s lodgings.

‘But if she is the ordinary country clergyman’s spouse, the Squire of

course will have given the young man a hint.’

But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim humor toward

Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, the Squire said not one

word about his wife to Robert, in the course of their talk of Madame de

Netteville.

Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do Robert credit.

She put on one of the gowns she had taken to Murewell when she married.

It was black, simply made, and had been a favorite with both of them in

the old surroundings.

So they drove off to Madame de Netteville’s. Catherine’s heart was

beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting stairs of the

luxurious little house. All these new social experiences were a trial to

her. But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious ideas of what she was to

see in this particular house.

A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most English rooms, it

was barely though richly furnished. A Persian carpet of self-colored

grayish blue, threw the gilt French chairs and the various figures

sitting upon them into delicate relief. The walls were painted white,

and had a few French mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine

French portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames.

The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and seemed

to be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly have read or

written in the room, but you could see a beautiful woman in a beautiful

dress there, and you could talk there, either _tête-à-tête_ or to the

assembled company, to perfection, so cunningly was it all devised.

When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people present--ten

gentleman and two ladies. One of the ladies, Madame de Netteville, was

lying back in the corner of a velvet divan placed against the wall, a

screen between her and a splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the

room. The other, a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck

abnormally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men were

talking indiscriminately to both.

As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was a general stir

of surprise. The men looked round; Madame de Netteville half rose with

a puzzled look. It was more than a month since she had dropped her

invitation. Then a flash, not altogether of pleasure, passed over her

face, and she said a few hasty words to the woman near her, advancing

the moment afterward to give her hand to Catherine.

‘This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so soon. I had

imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to give me the pleasure of

seeing you.’

But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in everything, were not

cordial for all their smile.

Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive manner,

and by the woman’s look of conscious sarcastic strength, struggling

through all the outer softness of beauty and exquisite dress.

‘Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am afraid, as

that afternoon on which we met last. Let me introduce you to Count

Wielandt--Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will you come over here, beside

Lady Aubrey Willert?’

Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, who seemed to him to

look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinized an inhabitant

of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey made an imperceptible movement of the head

as Catherine was presented to her, and Madame de Netteville, smiling and

biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat.

There was a faint odor of smoke in the room. As Catherine sat down, a

young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end of a cigarette into

the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. Lady Aubrey also pushed

away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand.

Everybody there had the air more or less of an _habitué_ of the house;

and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very

hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de

Netteville, to take any share in it.

‘Well, I believe the story about Desforêts is true,’ said the

fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling

back in his chair.

Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English

rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her.

‘If you got it from _The Ferret_, my dear Evershed,’ said the ex-Tory

minister, Lord Rupert, ‘you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I

believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.’

‘What do you mean?’ said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.

‘Well, it doesn’t _pay_, you know, to write yourself down a fiend--not

quite.’

‘What--you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good

joke!’ and the young man laughed immoderately joined by several of the

other guests.

‘I don’t imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,’

returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; ‘but the British public haven’t got

your nerve. They may take it awkwardly--I don’t say they will--when a

woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St.

Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies--comes to

ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.’

‘What has one to do with an actress’ private life, my dear Lord Rupert?’

asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth clearness

into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under straight black

brows.

‘What indeed!’ said the young man who had begun the conversation, with

a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching his hand for another

cigarette, and drawing it back out with a look under his drooped

eyelids--a look of cold impertinent scrutiny--at Catherine Elsmere.

‘Ah! well--I don’t want to be obtrusively moral--Heaven Forbid! But

there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to such an extent that

you injure your pocket. Desforêts is doing it--doing it actually in

Paris too.’

There was a ripple of laughter.

‘Paris and illusions--_O mon Dieu!_’ groaned young, Evershed, when he

had done laughing, laying meditative hands on his knees and gazing into

the fire.

‘I tell you I have seen it,’ said Lord Rupert, waxing combative, and

slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. ‘The last time I went

to see Desforêts in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the

house--theatrically speaking--_ice_. They received her in dead,

silence--they gave her not one single recall--and they only gave her

a clap, that I can remember, at those two or three points in the play

where clap they positively must or burst. They go to see her--but they

loathe her--and they let her know it.’

‘Bah!’ said his opponent, ‘it is only because they are tired of her. Her

vagaries don’t amuse them any longer--they know them by heart.

And--by George! she has some pretty rivals too, now!’ he added

reflectively,--‘not to speak of the Bernhardt.’

‘Well, the Parisians _can_ be shocked,’ said Count Wielandt in excellent

English, bending forward so as to get a good view of his hostess. ‘They

are just now especially shocked by the condition of English morals!’

The twinkle in his eye was irresistible. The men, understanding his

reference to the avidity with which certain English aristocratic

scandals had been lately seized upon by the French papers, laughed

out--so did Lady Aubrey. Madame de Netteville contented herself with a

smile.

‘They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan’s last book,’ said the editor

from the other side of the room.

‘Dear me!’ said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fanning herself

lightly the while, her thin but extraordinarily graceful head and neck

thrown out against the golden brocade of the cushion behind her.

‘Oh! what so many of them feel in Renan’s case, of course’ said Madame

de Netteville, ‘is that every book he writes now gives a fresh opening

to the enemy to blaspheme. Your eminent freethinker can’t afford

just yet, in the present state of the world, to make himself socially

ridiculous. The cause suffers.’

‘Just my feeling,’ said young Evershed calmly. ‘Though I mayn’t care

a rap about him personally, I prefer that a man on my own front bench

shouldn’t make a public ass of himself if he can help it--not for his

sake, of course, but for mine!’

Robert looked at Catherine. She sat upright by the side of Lady Aubrey;

her face, of which the beauty tonight seemed lost in rigidity, pale

and stiff. With a contraction of heart he plunged himself into the

conversation. On his road home that evening he had found an important

foreign telegram posted up at the small literary club to which he had

belonged since Oxford days. He made a remark about it now to Count

Wielandt; and the diplomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his

questioner, recognized that the remark was a shrewd one.

Presently the young man’s frank intelligence had told. On his way to and

from the Holy Land three years before, Robert had seen something of the

East, and it so happened that he remembered the name of Count Wielandt

as one of the foreign secretaries of legation present at an official

party given by the English Ambassador at Constantinople, which he and

his mother had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a family

connection with the Ambassador. All that he could glean from memory he

made quick use of now, urged at first by the remorseful wish to make

this new world into which he had brought Catherine less difficult than

he knew it must have been during the last quarter of an hour.

But after a while he found himself leading the talk of a section of the

room, and getting excitement and pleasure out of the talk itself. Ever

since that Eastern journey he had kept an eye on the subjects which had

interested him then, reading in his rapid voracious way all that came

across him at Murewell, especially in the Squire’s foreign newspapers

and reviews, and storing it when read in a remarkable memory.

Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts between her

and Madame de Netteville, fell to watching her husband with a start of

strangeness and surprise. She had scarcely seen him at Oxford among

his equals; and she had very rarely been present at his talks with

the Squire. In some ways, and owing to the instinctive reserves set up

between them for so long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very

imperfect. His ease, his resource among these men of the world, for

whom--independent of all else--she felt a country-woman’s dislike,

filled her with a kind of bewilderment.

‘Are you new to London?’ Lady Aubrey asked her presently, in that tone

of absolute detachment from the person addressed which certain women

manage to perfection. She, too, had been watching the husband, and the

sight had impressed her with a momentary curiosity to know what the

stiff, handsome, dowdily-dressed wife was made of.

‘We have been two months here,’ said Catherine, her large gray eyes

taking in her companion’s very bare shoulders, the costly fantastic

dress, and the diamonds flashing against the white skin.

‘In what part?’

‘In Bedford Square.’

Lady Aubrey was silent. She had no ideas on the subject of Bedford

Square at command.

‘We are very central,’ said Catherine, feeling desperately that she was

doing Robert no credit at all, and anxious to talk if only something

could be found to talk about.

‘Oh, yes, you are near the theatres,’ said the other indifferently.

This was hardly an aspect of the matter which had yet occurred to

Catherine. A flash of bitterness ran through her. Had they left their

Murewell life to be near the theatres, and kept at arm’s length by

supercilious great ladies?

‘We are very far from the Park,’ she answered with an effort. ‘I wish we

weren’t for my little girl’s sake.’

‘Oh, you have a little girl! How old?’

‘Sixteen months.’

‘Too young to be a nuisance yet. Mine are just old enough to be in

everybody’s way. Children are out of place in London. I always want to

leave mine in the country, but my husband objects,’ said Lady Aubrey

coolly. There was a certain piquancy in saying frank things to this

stiff, Madonna-faced woman.

Madame de Netteville, meanwhile, was keeping up a conversation in an

undertone with young Evershed, who had come to sit on a stool beside

her, and was gazing up at her with eyes of which the expression

was perfectly understood by several persons present. The handsome,

dissipated, ill-conditioned youth had been her slave and shadow for

the last two years. His devotion now no longer mused her, and she

was endeavoring to, get rid of it and of him. But the process was a

difficult one, and took both time and _finesse_.

She kept her eye, notwithstanding, on the newcomers where the Squire’s

introduction had brought to her that night. When the Elsmeres rose to

go, she said good-by to Catherine with an excessive politeness, under

which her poor guest, conscious of her own _gaucherie_ during the

evening, felt the touch of satire she was perhaps meant to feel. But

when Catherine was well ahead Madame de Netteville gave Robert one of

her most brilliant smiles.

‘Friday evening, Mr. Elsmere; always Fridays. You will remember?’

The _naïveté_ of Robert’s social view, and the mobility of his temper,

made him easily responsive. He had just enjoyed half an hour’s brilliant

talk with two or three of the keenest and most accomplished men in

Europe. Catherine had slipped out of his sight meanwhile, and the

impression of their _entreé_ had been effaced. He made Madame de

Netteville, therefore, a cordial smiling reply, before his tall slender

form disappeared after that of his wife.

‘Agreeable--rather an acquisition!’ said Madame de Netteville to Lady

Aubrey, with a light motion of the head toward Robert’s retreating

figure. ‘But the wife! Good heavens! I owe Roger Wendover a grudge. I

think he might have made it plain to those good people that I don’t want

strange women at my Friday evenings.’

Lady Aubrey laughed. ‘No doubt she is a genius, or a saint, in mufti.

She might be handsome too if some one would dress her.’

Madame de Netteville shrugged her shoulders. ‘Oh! life is not long

enough to penetrate that kind of person,’ she said.

Meanwhile the ‘person’ was driving homeward very sad and ill at ease.

She was vexed that she had not done better, and yet she was wounded by

Robert’s enjoyment. The Puritan in her blood was all aflame. As she sat

looking into the motley lamp-lit night she could have ‘testified’ like

any prophetess of old.

Robert meanwhile, his hand slipped into hers, was thinking of Wielandt’s

talk, and of some racy stories of Berlin celebrities told by a young

_attaché_ who had joined their group. His lips were lightly smiling, his

brow serene.

But as he helped her down from the cab, and they stood in the hall

together, he noticed the pale discomposure of her looks. Instantly the

familiar dread and pain returned upon him.

‘Did you like it, Catherine?’ he asked her, with something like

timidity, as they stood together by their bedroom fire.

She sank into a low chair and sat a moment staring at the blaze. He

was startled by her look of suffering, and, kneeling, he put his arms

tenderly round her.

‘Oh, Robert, Robert!’ she cried, falling on his neck.

‘What is it?’ he asked, kissing her hair.

‘I seem all at sea,’ she said in a choked voice, her face hidden,--‘the

old landmarks swallowed up! I am always judging and condemning,--always

protesting. What am I that I should judge? But how,--how,--can I help

it?’

She drew herself away from him, once more looking into the fire with

drawn brows.

‘Darling, the world is full of difference. Men and women take life in

different ways. Don’t be so sure yours is the only right one.’

He spoke with a moved gentleness, taking her hand the while.

’”_This_ is the way, walk ye in it!”’ she said presently, with strong,

almost stern emphasis. ‘Oh those women, and that talk! Hateful!’

He rose and looked down on her from the mantelpiece. Within him was a

movement of impatience, repressed almost at once by the thought of that

long night at Murewell, when he had vowed to himself to ‘make amends!’

And if that memory had not intervened she would still have disarmed him

wholly.

‘Listen!’ she said to him suddenly, her eyes kindling with a strange

childish pleasure. ‘Do you hear the wind, the west wind? Do you remember

how it used to shake the house, how it used to come sweeping through the

trees in the wood-path? It must be trying the study window now, blowing

the vine against it.’

A yearning passion breathed through every feature. It seemed to him she

saw nothing before her. Her longing soul was back in the old haunts,

surrounded by the old loved forms and sounds. It went to his heart. He

tried to soothe her with the tenderest words remorseful love could

find. But the conflict of feeling--grief, rebellion, doubt,

self-judgment--would not be soothed, and long after she had made him

leave her and he had fallen asleep, she knelt on, a white and rigid

figure in the dying firelight, the wind shaking the old house, the

eternal murmur of London booming outside.

CHAPTER XXXIV.

Meanwhile, as if to complete the circle of pain with which poor

Catherine’s life was compassed, it began to be plain to her that, in

spite of the hard and mocking tone Rose generally adopted with regard to

him, Edward Langham was constantly at the house in Lerwick Gardens, and

that it was impossible he should be there so much unless in some way or

other Rose encouraged it.

The idea of such a marriage--nay, of such a friendship--was naturally as

repugnant as ever to her. It had been one of the bitterest moments of a

bitter time, when, at their first meeting after the crisis in her life,

Langham, conscious of a sudden movement of pity for a woman he disliked,

had pressed the hand she held out to him in a way which clearly showed

her what was in his mind, and had then passed on to chat and smoke with

Robert in the study, leaving her behind to realize the gulf that lay

between the present and that visit of his to Murewell, when Robert and

she had felt in unison toward him, his opinions and his conduct to Rose,

as toward everything else of importance in their life.

Now it seemed to her Robert must necessarily look at the matter

differently, and she could not make up her mind to talk to him about it.

In reality, his objections had never had the same basis as hers, and he

would have given her as strong a support as ever, if she had asked for

it. But she held her peace, and he, absorbed in other things, took no

notice. Besides, he knew Langham too well. He had never been able to

take Catherine’s alarms seriously.

An attentive onlooker, however, would have admitted that this time, at

any rate, they had their justification. Why Langham was so much in the

Leyburns’ drawing-room during these winter months, was a question that

several people asked--himself not least. He had not only pretended to

forget Rose Leyburn during the eighteen months which had passed since

their first acquaintance at Murewell--he had for all practical purposes

forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men and women who are

capable of passion on the great scale at all; and certainly, as we have

tried to show, Langham was not among them. He had had a passing moment

of excitement at Murewell, soon put down, and followed by a week of

extremely pleasant sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had

ended in reaction and self-abhorrence. He had left Murewell remorseful,

melancholy, and ill-at-ease, but conscious, certainly, of a great relief

that he and Rose Leyburn were not likely to meet again for long.

Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such matters

absorb men who have become the slaves of their own solitary habits, and

in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh zest for learning it had

aroused in him, the beautiful unmanageable child who had disturbed his

peace at Murewell was not likely to be more, but less remembered.

When he stumbled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his

determining impulse had been merely one of flight.

However, as he had written to Robert toward the beginning of his London

residence, there was no doubt that his migration had made him for the

time much more human, observant, and accessible. Oxford had become to

him an oppression and a nightmare and as soon as he had turned his back

on it, his mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his

modest part in the life of the capital; happy in the obscurity afforded

him by the crowd; rejoicing in the thought that his life and his affairs

were once more his own, and the academical yoke had been slipped for

ever.

It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that his fresh

sight of Rose found him. For the moment, he was perhaps more susceptible

than he ever could have been before to her young perfections, her

beauty, her brilliancy, her provoking, stimulating ways. Certainly, from

that first afternoon onward he became more and more restless to watch

her, to be near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In

general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so much, she

took small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to regard, himself as

a mere ‘item’--something systematically overlooked and forgotten in the

bustle of her days and nights. He saw that she thought badly of him,

that the friendship he might have had was now proudly refused him, that

their first week together had left a deep impression of resentment and

hostility in her mind. And all the same he came; and she asked him!

And sometimes, after an hour when she had been more difficult or more

satirical than usual, ending notwithstanding with a little change of

tone, a careless ‘You will find us next Wednesday as usual; So-and-so

is coming to play,’ Langham would walk home in a state of feeling he did

not care to analyze, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a

good deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, but

in the strangest slightest ways did she not make him suspect every now

and then that he _was_ in some sort important to her, that he sometimes

preoccupied her against her will; that her will, indeed, sometimes

escaped her, and failed to control her manner to him?

It was not only his relations to the beauty, however, his interest

in her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. Elsmere’s cold

dislike and disapproval of his presence in her mother’s drawing-room,

that accounted for Langham’s heightened mental temperature this winter.

The existence and the proceedings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very

considerable share in it.

‘Tell me about Mr. Langham,’ said Mr. Flaxman once to Agnes Leyburn,

in the early days of his acquaintance with the family; ‘is he an old

friend?’

‘Of Robert’s,’ replied Agnes, her cheerful impenetrable look fixed upon

the speaker. ‘My sister met him once for a week in the country at the

Elsmeres’. My mother and I have been only just introduced to him.’

Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little.

‘Does he strike you as--well--what shall we say?--unusual?’

His smile struck one out of her.

‘Even Robert might admit that’ she said demurely.

‘Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his

tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and

mental strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with a

_nonchalance_ I cannot convey: “Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should

have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while.”

“Why?” said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn’t know--wouldn’t

say. But I gathered that according to him, Elsmere is still swathed in

such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags and patches

he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort of the change. It

seemed to me the tone of the very cool spectator, rather than the

friend. However--does your sister like him?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the face.

Hugh Flaxman’s fair complexion flushed a little. He got up to go.

‘He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I ever saw,’ he

remarked as he buttoned up his coat. ‘Don’t you think so?’

‘Yes,’ said Agnes dubiously, ‘if he didn’t stoop, and if he didn’t in

general look half-asleep.’

Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the reason for the

constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti-social person at the

Leyburns’ house. Being himself a man of very subtle and fastidious

tastes, he could imagine that so original a suitor, with such eyes, such

an intellectual reputation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and

the most picturesque capacity for silence, _might_ have attractions for

a romantic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose rarely

talked to him, and was always ready to make him the target of a sub-acid

raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to him, and Mrs. Leyburn equally

clearly afraid of him. Mrs. Elsmere, too, seemed to dislike him, and yet

there he was, week after week. Flaxman could not make it out.

Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started various topics

with him--University reform, politics, music. In vain. In his most

characteristic Oxford days Langham had never assumed a more wholesale

ignorance of all subjects in heaven and earth, and never stuck more

pertinaciously to the flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked

away at last boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is

perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom.

However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of these

fragments of conversation, Langham also walked rapidly home in a state

of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the

pockets of his overcoat.

‘No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything your own

way so easily with me or with _her!_ You may break me, but you shall not

play upon me. And as for her, I will see it out--I will see it out!’

And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all about

him and a strange new force tingling in every vein.

Meanwhile, however, Mr. Flaxman was certainly having a good deal of his

own way. Since the moment when his aunt, Lady Charlotte, had introduced

him to Miss Leyburn--watching him the while with a half-smile which soon

broadened into one of sly triumph--Hugh Flaxman had persuaded himself

that country houses are intolerable even in the shooting season, and

that London is the only place of residence during the winter for the

man who aspires to govern his life on principles of reason. Through his

influence and that of his aunt, Rose and Agnes--Mrs. Leyburn never went

out--were being carried into all the high life that London can supply in

November and January. Wealthy, highborn, and popular, he was gradually

devoting his advantages in the freest way to Rose’s service. He was an

excellent musical amateur, and was always proud to play with her; he had

a fine country house, and the little rooms on Campden Hill were almost

always filled with flowers from his gardens; he had a famous musical

library, and its treasures were lavished on the girl violinist; he had a

singularly wide circle of friends, and with his whimsical energy he

was soon inclined to make kindness to the two sisters the one test of a

friend’s good-will.

He was clearly touched by Rose; and what was to prevent his making an

impression on her? To her sex he had always been singularly attractive.

Like his sister, he had all sorts of bright impulses and audacities

flashing and darting about him. He had a certain _hauteur_ with men,

and could play the aristocrat when he pleased, for all his philosophical

radicalism. But with women he was the most delightful mixture of

deference and high spirits. He loved the grace of them, the daintiness

of their dress, the softness of their voices. He would have done

anything to please them, anything to save them pain. At twenty-five,

when he was still ‘Citizen Flaxman’ to his college friends, and in the

first fervors of a poetic defiance of prejudice and convention, he

had married a gamekeeper’s pretty daughter. She had died with her

child--died, almost, poor thing! of happiness and excitement--of the

over-greatness of Heaven’s boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and

death had tenderly embalmed a sentiment to which life might possibly

have been less kind. Since then he had lived in music, letters, and

society, refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to enter politics,

but welcomed and considered wherever he went, tall, good-looking,

distinguished, one of the most agreeable and courted of men, and perhaps

the richest _parti_ in London.

Still, in spite of it all, Langham held his ground--Langham would see

it out! And indeed, Flaxman’s footing with the beauty was by no means

clear--least of all to himself. She evidently liked him, but she

bantered him a good deal; she would not be the least subdued or dazzled

by his birth and wealth, or by those of his friends; and if she allowed

him to provide her with pleasure, she would hardly ever take his advice,

or knowingly consult his tastes.

Meanwhile she tormented them both a good deal by the artistic

acquaintance she gathered about her. Mrs. Pierson’s world, as we have

said, contained a good many dubious odds and ends, and she had handed

them all over to Rose. The Leyburns’ growing intimacy with Mr. Flaxman

and his circle, and through them with the finer types of the artistic

life, would naturally and by degrees have carried them away somewhat

from this earlier circle if Rose would have allowed it. But she clung

persistently to its most unpromising specimens, partly out of a natural

generosity of feeling, but partly also for the sake of that opposition

her soul loved, her poor prickly soul, full under all her gayety and

indifference of the most desperate doubt and soreness,--opposition to

Catherine, opposition to Mr. Flaxman, but, above all, opposition to

Langham.

Flaxman could often avenge himself on her--or rather on the more

obnoxious members of her following--by dint of a faculty for light and

stinging repartee which would send her, flushed and biting her lip,

to have her laugh out in private. But Langham for a long time was

defenseless. Many of her friends in his opinion were simply pathological

curiosities--their vanity was so frenzied, their sensibilities so

morbidly developed. He felt a doctor’s interest in them coupled

with more than a doctor’s scepticism as to all they had to say about

themselves. But Rose would invite them, would assume a _quasi_-intimacy

with them; and Langham as well as everybody else had to put up with it.

Even the trodden worm however----And there came a time when the

concentration of a good many different lines of feeling in Langham’s

mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp and sudden openness. It began

to seem to him that she was specially bent often on tormenting _him_

by these caprices of hers, and he vowed to himself finally, with an

outburst of irritation due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would

assert himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her

from her own follies.

One afternoon, at a crowded musical party, to which he had come much

against his will, and only in obedience to a compulsion he dared not

analyze, she asked him in passing if he would kindly find Mr. MacFadden,

a bass singer, whose name stood next on the programme, and who was not

to be seen in the drawing-room.

Langham searched the dining-room and the hall, and at last found Mr.

MacFadden--a fair, flabby, unwholesome youth--in the little study or

cloak room, in a state of collapse, flanked by whisky and water, and

attended by two frightened maids, who handed over their charge to

Langham and fled.

Then it appeared that the great man had been offended by a change in the

programme, which hurt his vanity, had withdrawn from the drawing-room on

the brink of hysterics, had called for spirits, which had been provided

for him with great difficulty by Mrs. Leyburn’s maids, and was there

drinking himself into a state of rage and rampant dignity which would

soon have shown itself in a melodramatic return to the drawing-room,

and a public refusal to sing at all in a house where art had been

outraged in his person.

Some of the old disciplinary instincts of the Oxford tutor awoke in

Langham at the sight of the creature, and, with a prompt sternness which

amazed himself, and nearly set MacFadden whimpering, he got rid of the

man, shut the hall door on him, and went back to the drawing-room.

‘Well?’ said Rose in anxiety, coming up to him.

‘I have sent him away,’ he said briefly, an eye of unusual quickness and

brightness looking down upon her; ‘he was in no condition to sing. He

chose to be offended, apparently because he was put out of his turn, and

has been giving the servants trouble.’

Rose flushed deeply, and drew herself up with a look of half trouble,

half defiance, at Langham.

‘I trust you will not ask him again,’ he said, with the same decision.

‘And if I might say so, there are one or two people still here whom I

should like to see you exclude at the same time.’

They had withdrawn into the bow window out of earshot of the rest of the

room. Langham’s look turned significantly toward a group near the piano.

It contained one or two men whom he regarded as belonging to a low type;

men who, if it suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or

invent malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and whose

standards and instincts represented a coarser world than Rose in reality

knew anything about.

Her eyes followed his.

‘I know,’ she said, petulantly, ‘that you dislike artists. They are not

your world. They are mine.’

‘I dislike artists? What nonsense, too! To me personally these men’s

ways don’t matter in the least. They go their road and I mine. But I

deeply resent any danger of discomfort and annoyance to you!’

He still stood frowning, a glow of indignant energy showing itself in

his attitude, his glance. She could not know that he was at that moment

vividly realizing the drunken scene that might have taken place in her

presence if he had not succeeded in getting the man safely out of the

house. But she felt that he was angry, and mostly angry with her, and

there was something so piquant and unexpected in his anger!

‘I am afraid,’ she said, with a queer sudden submissiveness, ‘you have

been going through something very disagreeable. I am very sorry. Is

it my fault?’ she added, with a whimsical flash of eye, half fun, half

serious.

He could hardly believe his ears.

‘Yes, it is your fault, I think!’ he answered her, amazed at his

own boldness. ‘Not that _I_ was annoyed--Heavens! what does that

matter?--but that you and your mother and sister were very near an

unpleasant scene. You will not take advice, Miss Leyburn, you will take

your own way in spite of what anyone else can say or hint to you, and

some day you will expose yourself to annoyance when there is no one near

to protect you!’

‘Well, if so, it won’t be for want of a mentor,’ she said, dropping him

a mock courtesy. But her lips trembled under its smile, and her tone had

not lost its gentleness.

At this moment Mr. Flaxman, who had gradually established himself as the

joint leader of these musical afternoons, came forward to summon Rose

to a quartet. He looked from one to the other, a little surprise

penetrating through his suavity of manner.

‘Am I interrupting you?’

‘Not at all,’ said Rose; then, turning back to Langham, she said, in a

hurried whisper: ‘Don’t say anything about the wretched man: it would

make mamma nervous. He shan’t come here again.’

Mr. Flaxman waited till the whisper was over, and then led her off, with

a change of manner which she immediately perceived, and which lasted for

the rest of the evening.

Langham went home and sat brooding over the fire. Her voice had not

been so kind, her look so womanly, for months. Had she been reading

‘Shirley,’ and would she have liked him to play Louis Moore? He went

into a fit of silent convulsive laughter as the idea occurred to him.

Some secret instinct made him keep away from her for a time. At last,

one Friday afternoon, as he emerged from the Museum, where he had been

collating the MSS. of some obscure Alexandrian, the old craving returned

with added strength and he turned involuntarily westward.

An acquaintance of his, recently made in the course of work at the

Museum, a young Russian professor, ran after him, and walked with him.

Presently they passed a poster on the wall, which contained in enormous

letters the announcement of Madame Desforêts’ approaching visit to

London, a list of plays, and the dates of performances.

The young Russian suddenly stopped and stood pointing at the

advertisement, with shaking derisive finger, his eyes aflame, the whole

man quivering with what looked like antagonism and hate.

Then he broke into a fierce flood of French. Langham listened till they

had passed Piccadilly, passed the Park, and till the young _savant_

turned southward toward his Brompton lodgings.

Then Langham slowly climbed Campden Hill, meditating. His thoughts

were an odd mixture of the things he had just heard, and of a scene at

Murewell long ago when a girl had denounced him for ‘calumny.’

At the door of Lerwick Gardens he was informed that Mrs. Leyburn was

upstairs with an attack of bronchitis. But the servant thought the young

ladies were at home. Would he come in? He stood irresolute a moment,

then went in on a pretext of ‘inquiry.’

The maid threw open the drawing-room door, and there was Rose sitting

well into the fire--for it was a raw February afternoon--with a book.

She received him with all her old hard brightness. He was indeed

instantly sorry that he had made his way in. Tyrant! was she displeased

because he had slipped his chain for rather longer than usual?

However, he sat down, delivered his book, and they talked first about

her mother’s illness. They had been anxious, she said, but the doctor,

who had just taken his departure, had now completely reassured them.

‘Then you will be able probably after all to put in an appearance at

Lady Charlotte’s this evening?’ he asked her.

The omnivorous Lady Charlotte of course had made acquaintance with him,

in the Leyburns’ drawing-room, as she did with everybody who crossed

her path, and three days before he had received a card from her for this

evening.

‘Oh, yes! But I have had to miss a rehearsal this afternoon. That

concert at Searle House is becoming a great nuisance.’

‘It will be a brilliant affair, I suppose. Princes on one side of

you--and Albani on the other. I see they have given you the most

conspicuous part as violinist.’

‘Yes,’ she said with a little satirical tightening of the lip. ‘Yes--I

suppose I ought to be much flattered.’

‘Of course--’ he said, smiling, but embarrassed. ‘To many people you

must be at this moment one of the most enviable persons in the world. A

delightful art--and every opportunity to make it tell!’

There was a pause. She looked into the fire.

‘I don’t know whether it is a delightful art,’ she said presently,

stifling a little yawn. ‘I believe I am getting very tired of London.

Sometimes I think I shouldn’t be very sorry to find myself suddenly

spirited back to Burwood!’

Langham gave vent to some incredulous interjection. He had apparently

surprised her in a fit of _ennui_ which was rare with her.

‘Oh no, not yet!’ she said suddenly, with a return of animation. ‘Madame

Desforêts comes next week, and I am to see her.’ She drew herself up

and turned a beaming face upon him. Was there a shaft of mischief in her

eye? He could not tell. The firelight was perplexing.

‘You are to see her?’ he said slowly. ‘Is she coming here?’

‘I hope so. Mrs. Pierson is to bring, her. I want mamma to have the

amusement of seeing her. My artistic friends are a kind of tonic to

her--they excite her so much. She regards them as a sort of show--much

as you do, in fact, only in a more charitable fashion.’

But he took no notice of what she was saying.