a curious accent in his tone.
‘Yes!’ she replied, with apparent surprise. Then with a careless smile:
‘Oh, I remember when we were at Murewell, you were exercised that we
should know her. Well, Mr. Langham, I told you then that you were only
echoing unworthy gossip. I am in the same mind still. I have seen her,
and you haven’t. To me she is the greatest actress in the world, and an
ill-used woman to boot!’
Her tone had warmed with every sentence. It struck him that she had
wilfully brought up the topic--that it gave her pleasure to quarrel with
him.
He put down his hat deliberately, got up, and stood with his back to
the fire. She looked up at him curiously. But the dark regular face was
almost hidden from her.
‘It is strange,’ he said slowly; ‘very strange--that you should have
told me this at this moment! Miss Leyburn, a great deal of the truth
about Madame Desforêts I could neither tell, nor could you hear. There
are charges against her proved in open court, again and again, which I
could not even mention in your presence. But one thing I can speak of.
Do you know the story of the sister at St. Petersburg?’
‘I know no stories against Madame Desforêts,’ said Rose loftily, her
quickened breath responding to the energy of his tone. ‘I have always
chosen not to know them.’
‘The newspapers were full of this particular story just before
Christmas. I should have thought it must have reached you.’
‘I did not see it,’ she replied stiffly; ‘and I cannot see what good
purpose is to be served by your repeating it to me, Mr. Langham.’
Langham could have smiled at her petulance, if he had not for once been
determined and in earnest.
‘You will let me tell it, I hope?’ he said quietly. ‘I will tell it so
that it shall not offend your ears. As it happens, I myself thought it
incredible at the time. But, by an odd coincidence, it has just this
afternoon been repeated to me by a man who was an eyewitness of part of
it.’
Rose was silent. Her attitude Was _hauteur_ itself, but she made no
further active opposition.
‘Three months ago--’ he began, speaking with some difficulty, but still
with a suppressed force of feeling which amazed his hearer-’Madame
Desforêts was acting in St. Petersburg. She had with her a large
company, and among them her own young sister, Elise Romey, a girl of
eighteen. This girl had been always kept away from Madame Desforêts by
her parents, who had never been sufficiently consoled by their eldest
daughter’s artistic success for the infamy of her life.’
Rose started indignantly. Langham gave her no time to speak.
‘Elise Romey, however, had developed a passion for the stage. Her
parents were respectable--and you know young girls in France are brought
up strictly. She knew next to nothing of her sister’s escapades. But
she knew that she was held to be the greatest actress in Europe--the
photographs in the shops told her that she was beautiful. She conceived
a romantic passion for the woman whom she had last seen when she was a
child of five, and actuated partly by this hungry affection, partly by
her own longing wish to become an actress, she escaped from home and
joined Madame Desforêts in the South of France. Madame Desforêts seems
at first to have been pleased to have her. The girl’s adoration pleased
her vanity. Her presence with her gave her new opportunities of posing.
I believe,’ and Langham gave a little dry laugh, ‘they were photographed
together at Marseilles with their arms round each other’s necks, and the
photograph had an immense success. However on the way to St. Petersburg,
difficulties arose. Elise was pretty, in a _blonde_ childish way,
and she caught the attention of the _jeune premier_ of the company, a
man’--the speaker became somewhat embarrassed-’whom Madame Desforêts
seems to have regarded as her particular property. There were scenes at
different towns on the journey. Elise became frightened--wanted to go
home. But the elder sister, having begun tormenting her, seems to
have determined to keep her hold on her, as a cat keeps and tortures a
mouse--mainly for the sake of annoying the man of whom she was jealous.
They arrived at St. Petersburg in the depth of winter. The girl was worn
out with travelling, unhappy, and ill. One night in Madame Desforêts
apartment there was a supper party, and after it a horrible quarrel. No
one exactly knows what happened. But toward twelve o’clock that night
Madame Desforêts turned her young sister in evening dress, a light shawl
round her, out into the snowy streets of St Petersburg, barred the door
behind her, and revolver in hand dared the wretched man who had caused
the _fracas_ to follow her.’
Rose sat immovable. She had grown pale, but the firelight was not
revealing.
Langham turned away from her toward the blaze, holding out his hands to
it mechanically.
‘The poor child,’ he said, after a pause, in a lower voice, ‘wandered
about for some hours. It was a frightful night--the great capital was
quite strange to her. She was insulted--fled this way and that--grew
benumbed with cold and terror, and was found unconscious in the early
morning under the archway of a house some two miles from her sister’s
lodgings.’
There was a dead silence. Then Rose drew a long quivering breath.
‘I do not believe it!’ she said passionately. ‘I cannot believe it!’
‘It was amply proved at the time,’ said Langham dryly, ‘though of course
Madame Desforêts tried to put her own color on it. But I told you I had
private information. On one of the floors of the house where Elise Romey
was picked up, lived a young university professor. He is editing an
important Greek text, and has lately had business at the Museum. I made
friends with him there. He walked home with me this afternoon, saw the
announcement of Madame Desforêts coming, and poured out the story. He
and his wife nursed the unfortunate girl with devotion. She lived just
a week, and died of inflammation of the lungs. I never in my life heard
anything so pitiful as his description of her delirium, her terror, her
appeals, her shivering misery of cold.’
There was a pause.
‘She is not a woman,’ he said presently, between his teeth. ‘She is a
wild beast.’
Still there was silence, and still he held out his hand to the flame
which Rose too was staring at. At last he turned round.
‘I have told you a shocking story,’ he said hurriedly, ‘Perhaps I ought
not to have done it. But, as you sat there talking so lightly, so gayly,
it suddenly became to me utterly intolerable that that woman should ever
sit here in this room--talk to you--call you by your name--laugh with
you--touch your hand! Not even your wilfulness shall carry you so
far--you _shall_ not do it!’
He hardly knew what he said. He was driven on by a passionate sense of
physical repulsion to the notion of any contact between her pure fair
youth and something malodorous and corrupt. And there was beside a wild
unique excitement in claiming for once to stay--to control her.
Rose lifted her head slowly. The fire was bright. He saw the tears in
her eyes, tears of intolerable pity for another girl’s awful story.
But through the tears something gleamed--a kind of exultation--the
exultation which the magician feels when he has called spirits from the
vasty deep and after long doubt and difficult invocation they rise at
last before his eyes.
‘I will never see her again’--she said in a low wavering voice, but
she too was hardly conscious of her own words. Their looks were on
each other; the ruddy capricious light touched her glowing cheeks,
her straight-lined grace, her white hand. Suddenly from the gulf of
another’s misery into which they had both been looking, there had sprung
up, by the strange contrariety of human things, a heat and intoxication
of feeling, wrapping them round, blotting out the rest of the world from
them like a golden mist. ‘Be always thus!’ her parted lips, her liquid
eyes were saying to him. His breath seemed to fail him; he was lost in
bewilderment.
There were sounds outside--Catherine’s voice. He roused himself with a
supreme effort.
‘To-night--at Lady Charlotte’s?’
‘To-night,’ she said, and held out her hand.
A sudden madness seized him--he stooped--his lips touched it--it was
hastily drawn away, and the door opened.
CHAPTER XXXV.
‘In the first place, my dear aunt,’ said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself
back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte’s drawing-room fire, ‘you
may spare your admonitions, because it is becoming more and more clear
to me that, whatever my sentiments may be, Miss Leyburn never gives a
serious thought to me.’
He turned to look at his companion over his shoulder. His tone and
manner were perfectly gay, and Lady Charlotte was puzzled by him.
‘Stuff and nonsense!’ replied the lady with her usual emphasis; ‘I never
flatter you, Hugh, and I don’t mean to begin now, but it would be mere
folly not to recognize that you have advantages which must tell on the
mind of any girl in Miss Leyburn’s position.’
Hugh Flaxman rose, and, standing before the fire with his hands in his
pockets, made what seemed to be a close inspection of his irreproachable
trouser-knees.
‘I am sorry for your theory, Aunt Charlotte,’ he said, still stooping,
‘but Miss Leyburn doesn’t care twopence about my advantages.’
‘Very proper of you to say so,’ returned Lady Charlotte sharply; ‘the
remark, however, my good sir, does more credit to your heart than your
head.’
‘In the next place,’ he went on undisturbed, ‘why you should have done
your best this whole winter to throw Miss Leyburn and me together, if
you meant in the end to oppose my marrying her, I don’t quite see.’
He looked up smiling. Lady Charlotte reddened ever so slightly.
‘You know my weakness,’ she said presently, with an effrontery which
delighted her nephew. ‘She is my latest novelty, she excites me, I
can’t do without her. As to you, I can’t remember that you wanted
much encouragement, but I acknowledge, after all these years of
resistance--resistance to my most legitimate efforts to dispose of
you--there was a certain piquancy in seeing you caught at last!’
‘Upon my word!’ he said, throwing back his head with a not very cordial
laugh, in which, however, his aunt joined. She was sitting opposite to
him, her powerful, loosely-gloved hands crossed over the rich velvet of
her dress, her fair large face and grayish hair surmounted by a mighty
cap, as vigorous, shrewd, and individual a type of English middle age
as could be found. The room behind her and the second and third
drawing-rooms were brilliantly lighted. Mr. Wynnstay was enjoying a
cigar in peace in the smoking-room, while his wife and nephew were
awaiting the arrival of the evening’s guests upstairs.
Lady Charlotte’s mind had been evidently much perturbed by the
conversation with her nephew of which we are merely describing the
latter half. She was laboring under an uncomfortable sense of being
hoist with her own petard--an uncomfortable memory of a certain warning
of her husband’s, delivered at Murewell.
‘And now,’ said Mr. Flaxman, ‘having confessed in so many words that
you have done your best to bring me up to the fence, will you kindly
recapitulate the arguments why in your opinion I should not jump it?’
‘Society, amusement, flirtation, are one thing,’ she replied with
judicial imperativeness, ‘marriage is another. In these democratic days
we must know everybody; we should only marry our equals.’
The instant, however, the words were out of her mouth, she regretted
them. Mr. Flaxman’s expression changed.
‘I do not agree with you,’ he said calmly, ‘and you know I do not. You
could not, I imagine, have relied much upon _that_ argument.’
‘Good gracious, Hugh!’ cried Lady Charlotte crossed, ‘you talk as if I
were really the old campaigner some people suppose me to be. I have been
amusing myself--I have liked to see you amused. And it is only the last
few weeks, since you have begun to devote yourself so tremendously, that
I have come to take the thing seriously at all. I confess, if you like,
that I have got you into the scrape--now I want to get you out of it!
I am not thin-skinned, but I hate family unpleasantnesses--and you know
what the Duke will say.’
‘The Duke be--translated!’ said Flaxman, coolly. ‘Nothing of what you
have said or could say on this point, my dear aunt, has the smallest
weight with me. But Providence has been kinder to you and the Duke than
you deserve. Miss Leyburn does not care for me, and she does care--or I
am very much mistaken--for somebody else.’
He pronounced the words deliberately, watching their effect upon her.
‘What, that Oxford nonentity, Mr. Langham, the Elsmeres’ friend?
Ridiculous! What attraction could a man of that type have for a girl of
hers?’
‘I am not bound to supply an answer to that question,’ replied her
nephew. ‘However, he is not a nonentity. Far from it! Ten years
ago, when I was leaving Cambridge, he was certainly one of the most
distinguished of the young Oxford tutors.’
‘Another instance of what university reputation is worth!’ said Lady
Charlotte scornfully. It was clear that even in the case of a beauty
whom she thought it beneath him to marry, she was not pleased to see her
nephew ousted by the _force majeure_ of a rival--and that rival whom she
regarded as an utter nobody, having neither marketable eccentricity, nor
family, nor social brilliance to recommend him.
Flaxman understood her perplexity and watched her with critical, amused
eyes.
‘I should like to know--’ he said presently, with a curious slowness
and suavity,--‘I should greatly like to know why you asked him here
to-night?’
‘You know perfectly well that I should ask anybody--a convict, a
crossing sweeper--if I happened to be half an hour in the same room with
him!’
Flaxman laughed.
‘Well, it may be convenient to-night,’ he said reflectively. ‘What are
we to do--some thought-reading?’
‘Yes. It isn’t a crush! I have only asked about thirty or forty people.
Mr. Denman is to manage it.’
She mentioned an amateur thought-reader greatly in request at the
moment.
Flaxman cogitated for a while and then propounded a little plan to his
aunt, to which she, after some demur, agreed.
‘I want to make a few notes,’ he said dryly, when it was arranged; ‘I
should be glad to satisfy myself.’
When the Miss Leyburns were announced, Rose, though the younger, came
in first. She always took the lead by a sort of natural right, and Agnes
never dreamt of protesting. To-night the sisters were in white. Some
soft creamy stuff was folded and draped about Rose’s slim shapely figure
in such a way as to bring out all its charming roundness and grace. Her
neck and arms bore the challenge of the dress victoriously. Her red-gold
hair gleamed in the light of Lady Charlotte’s innumerable candles. A
knot of dusky blue feathers on her shoulder, and a Japanese fan of the
some color, gave just that touch of purpose and art which the spectators
seems to claim as the tribute answering to his praise in the dress of a
young girl. She moved with perfect self-possession, distributing a
few smiling looks to the people she knew as she advanced toward Lady
Charlotte. Anyone with a discerning eye could have seen that she was in
that stage of youth when a beautiful woman is like a statue to which the
master is giving the finishing touches. Life, the sculptor, had been at
work upon her, refining here, softening there, planing away awkwardness,
emphasizing grace, disengaging as it were, week by week, and month by
month, all the beauty of which the original conception was capable.
And the process is one attended always by a glow and sparkle, a kind of
effluence of youth and pleasure, which makes beauty more beautiful and
grace more graceful.
The little murmur and rustle of persons turning to look, which had
already begun to mark her entrance into a room, surrounded Rose as she
walked up to Lady Charlotte. Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing absently
silent, woke up directly she appeared, and went to greet her before his
aunt.
‘You failed us at rehearsal,’ he said with smiling reproach; ‘we were
all at sixes and sevens.’
‘I had a sick mother, unfortunately, who kept me at home. Lady
Charlotte, Catherine couldn’t come. Agnes and I are alone in the world.
Will you chaperon us?’
‘I don’t know whether I will accept the responsibility to-night--in that
new gown’--replied Lady Charlotte grimly, putting up her eyeglass to
look at it and the wearer. Rose bore the scrutiny with a light smiling
silence, even though she knew Mr. Flaxman was looking too.
‘On the contrary,’ she said, ‘one always feels so particularly good and
prim in a new frock.’
‘Really? I should have thought it one of Satan’s likeliest moments,’
said Flaxman, laughing--his eyes, however, the while saying quite other
things to her, as they finished their inspection of her dress.
Lady Charlotte threw a sharp glance first at him and then at Rose’s
smiling ease, before she hurried off to other guests.
‘I have made a muddle as usual,’ she said to herself in disgust,
‘perhaps even a worse one than I thought!’
Whatever might be Hugh Flaxman’s state of mind, however, he never showed
greater self-possession than on this particular evening.
A few minutes after Rose’s entry he introduced her for the first time
to his sister, Lady Helen. The Varleys had only just come up to town for
the opening of Parliament, and Lady Helen had come to-night to Martin
Street, all ardor to see Hugh’s new adoration, and the girl whom all the
world was beginning to talk about--both as a beauty and as an artist.
She rushed at Rose, if any word so violent can be applied to anything
so light and airy as Lady Helen’s movements, caught the girl’s hands in
both hers, and, gazing up at her with undisguised admiration, said to
her the prettiest, daintiest, most effusive things possible. Rose--who
with all her lithe shapeliness, looked over-tall and even a trifle
stiff beside the tiny bird-like Lady Helen--took the advances of Hugh
Flaxman’s sister with a pretty flush of flattered pride. She looked
down at the small radiant creature with soft and friendly eyes, and Hugh
Flaxman stood by, so far well pleased.
Then he went off to fetch Mr. Denman, the hero of the evening, to be
introduced to her. While he was away, Agnes, who was behind her sister,
saw Rose’s eyes wandering from Lady Helen to the door, restlessly
searching and then returning.
Presently through the growing crowd round the entrance Agnes spied a
well-known form emerging.
‘Mr. Langham! But Rose never told me he was to be here to-night, and how
dreadful he looks!’
Agnes was so startled that her eyes followed Langham closely across the
room. Rose had seen him at once; and they had greeted each other across
the crowd. Agnes was absorbed, trying to analyze what had struck her
so. The face was always melancholy, always pale, but to-night it was
ghastly, and from the whiteness of cheek and brow, the eyes, the jet
black hair stood out in intense and disagreeable relief. She would have
remarked on it to Rose, but that Rose’s attention was claimed by the
young thought-reader, Mr. Denman, whom Mr. Flaxman had brought up.
Mr. Denman was a fair-haired young Hercules, whose tremulous, agitated
manner contrasted oddly with his athlete’s looks. Among other magnetisms
he was clearly open to the magnetism of women, and he stayed talking
to Rose,--staring furtively at her the while from under his heavy
lids,--much longer than the girl thought fair.
‘Have you seen any experiments in the working of this new force before?’
he asked her with a solemnity which sat oddly on his commonplace bearded
face.
‘Oh, yes!’ she said flippantly. ‘We have tried it sometimes. It is very
good fun.’
He drew himself up. ‘Not _fun_,’ he said impressively; ‘not fun.
Thought-reading wants seriousness; the most tremendous things depend
upon it. If established it will revolutionize our whole views of life.
Even a Huxley could not deny that!’
‘She studied him with mocking eyes. ‘Do you imagine this party to-night
looks very serious?’
His face fell.
‘One can seldom get people to take it scientifically,’ he admitted,
sighing. Rose, impatiently, thought him a most preposterous young man.
Why was he not cricketing, or shooting, or exploring, or using the
muscles Nature had given him so amply, to some decent practical purpose,
instead of making a business out of ruining his own nerves and other
people’s night after night in hot drawing-rooms? And when would he go
away?
‘Come, Mr. Denman,’ said Flaxman, laying hands upon him; ‘the audience
is about collected, I think. Ah, there you are!’ and he gave Langham a
cool greeting. ‘Have you seen anything yet of these fashionable dealings
with the devil!’
‘Nothing. Are you a believer?’
Flaxman shrugged his shoulders. ‘I never refuse an experiment of any
kind,’ he added with an odd change of voice. Come, Denman.’
And the two went off. Langham came to stand beside Rose, while Lord
Rupert, as jovial as ever, and bubbling over with gossip about the
Queen’s speech, appropriated Lady Helen, who was the darling of all
elderly men.
They did not speak. Rose sent him a ray from eyes full of a new divine
shyness. He smiled gently in answer to it, and full of her own young
emotions, and of the effort to conceal it from all the world, she
noticed none of that change which had struck Agnes.
And all the while, if she could have penetrated the man’s silence! An
hour before this moment Langham had vowed that nothing should take him
to Lady Charlotte’s that night. And yet here he was, riveted to
her side, alive like any normal human being to every detail of her
loveliness, shaken to his inmost being by the intoxicating message of
her look, of the transformation which had passed in an instant over the
teasing difficult creature of the last few months.
At Murewell, his chagrin had been _not_ to feel, _not_ to struggle, to
have been cheated out of experience. Well, here is the experience in
good earnest! And Langham is wrestling with it for dear life. And how
little the exquisite child beside him knows of it or of the man on whom
she is spending her first wilful passion! She stands strangely exulting
in her own strange victory over a life, a heart, which had defied and
eluded her. The world throbs and thrills about her, the crowd beside her
is all unreal, the air is full of whisper, of romance.
The thought-reading followed its usual course. A murder and
its detection were given in dumb show. Then it was the turn of
card-guessing, bank-note-finding, and the various other forms of
telepathic hide and seek. Mr. Flaxman superintended them all, his
restless eye wandering every other minute to the further drawing-room in
which the lights had been lowered, catching there always the same patch
of black and white,--Rose’s dress and the dark form beside her.
‘Are you convinced? Do you believe?’ said Rose, merrily looking up at
her companion.
‘In telepathy? Well--so far--I have not got beyond the delicacy and
perfection of Mr. Denman’s muscular sensation. So much I am sure of!’
‘Oh, but your scepticism is ridiculous!’ she said gayly. ‘We know that
some people have an extraordinary power over others.’
‘Yes, that certainly we know!’ he answered, his voice dropping, an odd,
strained note in it. ‘I grant you that.’
She trembled deliciously. Her eyelids fell. They stood together,
conscious only of each other.
‘Now,’ said Mr. Denman, advancing to the doorway between the two
drawing-rooms, ‘I have done all I can--I am exhausted. But let me beg
of you all to go on with some experiments among yourselves. Every fresh
discovery of this power in a new individual is a gain to science. I
believe about one in ten has some share of it. Mr. Flaxman and I will
arrange everything, if anyone will volunteer?’
The audience broke up into groups, laughing, chatting, suggesting this
and that. Presently Lady Charlotte’s loud dictatorial voice made itself
heard, as she stood eyeglass in hand looking round the circle of her
guests.
‘Somebody must venture--we are losing time.’
Then the eyeglass stopped at Rose, who was now sitting tall and radiant
on the sofa, her blue fan across her white knees. ‘Miss Leyburn--you are
always public-spirited--will you be victimized for the good of science?’
The girl got up with a smile.
‘And Mr. Langham--will you see what you can do with Miss Leyburn?
Hugh--we all choose her task, don’t we--then Mr. Langham wills?’
Flaxman came up to explain. Langham had turned to Rose--a wild fury with
Lady Charlotte and the whole affair sweeping through him. But there was
no time to demur; that judicial eye was on them; the large figure and
towering cap bent toward him. Refusal was impossible.
‘Command me!’ he said with a sudden straightening of the form and a
flush on the pale cheek. ‘I am afraid Miss Leyburn will find me a very
bad partner.’
‘Well, now then!’ said Flaxman; ‘Miss Leyburn, will you please go down
into the library while we settle what you are to do?’
She went, and he held the door open for her. But she passed out
unconscious of him--rosy, confused, her eyes bent on the ground.
‘Now, then, what shall Miss Leyburn do?’ asked Lady Charlotte in the
same loud emphatic tone.
‘If I might suggest something quite different from anything that has
been yet tried,’ said Mr. Flaxman, ‘suppose we require Miss Leyburn
to kiss the hand of the little marble statue of Hope in the far
drawing-room. What do you say, Langham?’
‘What you please!’ said Langham, moving up to him. A glance passed
between the two men. In Langham’s there was a hardly sane antagonism and
resentment, in Flaxman’s an excited intelligence.
‘Now then,’ said Flaxman coolly, ‘fix your mind steadily on what Miss
Leyburn is to do--you must take her hand--but except in thought, you
must carefully follow and not lead her. Shall I call her?’
‘Langham abruptly assented. He had a passionate sense of being
watched--tricked. Why were he and she to be made a spectacle for this
man and his friends! A mad irrational indignation surged through him.
Then she was led in blindfolded, one hand stretched out feeling the air
in front of her. The circle of people drew back. Mr. Flaxman and Mr.
Denman prepared, notebook in hand, to watch the experiment. Langham
moved desperately forward.
But the instant her soft trembling hand touched his, as though by
enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, were blotted
out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot everything but her and
this thing she was to do. He had her in his grasp--he was the man, the
master--and what enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying pliant
form! In the distance far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on
tiptoe, one outstretched arm just visible from where he stood.
There was a moment’s silent expectation. Every eye was riveted on the
two figures--on the dark handsome man--on the blindfolded girl.
At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange wavering
motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly parted lips; her
bright color was ebbing. She was conscious of nothing but the grasp in
which her hand was held,--otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state
during the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one under
the partial influence of an anaesthetic; a benumbing grip was laid on
all her faculties; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she
was going.
Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half an hour
or five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing beside a small
marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and her lips had on them
a slight sense of chill as though they had just been laid to something
cold.
She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her was Langham’s
face, a marvellous glow and animation in every line of it.
‘Have I done it?’ she asked in a tremulous whisper.
For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still Bewildered.
He nodded, smiling.
‘I am so glad,’ she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing at
him. There was the most adorable abandon in her whole look and attitude.
He could but just restrain himself from taking her in his arms, and for
one bright flashing instant each saw nothing but the other.
The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the little
old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and through which
they had swept without heeding, was drawn back with a rattle.
‘She has done it! Hurrah!’ cried Mr. Flaxman. ‘What a rush that last
was, Miss Leyburn! You left us all behind!’
Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her eyes. A
rush? She had known nothing about it!
Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report to his aunt,
who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the experiment from the main
drawing-room. His face was a curious mixture of gravity and the keenest
excitement. The gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied
a passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged
certain instincts of breeding and refinement which were now revenging
themselves.
‘Did she do it exactly?’ said Lady Helen eagerly.
‘Exactly,’ he said, standing still.
Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would not see her
look.
‘Lady Charlotte, where is my sister?’ said Rose, coming up from the back
room, looking now nearly as white as her dress.
It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady who lived on
Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had been obliged to go at
the beginning of the last experiment. Agnes, torn between her interest
in what was going on and her desire to get back to her mother, had at
last hurriedly accepted this Mrs. Sherwood’s offer of a seat in her
carriage, imagining that her sister would want to stay a good deal
later, and relying on Lady Charlotte’s promise that she should be safely
put into a hansom.
‘I must go,’ said Rose, putting her hand to her head. How tiring this
is! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman?’
‘Exactly three minutes’ he said, his gaze fixed upon her with an
expression that only Lady Helen noticed.
‘So little! Good-night, Lady Charlotte!’ and giving her hand first to
her hostess, then to Mr. Flaxman’s bewildered sister, she moved away
into the crowd.
‘Hugh, of course you are going down with her?’ exclaimed Lady Charlotte
under her breath. ‘You must. I promised to see her safely off the
promises.’
He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look made a step
forward, but he caught her arm.
‘Don’t spoil sport,’ he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of
discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and
sister.
They looked at him--the one amazed, the other grimly observant--and
caught a slight significant motion of the head toward Langham’s distant
figure.
Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned his back, Lady
Helen’s large astonished eyes followed him to the door.
‘Oh Hugh!’ was all she could say as they came back to her brother.
‘Never mind, Nellie,’ he whispered, touched by the bewildered sympathy
of her look; ‘I will tell you all about it to-morrow. I have not been
behaving well, and am not particularly pleased with myself. But for her
it is all right. Poor, pretty little thing!’
And he walked away into the thick of the conversation.
Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for their
carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming out of the
cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale, child-like fatigue in her
looks which set his heart beating faster than ever.
‘Miss Leyburn, how are you going home?’
‘Will you ask for a hansom, please?’
‘Take my arm,’ he said, and she clung to him through the crush till they
reached the door.
Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street seemed blocked,
a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and shouting men with lanterns.
Which of them suggested, ‘Shall we walk a few steps?’ At any rate, here
they were, out in the wind and the darkness, every step carrying them
farther away from that moving patch of noise and light behind.
‘We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,’ he said. ‘Are you warm?’
‘Perfectly.’
A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the color was coming back.
She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well
shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.
Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was
being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the
glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they
passed within the power of the lamps each saw with noonday distinctness
every line and feature in the other’s face. They swept on-the night,
with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world
about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind
them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen’s voices;
before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight.
London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this
wandering of theirs.
A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could
close it again, an arm was flung around her. Should not speak or move,
she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry wind,
and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.
‘Oh, stay there!’ a voice said close to her ear. ‘Rest there--pale tired
child--pale tired little child!’
That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing
and protecting her from the cold--not kissing her--till at length she
looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.
‘Are you sure at last?’ she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the
far depths of her own thought to his.
‘Sure!’ he said, his expression changing. ‘What can I be sure of? I
am sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor,
insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be
miserably throwing yourself away!’
She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about
him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm,
holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.
‘Do you know,’ he repeated--a tone of intense melancholy replacing the
tone of passion-’how little I have to give you?’
‘I know,’ she answered, her face turned shly away from him, her words
coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. ‘I
know that-that--you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that----’
‘Oh, hush,’ he said, and his voice was full of pain. ‘You know so
little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself,
till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or
be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain
selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell,
though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from
you. There is something paralyzing in me, which is always forbidding
me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical
disability--the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort.
Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony?
Oh, impossible!’ he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him.
‘You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright
and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It
is a crime--an infamy--that I should be speaking to you like this!’
Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling
and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.
‘No, no,’ she said wistfully; ‘not if you love me.’
He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which
the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by
the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of
circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very
passion beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the
self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her
love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.
‘You will not say you love me!’ she cried, with hurrying breath. ‘But I
know--I know--you do.’
Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from
him--‘At least, if you don’t, I am very--very--unhappy.’
The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself
saved, like Faust,--saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment’s
impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to
hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest
shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. She would not
let him take her any farther.
‘I will say nothing,’ she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing
hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, ‘till I see you again.
To-morrow?’
‘To-morrow morning,’ he said, waving his hand to her, and in another
instant he was facing the north wind alone.
He walked on fast toward Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached his
destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where the
fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his large
reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay
littered on the floor.
He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung
shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to
him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of
that walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long
past--incredible almost.
And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a
hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those
soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent,
insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful
man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his
arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love.
Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but
fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal
note also, that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.
So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which
life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt
the torturing thrill of passion--he has evoked such an answer as all
men might envy him,--and fresh from Rose’s kiss, from Rose’s beauty,
the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion,
her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of
gratitude and tenderness; the next--is nothing what it promises to
be?--and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost
some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where
its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?
The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over
the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate
the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that
silent upper room. Nothing caught Langham’s ear. He was absorbed in the
dialogue which was to decide his life.
Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of
himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.
‘But I love her!--I love her! A little courage--a little effort--and I
too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere
contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me
back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not
forced her love--it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it,
if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope
thrown to him?’
To which the pale spectre self said scornfully--
‘_Courage_ and _effort_ may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary.
They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two
others--_habit_ and _character_. Slave as you are of habit, of the
character you have woven for yourself--out of years of deliberate
living--what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can
re-create! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden,
but for God’s sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you
with theirs!’
‘But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so
warm a heart! Poor child--poor child! I have played on her pity. I have
won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face--oh
monstrous--oh inhuman!’ and the cold drops stood on his forhead.
But the other self was inexorable. ‘You have acted as you were bound to
act--as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true
human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the
critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first.
What in God’s name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such
ambitions? You are poor--you must go back to Oxford--you must take up
the work your soul loathes--grow more soured, more embittered--maintain
a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted,
and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even
that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from
the world! Think of the little house--the children--the money
difficulties--she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,--you
incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull
rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck--submit--refuse
that long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time.
_Kismet!--Kismet!_’
And spread out before Langham’s shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal
Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in
the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures,
two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with old
and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.
The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, cold and
bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and
terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of
manhood, had been alike powerless to save.
The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table
and wrote.
Then for hours afterward he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue
broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was
a base thing which he had done--it was also a strange thing
psychologically--and at intervals he tried to understand it--to track it
to its causes.
At nine o’clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a
commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him
with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.
On his way back he passed a gunsmith’s, and stood looking fascinated
at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes
gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the
bounds of tragedy--become farcical even.
‘I should only stand a month--arguing--with my finger on the trigger.’
In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of
him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He
gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging
books and boxes about as though he were packing.
A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27,
looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The
ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through
the fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was
clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose’s mood answered to
that of nature.
Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs.
Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two,
was in a chair by the fire, reading some letters forwarded to her from
Bedford Square.
He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an
expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his
interview, with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels
herself happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for
much of her behavior to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been,
how unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a
fresh blow! ‘But afterward, when she has got over it--when she knows
that it makes me happy,--that nothing else would make me happy,--then
she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all
over again, from the beginning. I won’t be angry or hard over it--poor
Cathie!’
And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for
what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light
catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly
toward her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady
Charlotte’s house the night before had been a very different matter from
the royally attended leave takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which
generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of
her head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. ‘I have
never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.’
But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself.
So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is
dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by
the clamor, will take up very much the same line.
What matter! The girl’s spirit seemed to rise against all the world.
There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself,
a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to
overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been
expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with
a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the
artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.
Besides--success! To make a man hope and love, and live again--_that_
shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling,
her heart very soft.
Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged
passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterward the
dining-room door opened.
‘A letter for you, Miss,’ said the maid.
Rose took it--glanced at the hand-writing. A bright flush--a
surreptitious glance at Catherine, who sat absorbed in a wandering
letter from, Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window
and opened it.
Catherine read on, gathering up, the Murewell names and details as
some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered
field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other
inmate in it, struck her.
‘Rose,’ she said, looking up, ‘was that someone brought you a note?’
The girl turned with a start--a letter fell to the ground. She made a
faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.
‘Rose--darling!’ cried Catherine, springing up, ‘are you ill?’
Rose looked at her with a perfectly colorless fixed face, made a feeble
negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front
of her, let her head fall upon them.
Catherine stood over her aghast. ‘My darling--what is it? Come and lie
down--take this water.’
She put some close to her sister’s hand, but Rose pushed it away. ‘Don’t
talk to me, ‘she said, with difficulty.
Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek
resting against her sister’s shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What
could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the
letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at
once recognized Langham’s handwriting. But before she could combine any
rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered
herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister’s arm.
‘I was startled,’ she said, a forced smile on her white lips. ‘Last
night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him--I expected him here this
morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform
me that--he made a mistake--and he was very sorry! So am I! It is
so--so--bewildering!’
She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with
cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The older
sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her pressed the slim
irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips
quivering.
‘That he should _dare!_’ she cried. ‘Rose--my poor little Rose?’
‘Don’t blame him!’ said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while
Catherine fell into the arm-chair again. ‘It doesn’t seem to count, from
you--you have always been so ready to blame him!’
Her brow contracted--she looked frowning into the fire--her still
colorless mouth working painfully.
Catherine was cut to the heart. ‘Oh Rose!’ she said, holding out her
hands, ‘I will blame no one, dear, I seem hard--but I love you so. Oh,
tell me--you would have told we everything once!’
There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless
right hand and put it into her sister’s out-stretched palms. But she
made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell toward
Catherine.
‘Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him--he kissed me--I could
kill myself and him.’
Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour
that followed--the little familiar morning sounds in and about the
house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells
ringing--and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental struggle
which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two
strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose--a sense of shook, of
wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation--and a strange intervening
passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have
been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder questioned, and
the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly piece the story
together, nor could she find the answer to the question filling her own
indignant heart, ‘Does she love him?’
At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood,
a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from
eyes that were dry and feverish.
‘If I could only be angry,--downright angry,’ she said, more to herself
than Catherine--‘it would do one good.’
‘Give others leave to be angry for you!’ cried Catherine.
‘Don’t!’ said Rose, almost fiercely drawing herself away. ‘You don’t
know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you
must--you misjudge him--you always have. No, no’--and she nervously
crushed the letter in her hand--‘not yet. But you shall read it some
time--you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It
is due to him, perhaps due to me too,’ and a hot flush transfigured her
paleness for an instant. ‘Oh, my head! Why does one’s mind effect one’s
body like this? It shall not--it is humiliating! “Miss Leyburn has been
jilted and cannot see visitors,”--that is the kind of thing. Catherine,
when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me
practise my last Raff?--I am going. Good-by.’
She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or
she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.
‘Miserable!’ she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, ‘I must go and lie
down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine,
not a word to anyone but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not
to speak to me! No, don’t come--I will go alone.’
And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her
room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the
letter in her hand,--the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had
for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished
sentence pleaded with her,--even in the first smart of her wrong--for
pardon, for compassion, as toward something maimed and paralyzed from
birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over
her cheeks.
‘I was not good enough,--I was not good enough--God would not let me!’
And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper
crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what! _To
save_?
How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the
task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that
shakes her as she kneels and weeps,--nor is it mere wounded woman’s
pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she
is--more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive--he could
not have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces
of character stir within her. She feels herself judged,--and with
a righteous judgement-issuing inexorably from the facts of life and
circumstance.
Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert who had come over
early to see how the household fared.
Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonishment and
dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had gone out of his mind
for some time. He had been busy in his East End work. Catherine had been
silent. Over how many matters they would once have discussed with open
heart was she silent now?
‘I ought to have been warned,’ he said, with quick decision--‘if you
knew this was going on. I am the only man, among you, and I understand
Langham better than the rest of you. I might have looked after the poor
child a little.’
Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart the more.
However, what had she known? She had seen nothing unusual of late,
nothing to make her think a crisis was approaching. Nay, she had
flattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, whom she liked, was gaining ground.
Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be done. Could
anything be done?
‘I must go and see him,’ he said presently. ‘Yes, dearest, I must.
Impossible the thing should be left so! I am his old friend,--almost her
guardian. You say she is in great trouble--why it may shadow her whole
life! No--he must explain things to us--he is bound to--he shall. It
may be something comparatively trivial in the way after all--money or
prospects or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you
say? It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for
her--but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him----’
He turned to her--appealing, remonstrating. Catherine stood pale and
rigid. Incredible that he should think it right to intermeddle--to take
the smallest step toward reversing so plain a declaration of God’s will!
She could not sympathize--she would not consent. Robert watched her in
painful indecision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to her true
reason for finding some comfort even in her sister’s trouble--that he
seemed to her mindful only of the passing human misery, indifferent to
the eternal risk.
They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched up his hat.
‘I must go,’ he said in a low voice; ‘it is right.’
And he went--stepping, however, with the best intentions in the world,
into a blunder.
Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had left her.
Then someone came into the room--someone with pale looks and flashing
eyes. It was Agnes.
‘She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,’ said the
girl--her whole, even cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. ‘What
are such creatures made for, Catherine--why do they exist?’
Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty morning streets
to Langham’s lodgings. His mood was very hot by the time he reached
his destination, and he climbed the staircase to Langham’s room in some
excitement. When he tried to open the door after the answer to his knock
biding him enter, he found something barring the way. ‘Wait a little,’
said the voice inside, ‘I will move the case.’
With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. Seeing his
visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre astonishment. The room was
littered with books and packing-cases with which he had been busy.
‘Come in,’ he said, not offering to shake hands.
Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, stood
leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to him. Langham
paused opposite to him, his waving jet-black hair falling forward
over the marble-pale face which had been Robert’s young ideal of manly
beauty.
The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong is old
association, that Robert’s feeling toward his friend had always remained
in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate toward the don. His
sense of it now filled him with a curious awkwardness.
‘I know why you are come,’ said Langham slowly, after a scrutiny of his
visitor.
‘I am here by a mere accident,’ said the other, thinking perfect
frankness best. ‘My wife was present when her sister received your
letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had gone up to ask after them
all, and came on to you,--of course on my own responsibility entirely!
Rose knows nothing of my coming--nothing of what I have to say.’
He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man before him.
Whatever he had done during the past twenty-four hours he had clearly
had the grace to suffer in the doing of it.
‘You can have nothing to say!’ said Langham, leaning against the
chimney-piece and facing him with black, darkly-burning eyes. ‘You know
me.’
Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the despair, all the
bitterness hidden under the languid student’s exterior of every day had,
as it were, risen to the surface. He stood at bay, against his friend,
against himself.
‘No!’ exclaimed Robert, stoutly, ‘I do not know you in the sense you
mean. I do not know you as the man who could beguile a girl on to a
confession of love, and then tell her that for you marriage was too
great a burden to be faced!’
Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. Robert
repented him a little. Langham’s strange individuality always impressed
him against his will.
‘I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,’ he went on, ‘though I
confess to being very hot! I came to try and find out--for myself only,
mind--whether what prevents you from following up what I understand
happened last night is really a matter of feeling, or a matter of
outward circumstance. If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling
for Rose is not what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion
about your conduct:--but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you
have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply afraid
of yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities of practical
married life, I cannot help be begging you to talk the matter over with
me, and let us face it together. Whether Rose would ever, under any
circumstances, got over the shock of this morning--I have not the
remotest idea. But--’ and he hesitated, ‘it seems the feeling you
appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well
what havoc a thing of this kind may make in a girl’s life. I don’t say
it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not
hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I
am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to
take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!’
There was a moment’s dead silence.
‘You cannot pretend to believe,’ said Langham, at last, with the same
sombre self-containedness, ‘that a marriage with me would be for your
sister-in-law’s happiness?’
‘I don’t know what to believe!’ cried Robert. ‘No,’ he added frankly,
‘no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the
idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; _á priori_, I never
thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when
a thing is wholly in the air, looks very different when a man has
committed himself and another, as you have done.’
Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from
his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.
‘Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as
you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even
greater fiend and weakling than you think me, if, in cold blood, I
could let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust
myself--you may think of the statement as you like--I should make her
_miserable_. Last night I had not parted from her an hour, before I
was utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are any masters. I
believe,’--he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond
Robert, ‘I could even grow to _hate_ what came between me and them!’
Was it the last word of the man’s life? It struck Robert with a kind of
shiver.
‘Pray heaven,’ he said with a groan, getting up to go, you may not have
made her miserable already!’
‘Did it hurt her so much?’ asked Langham, almost inaudibly, turning
away, Robert’s tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in
the subtle brain tissue.
‘I have not seen her,’ said Robert abruptly; ‘but when I came in, I
found my wife--who has no light tears--weeping for her sister.’
His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too
pitiful and too intimate for speech.
Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.
‘Good-by!’ said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having
got foolishly through a fool’s errand. ‘As I said to you before, what
Rose’s feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she
would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And
I see that you will not talk to me--you will not take me into your
confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend.
And--and--are you going? What does this mean?’
He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.
‘I am going back to Oxford,’ said the other briefly. ‘I cannot stay in
these rooms, in these streets.’
Robert was sore perplexed. What real--nay, what terrible suffering--in
the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt
himself wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly
unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over
human life.
‘It is very hard--’ he said hurriedly, moving nearer--‘that our old
friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You
are always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council
sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities?
Your own perceptions are all warped!’
Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and
one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.
‘I will write to you, Elsmere,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘speech
is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.’
Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.
But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the day sitting dumb and
immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again more feverishly
than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose, suffering and
paling.
And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus
of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married
life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life
had been so long purely intellectual, that this sudden strain of passion
and fierce practical interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his
mental balance.
He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last rehearsal at
Searle House. Afterward her custom was to come back from St. James’s
Park to High Street, Kensington, and walk up the hill to her own home.
He knew it, for on two occasions after these rehearsals he had been at
Lerwick Gardens, waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she
go this afternoon? A subtle instinct told him that she would.
It was nearly six o’clock that evening when Rose, stepping out from the
High Street station, crossed the main road and passed into the darkness
of one of the streets leading up the hill. She had forced herself to
go and she would go alone. But as she toiled along she felt weary and
bruised all over. She carried with her a heart of lead--a sense of utter
soreness--a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only
thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent
memory of Mr. Flaxman’s manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill?
She flushed hotly at the thought, and then realized again, with a sense
of childish comfort, the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in
shielding her from any unnecessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of
the hand with which he had put her into the cab that took her to the
Underground.
Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she saw a man
standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was Langham.
‘You!’ she cried, stopping.
He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway of a largo
detached, house not far off, which threw a certain illumination over
him, though it left her in the shadow. He said nothing, but he held out
both his hands mutely. She fancied rather than saw the pale emotion of
his look.
‘What?’ she said, after a pause. ‘You think to-night is last night! You
and I have nothing to say to each other, Mr. Langham.’
‘I have every thing to say,’ he answered, under his breath; ‘I have
committed a crime--a villainy.’
‘And it is not pleasant to you?’ she said, quivering. ‘I am sorry--I
cannot help you. But you are wrong--it was no crime--it was necessary
and profitable like the doses of one’s childhood! Oh! I might have
guessed you would do this! No, Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an
interesting decline. I have just played my concerto very fairly. I
shall not disgrace myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at
peace--I have learnt several things to-day that have been salutary--very
salutary.’
She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him--unresisting,
helplessly silent.
‘Don’t come any farther,’ she said resolutely after a minute, turning
to face him. ‘Let us be quits! I was a tempting easy prey. I bear you no
malice. And do not let me break your friendship with Robert; that began
before this foolish business--it should outlast it. Very likely _we_
shall be friends again, like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine
your wound is very deep, and----’
But no! Her lips closed; not even for pride’s sake, and retort’s sake,
will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first love.
She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see nothing among
her furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. The whole personality
seemed centred in the voice--the half-mocking, vibrating voice. He took
her hand and dropped it instantly.
‘You do not understand,’ he said, hopelessly--feeling as though every
phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally fatuous, equally
shameful. ‘Thank heaven you never will understand.’
‘I think I do,’ she said with a change of tone, and paused. He raised
his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. What _was_ the
expression in them? It was yearning--but not the yearning of passion.
‘If things had been different--if one could change the self--if the past
were nobler!--was that the cry of them? A painful humility--a boundless
pity--the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither measure
nor explain--these were some of the impressions which passed from her to
him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her transformed on
the farther side, with, as it were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature,
than had ever yet been hers.
He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for an instant to
his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and was gone.
He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his books, his
only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever tampered with any other?
‘_It was not love--not love!_’ he said to himself, with an accent of
infinite relief as he sank into his chair. ‘_Her_ smart will heal.’
BOOK VI. NEW OPENINGS.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Ten days after Langham’s return to Oxford, Elsmere received a
characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to
be considered as still existing or at an end. The calm and even proud
melancholy of the letter showed a considerable subsidence of that state
of half-frenzied irritation and discomfort in which Elsmere had last
seen him. The writer, indeed, was clearly settling down into another
period of pessimistic quietism such as that which had followed upon
his first young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second
period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all the vital
forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, half-angry,
half-relenting, put down the letter, he felt the conviction that no
fresh influence from the outside world would ever again be allowed to
penetrate the solitude of Langham’s life. In comparison with the man who
had just addressed him, the tutor of his undergraduate recollections was
a vigorous and sociable human being.
The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible, affectionate
letter in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings of resentment,
he said, he could not realize, now that the crisis was past, that he
cared less about his old friend. ‘As far as we two are concerned, lot
us forget it all. I could hardly say this, you will easily imagine, if I
thought you had done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife and
I agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to her
own surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no doubt,
before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal to her past.
But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send you our opinion for
what it is worth, believing that it will and must be welcome to you.’
Rose, however was not so long in admitting it. One marked result of that
now vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of that February
morning was a great softening toward Catherine. Whatever might have
been Catherine’s intense relief when Robert returned from his abortive
mission, she never afterward let a disparaging word toward Langham
escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy itself, and
Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, and against the
noisy world of flattery and excitement in which she had been living,
turned to Catherine as she had never done since she was a tiny child.
She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square drawing-room
pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality recovering,
like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing influence of
thought and silence.
One day when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine by
saying with one of her old, odd smiles,--
‘Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of
hullucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a
fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great
astonishment, there is no bone broken!’
And she held herself back from Catherine’s knee lest her sister should
attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow
an answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush
after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.
In truth, Rose Leyburn’s girlish passion for Edward Langham had been
a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had
crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and
lounging when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of
her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities.
His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very
strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl’s
immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the
interval of angry, resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it.
As to the months in London, they had been one long duel between
herself and him--a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and
uncertainty, but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained
a large portion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating
victory, Langham’s endangered habits and threatened individuality
had asserted themselves once for all. And from the whole long
struggle--passion, exultation, and crushing defeat--it often seemed to
her that she had gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new
birth of character, a soul!
It may easily be imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen
interest in Langham’s disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle
House rehearsal he had awaited Rose’s coming in a state of extraordinary
irritation. He expected a blushing _fiancée_, in a fool’s paradise,
asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a
decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in
him. And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some
double-edged congratulations.
Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale, tired girl
who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and
said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.
His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way
up to her, and was her watchful, unobtrusive guardian for the rest of
the afternoon.
He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient
conjecture.
‘As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had
an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he
did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot--and if he did,
_a fortiori_, for clearly she is _miserable_. But what a brave child!
How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that _I_ saw
nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!’
Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and
by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had
left London.
Gone! But not without a crisis--that was evident. During the din of
preparation for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings
which it entailed, now at the Varleys’, now at the house of some other
connection of his--for the concert was the work of his friends, and
given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel--he had
many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft, indefinable
change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of
sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost
her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been
so marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did
everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was
to his fancy absent and _distraite_, pursuing, through the tumult of
which she was often the central figure, some inner meditations of which
neither he or anyone else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over
the girl’s light, self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of
experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she
was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.
Flaxman’s guesses as to what had happened came often very near the
truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received
his own conjectures amused himself.
‘To think,’ he said to himself once with a long breath ‘that that
creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without
any one of the kickings due to him!’
Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude
toward this same ‘creature,’ toward the man who had released a prize he
had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. _Free_ again--to
be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.
His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly
at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions
carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state
of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask
of her friends was not to be made to feel.
He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady
Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh’s behalf,
Lady Helen had been dumfounded by the sudden emergence of Langham
at Lady Charlotte’s party for their common discomfiture. Who was the
man?--why?--what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of
giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love,
and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was
probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen
made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a
whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected,
that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf
allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for
him which at the moment he could not play for himself.
So in the cheeriest, daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother
and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked
Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to
Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally,
to Mrs. Pierson’s disgust, became the girls’ chief chaperon in a fast
filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend or
amuse his sister’s _protégées_--always there, but never in the way. He
was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all
the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a
bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone toward her which made his
companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced
Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose’s health, a
few unexplained stares and ‘humphs’ and grunts, a few irrelevant
disquisitions on her nephew’s merits of head and heart, were all she was
able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething with a mass
of sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant to give
expression--anger with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous
as to prefer some one else to Hugh; terror with Hugh for his persistent
disregard of her advice and the Duke’s feelings; and a burning desire to
know the precise why and wherefore of Langham’s disappearance. She was
too lofty to become Rose’s aunt without a struggle, but she was not too
lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs.
But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited most by
Rose’s shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming over, restless under
her own smart, would fall to watching the trial of the woman and the
wife, and would often perforce forget herself and her smaller woes in
the pity of it. She stayed in Bedford Square once for a week, and then
for the first time she realized the profound change which had passed
over the Elsmeres’ life. As much tenderness between husband and wife as
ever--perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though from an
instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from each other and
from the world. But Robert went his way, Catherine hers. Their spheres
of work lay far apart; their interests were diverging fast; and though
Robert at any rate was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh
invading silences were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the
number of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in
the East End. under Murray Edwardes’ auspices. He was already known to
certain circles as a seceder from the Church who was likely to become
both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the ‘Nineteenth
Century,’ on disputed points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made
their mark, and several of the veterans of philosophical debate
had already taken friendly and flattering notice of the new writer.
Meanwhile Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon’s Sunday-school, and
attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert’s energies
became, the more she suffered, and the more the small daily
opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could hardly bear to
hear him talk about his work, and she never opened the number of the
‘Nineteenth Century’ which contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to
ask her to read them.
Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appearance in R----,
with a cordiality and a helpfulness of the most self-effacing kind.
Robert had begun with assuring his new friend that he saw no chance, at
any rate for the present, of his formally joining the Unitarians.
‘I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet! And I own I look
rather for a combination from many sides than for the development of any
now existing sect. But, supposing,’ he added, smiling, ‘supposing I do
in time set up a congregation and a service of my own, is there really
room for you and me? Should I not be infringing on a work I respect a
great deal too much for anything of the sort?’
Edwardes laughed the notion to scorn.
The parish, as a whole, contained 20,000 persons. The existing churches,
which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid’s, were miserably attended,
provided accommodation at the out-side for 3,000. His own chapel held
400, and was about half full.
‘You and I may drop our lives here,’ he said, his pleasant friendliness
darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy which London work seems
to develop even in the most buoyant of men, ‘and only a few hundred
persons, at the most, be ever the wiser. Begin with us--then make your
own circle.’
And he forthwith carried off his visitor to the point from which, as it
seemed to him, Elsmere’s work might start, viz., a lecture-room half a
mile from his own chapel, where two helpers of his had just established
an independent venture.
Murray Edwardes had at the time an interesting and miscellaneous staff
of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to religious opinions, but
in general the men who volunteered under him--civil servants, a young
doctor, a briefless barrister or two--were men who had drifted from
received beliefs, and found pleasure and freedom in working for and
with him they could hardly have found elsewhere. The two who had planted
their outpost in what seemed to them a particularly promising corner of
the district were men of whom Edwardes knew personally little. ‘I have
really not much concern with what they do,’ he explained to Elsmere,
‘except that they got a small share of our funds. But I know they want
help, and if they will take you in, I think you will make something of
it.’
After a tramp through the muddy winter streets, they came upon a new
block of warehouses, in the lower windows of which some bills announced
a night-school for boys and men. Here, to judge from the commotion round
the doors, a lively scene was going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs
were hammering at the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the
keyhole. Inside, as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, by dint of good
humor and strong shoulders, had succeeded in shoving their way through
and shutting the door behind them, they found a still more animated
performance in progress. The schoolroom was in almost total darkness;
the pupils, some twenty in number, were racing about, like so many
shadowy demons, pelting each other and their teachers with the ‘dips’
which, as the buildings were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been
provided to light them through their three R’s. In the middle stood the
two philanthropists they were in search of, freely bedaubed with
tallow, one employed in boxing a boy’s ears, the other in saving a huge
ink-bottle whereon some enterprising spirit had just laid hands by
way of varying the rebel ammunition. Murray Edwardes, who was in his
element, went to the rescue at once, helped by Robert. The boy-minister,
as he looked, had been, in fact, ‘bow’ of the Cambridge eight, and
possessed muscles which men twice his size might have envied. In three
minutes he had put a couple of ringleaders into the street by the scruff
of the neck, relit a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest of
the rioters in hand. Elsmere backed him ably, and in a very short time
they had cleared the premises.
Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off into a shout
of laughter.
‘My dear Wardlaw, my condolences to your coat! But I don’t believe if
I were a rough myself I could resist “dips.” Let me introduce a
friend--Mr. Elsmere--and if you will have him, a recruit for your work.
It seems to me another pair of arms will hardly come amiss to you!’
The short red-haired man addressed shook hands with Elsmere,
scrutinizing him from under bushy eyebrows. He was panting and
beplastered with tallow, but the inner man was evidently quite
unruffled, and Elsmere liked the shrewd Scotch face and gray eyes.
‘It isn’t only a pair of arms we want,’ he remarked dryly, ‘but a bit of
science behind them. Mr. Elsmere, I observed, can use his.’
Then he turned to a tall, affected-looking youth with a large nose and
long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands upon his sides, his
eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the wreck and disarray of the
schoolroom.
‘Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you? My friend and
helper,--Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, won’t you, a minute? They’ve
left us the chairs, I perceive, and there’s a spark or two of fire. Do
you smoke? Will you light up?’
The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw and Elsmere
walked home together. It had been all arranged. Mackay, a curious,
morbid fellow, who had thrown himself into Unitarianism and charity
mainly out of opposition to an orthodox and bourgeois family, and who
had a great idea of his own social powers, was somewhat grudging and
ungracious through it all. But Elsmere’s proposals were much too good
to be refused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his
clergyman’s experience, and as much money as might be wanted. Wardlaw
listened to him cautiously for an hour, took stock of the whole man
physically and morally, and finally said, as he very quietly and
deliberately knocked the ashes out of his pipe,--
‘All right, I’m your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, I vote we make
you captain of this venture.’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ said Elsmere. ‘In London I am a novice; I come to
learn, not to lead.’
Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mackay faintly
endorsed his companion’s offer, and the party broke up.
That was in January. In two months from that time, by the natural force
of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his own most sincere wish
to avoid a premature leadership, had become the head and heart of
the Elgood Street undertaking, which had already assumed much larger
proportions. Wardlaw was giving him silent approval and invaluable
help, while young Mackay was in the first uncomfortable stages of a
hero-worship which promised to be exceedingly good for him.
CHAPTER XXXVIII.
There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of
Elsmere’s venture in North R---- one of which may just be noticed here.
Wardlaw, his predecessor and colleague, had speculatively little or
nothing in common with Elsmere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted
and Orthodox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for
the philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging to far
stranger and remoter faiths.
By profession, he was a barrister, with a small and struggling practice.
On ibis practice, however, he had married, and his wife, who had been a
doctor’s daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardors as
himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell
Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to
do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been
seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a
dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative
to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them
was done, she would throw herself into charity organization cases, into
efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest
acts of ministry toward the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her
face, which but for the stress of London, of labor, and of poverty,
would have had a blunt fresh-colored dairymaid’s charm, became symbols
of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining
men and women.
The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings
to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe
even to each other that life might have brighter things to show
them than the neighborhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain
narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances
like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound
became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our
generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us
who are but moderately influenced by Comte’s philosophy, and can make
nothing of the religion of Humanity.
Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere’s work in North R----.
In spite of Robert’s efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner
gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive
something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth.
And we shall see that in time Robert’s energies took a direction which
Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning
Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of honoring.
In the fast place, Wardlaw’s choice of the Elgood Street room as a fresh
centre for civilizing effort had been extremely shrewd. The district
lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number of
promising elements.
Close by the dingy street which sheltered their school-room, rose the
great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north
side of the river to Doulton’s immense works on the south. The old
winding streets near it, and the blocks of workman’s dwellings recently
erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its
innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of
skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation,
earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great
many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been
largely instrumental in establishing within easy distance of their
houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as
the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working,
when Robert, after a few weeks’ work in the place, set up a popular
historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and
white poster in the school-room windows, it was the potters who provided
him with his first hearers.
The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock
laborers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran
up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and
a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together
in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and
specialized training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from
which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these
well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a
mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the
river-side streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street,
in the neighborhood of St. Wilfrid’s.
St. Wilfrid’s at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very
successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one
end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents
who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses, of which the
district was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were
chiefly drawn.
The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and
persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations
went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and
‘process’ in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where
it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its
natural fruits.
A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere’s
mind--after he had been working some six weeks in the district--the
forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid’s was the very church where
Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten
wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of
inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had
written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately
after his interview with the Bishop. The letter had remained unanswered,
and it was by now tolerably clear that the silence of its recipient
meant a withdrawal from all friendly relations with the writer.
Elsmere’s affectionate, sensitive nature took such things hardly,
especially as he knew that Newcome’s life was becoming increasingly
difficult end embittered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine
how Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend’s ‘infidel
propaganda,’ established on the very ground where he himself had all but
died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over.
But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London life which was
not without its uses to character. Hitherto he had always swum with the
stream, cheered by the support of all the great and prevailing English
traditions. Here, he and his few friends were fighting a solitary
fight apart from the organized system of English religion and English
philanthropy. All the elements of culture and religion already existing
in the place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid’s passed there
with cold averted eyes; the old and _fainéant_ rector of the parish
church very soon let it be known what he thought as to the taste of
Elsmere’s intrusion on his parish, or as to the eternal chances of those
who might take either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious.
His enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the Church,
in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly
no relation at all to the facts. But every little incident in this new
struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost
other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high Utopian vision
drove him on from day to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be,
alone and for himself, approved only by conscience and the inward voice.
Tasks in Hours of insight willed
Can be in Hours of gloom fulfilled;
and it was that moment by the river which worked in him through all the
prosaic and perplexing details of this hew attempt to carry enthusiasm
into life.
It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of London the
chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the _upper working
class_. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and
intelligent among the working class holds itself aloof--broadly
speaking--from all existing spiritual agencies, whether of Church or
Dissent.
Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically no hold
whatever; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar
material in the great towns of the North. Toward religion in general
the prevailing attitude is, one of indifference tinged with hostility.
‘Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous
proportion belong to the working class, and among them, Church and
Dissent nowhere--_Christianity not in possession_. Such is the estimate
of an Evangelical of our day; and similar laments come from all parts
of the capital. The Londoner is on the whole more conceited, more
prejudiced, more given over to crude theorizing, than his North-country
brother, the mill-hand, whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous
and tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline
of intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly
speaking, means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its
contradictions and absurdities; he has no dread of losing what he
never valued; his sense of antiquity, of history, is nil; and his
life supplies him with excitement enough without the stimulants of
‘other-worldliness.’ Religion has been on the whole irrationally
presented to him, and the result on his part has been an irrational
breach with the whole moral and religious order of ideas.
But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which
welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same
elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working
class-elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. The more
intermingling of races, which a modern city shares with those old
towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and
receptiveness, whether for good or evil.
As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despondency
produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun
to wear off; Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and
ardor of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with Religion.
He made himself quickly felt in the night school, and as soon as he
possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room,
on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin
the storytelling which had been so great a success at Murewell. The
story-telling struck the neighborhood as a great novelty. At first
only a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and
draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive sway. The next night
the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room
was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans,
that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for
story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.
In these performances Elsmere’s aim had always been two-fold--the
rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power
pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it
would be merely some feature of London life itself--the history of a
great fire, for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in
the river; a string of instances as true and homely and realistic
as they could be made of the way in which the poor help one another.
Sometimes it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties
of particular trades--a colliery explosion and the daring of the
rescuers; incidents from the life of the great Northern iron-works, or
from that of the Lancashire factories; or stories of English country
life and its humors, given sometimes in dialect--Devonshire, or
Yorkshire, or Cumberland--for which he had a special gift. Or, again,
he would take the sea and its terrors--the immortal story of the
‘Birkenhead;’ the deadly plunge of the ‘Captain;’ the records of the
lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring
step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the
hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which
Mount Blanc might be buried without showing even his top-most snow-field
above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple
frolic and fancy of fiction--fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or
Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas;
to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous
biography of some man of the people--of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas
Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle.
One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing
from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new
acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo’s escape from the Château
d’If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an
admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid’s hearing
vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and
this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At
the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious
conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it
often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or
Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them.
His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current
‘isms.’ Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church
divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions,
but it should be added that with equal regularity _he_ dropped
the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very
decipherable person in religious matters--as Rose had already
discovered.
The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid’s to the bare
warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough.
Here were no bowed figures, no _recueillement_. In the blaze of crude
light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the
platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long
arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the
attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a
band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their neighbors
had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the room cried out
for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When
Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to out the strings
of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at last he
reached _terra firma_ there was a ringing cheer.
‘What is he, d’ye know?’ Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbor, as
Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb
in the story-teller’s direction meanwhile. ‘Seems like a parson somehow.
But he ain’t a parson.’
‘Not he,’ said the other laconically. ‘Knows better. Most of ‘em as
comes down ‘ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as
an egg’s full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn’t catch _me_ here.
Never heard him say anything in the “dear brethren” sort of style, and
I’ve been ‘ere most o’ these evenings and to his lectures besides.’
‘Perhaps he’s one of your d--d sly ones,’ said the first speaker
dubiously. ‘Means to shovel it in by-and-by.’
‘Well, I don’t know as I couldn’t stand it if he did,’ returned his
companion. ‘He’d let other fellows have their say, anyhow.’
Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young man, a
gas-fitter--to judge by the contents of the basket he seemed to have
brought in with him on his way from work--with eyes like live birds, and
small emaciated features. During the story Flaxman had noticed the man’s
thin begrimed hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling
with excitement.
Another project of Robert’s, started as soon as he had felt his way a
little in the district, was the scientific Sunday-school. This was the
direct result of a paragraph in Huxley’s Lay Sermons, where the hint of
such a school was first thrown out. However, since the introduction of
science teaching into the Board schools, the novelty and necessity of
such a supplement to a child’s ordinary education is not what it was.
Robert set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the
streets in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for
fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dreadfuls. A little
simple chemical and electrical experiment went down greatly; so did
a botany class, to which Elsmere would come armed with two stores
of flowers, one to be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed
according to memory and attention. A year before he had had a number of
large colored plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a
Kew assistant. Those he would often set up on a large screen, or put
up on the walls, till the dingy school-room became a bower of superb
blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple and orange. And
then--still by the help of pictures--he would take his class on a
tour through strange lands, talking to them of China or Egypt or South
America, till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pyramids or
through the Pampas, or into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as
the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper.
Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, while almost
all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. He knew it, and had
laid his plans for such a result. Such work as he had at heart has no
chance with the lowest in the social scale, in its beginnings. It must
have something to work upon, and must penetrate downward. He only can
receive who already hath--there is no profounder axiom.
And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brooding, still
waiting. At last the spark fell.
There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street rose the famous
Workmen’s Club of North R----. It had been started by a former Liberal
clergyman of the parish, whose main object however, had been to train
the workmen to manage it for themselves. His training had been, in fact
too successful. Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it
had come to be a centre of active, nay, brutal, opposition to the Church
and faith which had originally fostered it. In organic connection with
it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist
lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under
its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing
with the coarsest freethinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll’s books
occupying the place of honor in the window and the ‘Freethinker’ placard
flaunting at the door. Inside there was still more highly seasoned
literature even than the ‘Freethinker’ to be had. There was in
particular a small half-penny paper which was understood to be in some
sense the special organ of the North R---- Club; which was at any rate
published close by, and edited by one of the workmen founders of the
club. This unsavory sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised
through the parish as Lent drew on toward Passion week, and the
exertions of St. Wilfrid’s and of the other churches, which were being
spurred on by the Ritualists’ success, became more apparent. Soon it
seemed to Robert that every bit of boarding and every waste wall was
filled with the announcement:--
‘Read “Faith and Fools.” Enormous success. Our “Comic Life of Christ”
now nearly completed. Quite the best thing of its kind going. Woodcut
this week--Transfiguration.’
His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Passion week he left the
night school about ten o’clock. His way led him past the club, which was
brilliantly lit up, and evidently in full activity. Round the door there
was a knot of workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and
the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of ‘Faith and Fools,’
and were showing the week’s woodcut to those about them, with chuckles
and spurts of laughter.
Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and stirred by a
sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, And asked for the paper.
The woman handed it to him, and gave him his change with a business-like
_sang-froid_, which struck on his tired nerves almost more painfully
then the laughing brutality of the men he had just passed.
Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under
a lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll
emanating from Mary Magdalene’s mouth, in particular, containing
obscenities which cannot be quoted here.
Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.
‘This is Wednesday in Passion week,’ he said to himself. The day after
to-morrow is Good Friday!’
He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself
within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But
he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East,
among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany,
the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with
the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical
perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum
and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem
preaching--all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life
within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of
dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and
befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace
such a temper of mind toward such an object--present and militant as
that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout
modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love
Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though
he could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately
discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from
simplicity and verity?--is it the last and most terrible illustration of
a great axiom! ‘_Faith has a judge--in truth?_’
He went home and lay awake half the light pondering. If he could but
pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his
youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are
alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will
not bear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more
painfully from exercising.
The next night was a storytelling night. He spent it in telling the
legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait
a moment, and there and then--with the tender, imaginative Franciscan
atmosphere, as it were, still about them--he delivered a short and
vigorous protest, in the name of decency, good feeling, and common-sense
against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate
neighborhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had
approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting
together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant
grimace or two.
When Robert ceased speaking, one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up
and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin
lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a
Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He
complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a
good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an
attack upon an institution in which many of them were deeply interested;
and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the
matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.
The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the
men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday
visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week.
Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with
him had an unusual piquancy.’
Robert sprang up. ‘When you will,’ he said. ‘I am ready to stand by what
I have just said in the face of you all, it you care to hear it.’
Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval
of the club committee, and Elsmere’s audience separated in a glow of
curiosity and expection.