‘Didn’t I tell ye?’ the gas-fitter’s snarling friend said to him.

‘Scratch him and you find the parson. Then upper-class folk, when they

come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls, as

those Injuns he was talking about last week hunt for scalps. They can’t

go to heaven without a certain number of ‘em slung about ‘em.’

‘Wait a bit!’ said the gas-fitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a

certain raised inner temperature.

Next morning the North R---- Club was placarded with announcements that

on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver a lecture in the

Debating Hall on ‘The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life;’ to be followed,

as usual, by general discussion.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at

St. Paul’s, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had

accompanied her. Their mid-day meal was over, and Robert had been

devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his

wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he

had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which

wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils all round the cabinet at

the end of the room. It was Mary’s weekly task to embrace this horror,

and the performance went by the name of ‘kissing the Jabberwock.’ It

had been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary

was being carried round the room on her father’s shoulder, holding on

mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the

defeated monster.

At last Robert deposited her on a rug beside a fascinating farm-yard

which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child

but at his wife.

‘Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!’

She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion

of the eyes, contradicted it.

‘I want courage,’ he went on--‘courage to tell you something that may

hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it.’

Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But

she waited quietly for what he had to say.

‘You know, I think,’ he said, looking away from her to the gray Museum

outside, ‘that my work in R---- hasn’t been religious as yet at all. Oh,

of course, I have said things here and there, but I haven’t delivered

myself in any way. Now there has come an opening.’

And he described to her--while she shivered a little and drew herself

together--the provocations which were leading him into a tussle with the

North R---- Club.

‘They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the sort of men

after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. Among their fellows,

they are the men who think. One longs to help them to think to a little

more purpose.’

‘What have you to give them, Robert?’ asked Catherine, after a pause,

her eyes bent on the child’s stocking she was knitting. Her heart was

full enough already, poor soul. Oh, the bitterness of this Passion week!

He had been at her side often in church, but through all his tender

silence and consideration she had divined the constant struggle in him

between love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb

irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wrestle with

herself as she would, there was constantly emerging in her now a note

of anger, not with Robert, but, as it were, with those malign forces of

which he was the prey.

‘What have I to give them?’ he repeated sadly. ‘Very little, Catherine,

as it seems to me to-night. But come and see.’

His tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In reality, he was

in that state of depression which often precedes a great effort. But she

was startled by his suggestion.

‘Come with you, Robert? To the meeting of a secularist club!’

‘Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage to what both

you and I hold dear. And the men are decent fellows. There will be no

disturbance.’

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘I have been trying to think it out,’ he said with difficulty. ‘I want

simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image of Jesus of

Nazareth which thought--and love--and reading--have left upon my own.

I want to make them realize for themselves the historical character,

so far as it can be, realized--to make them see for themselves the real

figure, as it went in and out among men--so far as our eyes can now

discern it.’

The words came quicker toward the end, while the voice sank--took the

vibrating characteristic note the wife knew so well.

‘How can that help them?’ she said abruptly. ‘Your historical Christ,

Robert, will never win souls. If he was God, every word you speak will

insult him. If he was man, he was not a good man!’

‘Come and see,’ was all he said, holding out his hand to her. It was in

some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, the inevitable renewal

of an offer he felt bound to make, and she felt bound to resist.

She let her knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the

rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was

the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken, incessant baby-talk,

and the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each

successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones

of the parents.

‘Don’t ask me, Robert, don’t ask me! Do you want me to come and sit

thinking of last year’s Easter Eve?’

‘Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve,’ he said slowly.

‘And now,’ she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden agitation of

every feature, ‘now you are not miserable? You are quite confident and

sure? You are going to devote your life to attacking the few remnants of

faith that still remain in the world?

Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this accent of

bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew his hand, and there

was a silence.

‘I held once a wife in my arms,’ he said presently with a voice hardly

audible, ‘who said to me that she would never persecute her husband. But

what is persecution, if it is not the determination not to understand?’

She buried her face in her hands. ‘I could not understand,’ she said

sombrely.

‘And rather than try,’ he insisted, ‘you will go on believing that I am

a man without faith, seeking only to destroy.’

‘I know you think you have faith,’ she answered, ‘but how can it seem

faith to me? “He that will not confess Me before men, him will I also

deny before My Father which is in heaven.” Your unbelief seems to me

more dangerous than these horrible things which shock you. For you can

make it attractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith of

Christ loved.’

He was silent She raised her face presently, whereon were the traces of

some of those quiet, difficult tears which were characteristic of her,

and went softly out of the room.

He stood awhile leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little Mary’s

clamor, and to her occasional clutches at his knees, as she tried to

raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A sense as though of some

fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him.

And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was

merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalpable

truths which the optimist is always much too ready to forget.

Heredity, the moulding force of circumstance, the iron hold of the

past upon the present--a man like Elsmere realizes the working of these

things in other men’s lives with it singular subtlety and clearness, and

is for ever overlooking them, running his head against them, in his own.

He turned and laid his arms on the chimney-piece, burying his head on

them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, looking down, saw Mary

peering up, her masses of dark hair streaming back from the straining

little face, the grave open mouth, and alarmed eyes.

‘Fader, tiss! fader, tiss!’ she said imperatively.

He lifted her up and covered the little brown cheeks with kisses. But

the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh dread--the like of

something he had often divined of late in Catherine. Was she actually

afraid now that he might feel himself bound in future to take her child

spiritually from her? The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him

a fresh anguish; it seemed a measure of the distance they had travelled

from that old perfect unity.

‘She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and torturer,’ he

said to himself with measureless pain, ‘and who knows--who can answer

for himself? Oh, the puzzle of living!’

When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Catherine said

nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after a while she opened

his study door.

‘Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next week, and let

me put out the pictures?’

It was the first time she had made any such offer. He sprang up with a

flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip of paper with a list. She

took it without looking at him. But he caught her in his arms, and for a

moment in that embrace the soreness of both hearts passed away.

But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this critical

occasion without auditors from his own immediate circle. On the evening

of Good Friday Flaxman had found his way to Bedford Square, and as

Catherine was out, was shown into Elsmere’s study.

‘I have come,’ he announced, ‘to try and persuade you and Mrs. Elsmere

to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow. My Easter party has come

to grief, and it would be a real charity on your part to come and

resuscitate it. Do! You look abominably fagged, and as if some country

would, do you good.’

‘But I thought--’ began Robert, taken aback.

‘You thought,’ repeated Flaxman coolly, ‘that, your two sisters-in-law

were going down there with Lady Helen, to meet some musical folk. Well,

they are not coming. Miss Leyburn thinks your mother-in-law not very

well to-day, and doesn’t like to come. And your younger sister prefers

also to stay in town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But--’ And he

shrugged his shoulders.

Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His sisters-in-law

were certainly inscrutable young women. This Easter party at Greenlaws,

Mr. Flaxman’s country house, had been planned, he knew, for weeks. And

certainly nothing could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine

would have been warned.

‘I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,’ he said, with some

embarrassment.

‘Of course they are,’ implied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He stood

opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets.

‘Will you have a confidence?’ the bright eyes seemed to say. ‘I am quite

ready. Claim it if you like.’

But Elsmere had no intention of offering it. The position of all Rose’s

kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had

the least knowledge of Rose’s mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had, she

lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman’s absorption in

her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of

an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his

wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated

to make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet.

Impossible for them, much as they liked him, to make any of the

advances!

No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to take the

responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took up his visitor’s

invitation to themselves, and explained the engagement for Easter Eve,

which tied them to London.

‘Whew!’ said Hugh Flaxman, ‘but that will be a shindy worth seeing, I

must come!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Robert, smiling. ‘Go down to Greenlaws, and go to

church. That will be much more in your line.’

‘As for church,’ said Flaxman meditatively. ‘If I put off may party

altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further advantage,

that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I can, with a blameless

impartiality, spend the following day in St. Andrew’s, Wells Street.

Yes! I telegraph to Helen--she knows my ways--and I come down to protect

you against an atheistical mob to-morrow night!’

Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. Flaxman’s

Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence

of his youth had subsided, the man harbored and dallied with a dozen

contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere.

They were so now, just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which

could not be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence.

But Flaxman was determined.

‘No,’ he said: ‘this one day we’ll give to heresy. Don’t look so

forbidding! In the first place, you won’t see me; in the next, if

you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in

Sophocles--always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all

for the Church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still

are, you will admit, that she is the right of it. And if so, why should

I cut myself off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be got

outside her? But the next day--_vive_ Elsmere and the Revolution! If

only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually! But I never yet came

across a religious novelty that seemed to me to have a leg of logic to

stand on!’

He laid his hand on Robert’s shoulder, his eyes twinkling with a sudden

energy. Robert made no answer. He stood erect, frowning a little, his

hands thrust far into the pockets of his light gray coat. He was in no

mood to disclose himself to Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with

extraordinary intensity on quite another sort of antagonist with whom

the mind was continuously grappling.

‘Ah, well--till to-morrow!’ said Flaxman, with a smile, shook hands, and

went.

Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte’s.

He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room alone, one on

either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was reading the latest political

biography with an apparent profundity of attention; Mr. Wynnstay was

lounging and caressing the cat. But both his aunt’s absorption and

Mr. Wynnstay’s nonchalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a

domestic breeze.

Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had come to propose that

she should accompany him the following evening to hear Elsmere lecture.

‘I advise you to come,’ he said. ‘Elsmere will deliver his soul, and

the amount of soul he has to deliver in these dull days is astounding.

A dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I will go down beforehand and see

some one on the spot, in case there should be difficulties about getting

in. Perhaps Miss Leyburn, too, might like to hear her brother-in-law?’

‘_Really_, Hugh,’ cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, ‘I think you might

take your snubbing with dignity. Her refusal this morning to go to

Greenlaws was brusqueness itself. To my mind that young person gives

herself airs!’ And the Duke of Sedbergh’s sister drew herself up with a

rustle of all her ample frame.

‘Yes, I was snubbed,’ said Flaxman, unperturbed; ‘that, however, is no

reason why she shouldn’t find it attractive to go to-morrow night.’

‘And you will let her see that, just because you couldn’t get hold of

her, you have given up your Easter party and left your sister in the

lurch?’

‘I never had excessive notions of dignity,’ he replied composedly. ‘You

may make up any story you please. The real fact is that I want to hear

Elsmere.’

‘You had better go, my dear!’ said her husband sardonically. ‘I cannot

imagine anything more piquant than an atheistic slum on Easter Eve.’

‘Nor can I!’ she replied, her combativeness rousing at once. ‘Much

obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my housekeeper’s dress, and be ready

to leave here at half-past seven.’

‘Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxman knew that she would be

asked, and let it alone.

‘Will his wife be there?’ asked Lady Charlotte.

‘Who? Elsmere’s? My dear aunt, when you happen to be the orthodox

wife of a rising heretic, your husband’s opinions are not exactly the

spectacular performance they are to you and me. I should think it most

unlikely.’

‘Oh, she persecutes him does she?’

‘She wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t!’ observed Mr. Wynnstay, _sotto

voce_. The small dark man was lost in a great arm-chair, his delicate

painter’s hands playing with the fur of a huge Persian cat. Lady

Charlotte threw him an eagle glance, and he subsided,--for the moment.

Flaxman, however, was perfectly right. There had been a breeze. It

had been just announced to the master of the house by his spouse that

certain Socialist celebrities--who might any day be expected to make

acquaintance with the police--were coming to dine at his table, to

finger his spoons, and mix their diatribes with his champagne, on the

following Tuesday. Overt rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew

perfectly well that when it came to the point he should smile more or

less affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon others of the same

sort before. But it had not yet come to the point and his intermediate

state was explosive in the extreme.

Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Elsmeres. Dropping

his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a very delicate, critical

analysis of Catherine Elsmere’s temperament and position, as in the

course of several months his intimacy with her husband had revealed them

to him. He did it well, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The

situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic

phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure

to draw it out in words.

Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew’s crisp phrases, but

also gradually gaining a perception of the human reality behind this

word-play of Hugh’s. That ‘good heart’ of hers was touched; the large

imperious face began to frown.

‘Dear me!’ she said, with a little sob. ‘Don’t go on, Hugh! I suppose

it’s because we all of us believe so little that the poor thing’s point

of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, however,’ she added,

regaining her usual _rôle_ of magisterial common-sense, ‘a woman, in my

opinion ought to go with her husband in religious matters.’

‘Provided, of course, she sets him at nought in all others,’ put in Mr.

Wynnstay, rising and daintily depositing the cat. ‘Many men, however, my

dear, might be willing to compromise it differently. Granted a certain

_modicum_ of worldly conformity, they would not be at all indisposed to

a conscience clause.’

He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged her shoulders

with a look at her nephew in which there was an irrepressible twinkle.

Mr. Flaxman neither heard nor saw. Life would have ceased to be worth

having long ago had he ever taken sides in the smallest degree in this

ménage.

Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with himself and

his manœuvres. Very likely it was quite unwise of him to have devised

another meeting between himself and Rose Leyburn so soon. Certainly she

had snubbed him--there could be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much

perplexity as to the reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting

his _rôle_ and the whole lie of the situation and if a man will be an

idiot he must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a move.

The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months since

Langham’s disappearance. During that time Rose Leyburn had been, to

Flaxman’s mind, enchantingly dependent on him. He had played his part

so well, and the beautiful high-spirited child had suited herself so

naively to his acting! Evidently she had said to herself that his age,

his former marriage, his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness

to her and her sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make

him her friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other male

friend. And when once the situation had been so defined in her mind,

how the girl’s true self had come out!--what delightful moments that

intimacy had contained for him!

He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading some Browning to

her and Helen, in Helen’s crowded, belittered drawing-room, which seemed

all piano and photographs and lilies of the valley. He never could

exactly trace the connection between the passage he had been reading and

what happened. Probably it was merely Browning’s poignant, passionate

note that had addicted her. In spite of all her proud, bright reserve,

both he and Helen often felt through these weeks that just below this

surface there was a heart which quivered at the least touch.

He finished the lines and laid down the book. Lady Helen heard her

three-year-old boy crying upstairs, and ran up to see what was the

matter. He and Rose were left alone in the scented, fire-lit room. And a

jet of flame suddenly showed him the girl’s face turned away, convulsed

with a momentary struggle for self-control. She raised a hand an instant

to her eyes, not dreaming evidently that she could be seen in the

dimness; and her gloves dropped from her lap.

He moved forward, stooped on one knee, and as she held out her hand for

the gloves, he kissed the hand very gently, detaining it afterward as a

brother might. There was not a thought of himself in his mind. Simply he

could not bear that so bright a creature should ever be sorry. It seemed

to him intolerable, against the nature of things. If he could have

procured for her at that moment a coerced and transformed Langham, a

Langham fitted to make her happy, he could almost have done it; and,

short of such radical consolation, the very least he could do was to go

on his knee to her, and comfort her in tender, brotherly fashion.

She did not say anything; she let her hand stay a moment, and then

she got up, put on her veil, left a quiet message for Lady Helen, and

departed. But as he put her into a hansom her whole manner to him was

full of a shy, shrinking sweetness. And when Rose was shy and shrinking

she was adorable.

Well, and now he had never again gone nearly so far as to kiss her hand,

and yet because of an indiscreet moment everything was changed between

them; she had turned resentful, stand-off, nay, as nearly rude as a

girl under the restraints of modern manners can manage to be. He almost

laughed as he recalled Helen’s report of her interview with Rose that

morning, in which she had tried to persuade a young person outrageously

on her dignity to keep an engagement she had herself spontaneously made.

‘I am very sorry, Lady Helen,’ Rose had said, her slim figure drawn up

so stiffly that the small Lady Helen felt herself totally effaced beside

her. ‘But I had rather not leave London this week. I think I will stay

with mamma and Agnes.’

And nothing Lady Helen could say moved her, or modified her formula of

refusal.

‘What _have_ you been doing, Hugh?’ his sister asked him, half dismayed,

half provoked.

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders and vowed he had been doing nothing. But,

in truth, he knew very well that the day before he had overstepped the

line. There had been a little scene between them, a quick passage

of speech, a rash look and gesture on his part, which had been quite

unpremeditated, but which had nevertheless transformed their relation.

Rose had flushed up, and said a few incoherent words, which he had

understood to be words of reproach, had left Lady Helen’s as quickly as

possible, and next morning his Greenlaws party had fallen through.

‘Check, certainly,’ said Flaxman to himself ruefully, as he pondered

these circumstances, ‘not mate, I hope, if one can but find out how not

to be a fool in future.’

And over his solitary fire he meditated far into the night.

Next day, at half-past seven in the evening, he entered Lady Charlotte’s

drawing-room, gayer, brisker, more alert than ever.

Rose started visibly at the sight of him, and shot a quick glance at the

unblushing Lady Charlotte.

‘I thought you were at Greenlaws,’ she could not help saying to him, and

she coldly offered him her hand. Why had Lady Charlotte never told her

he was to escort them? Her irritation arose anew.

‘What can one do,’ he said lightly, ‘if Elsmere will fix such a

performance for Easter Eve? My party was at its last gasp too; it only

wanted a telegram to Helen to give it its _coup de grâce_.’

Rose flushed up, but he turned on his heel at once, and began to banter

his aunt on the housekeeper’s bonnet and veil in which she had a little

too obviously disguised herself.

And certainly, in the drive to the East End, Rose had no reason to

complain of importunity on his part. Most of the way he was deep in talk

with Lady Charlotte as to a certain loan exhibition in the East End,

to which he and a good many of his friends were sending pictures;

apparently his time and thoughts were entirely occupied with it. Rose,

leaning back silent in her corner, was presently seized with a little

shock of surprise that there should be so many interests and relations

in his life of which she knew nothing. He was talking now as the man

of possessions and influence. She saw a glimpse of him as he was in his

public aspect, and the kindness, the disinterestedness, the quiet sense,

and the humor of his talk insensibly affected her as she sat listening.

The mental image of him which had been dominant in her mind altered

a little. Nay, she grew a little hot over it. She asked, herself

scornfully whether she was not as ready as any bread-and-buttery miss of

her acquaintance to imagine every man she knew in love with her.

Very likely he had meant what he said quite differently, and she--oh!

humiliation--had flown into a passion with him for no reasonable cause.

Supposing he had meant, two days ago, that if they were to go on being

friends she must let him be her lover too, it would of course have

been unpardonable. How _could_ she let any one talk to her of love

yet?--especially Mr. Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure,

what had happened to her? He must despise her to have imagined it. His

outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulent resentment.

Were all men self-seeking? Did all men think women shallow and fickle?

Could a man and a woman never be honestly and simply friends? If he

_had_ made love to her, he could not possibly--and there was the sting

of it--feel toward her maiden dignity that romantic respect which

she herself cherished toward it. For it was incredible that any

delicate-minded girl should go through such a crisis as she had gone

through, and then fall calmly into another lover’s arms a few weeks

later as though nothing had happened.

How we all attitudinize to ourselves! The whole of life often seems one

long dramatic performance, in which one-half of us is forever posing to

the other half.

But had he really made love to her?--had he meant what she had

assumed him to mean? The girl lost herself in a torrent of memory and

conjecture, and meanwhile Mr. Flaxman sat opposite, talking away, and

looking certainly as little love sick as any man can well look. As the

lamps flashed into the carriage her attention was often caught by his

profile and finely-balanced head, by the hand lying on his knee, or the

little gestures, full of life and freedom, with which he met some raid

of Lady Charlotte’s on his opinions, or opened a corresponding one

on hers. There was certainly power in the man, a bright human sort of

power, which inevitably attracted her. And that he was good too she had

special grounds for knowing.

But what an aristocrat he was after all! What an over-prosperous,

exclusive set he belonged to! She lashed herself into anger as the other

two chatted and sparred, with all these names of wealthy cousins and

relations, with their parks and their pedigrees and their pictures! The

aunt and nephew were debating how they could best bleed the family,

in its various branches, of the art treasures belonging to it for the

benefit of the East-enders; therefore the names were inevitable. But

Rose curled her delicate lip over them. And was it the best breeding,

she wondered, to leave a third person so ostentatiously outside the

conversation?

‘Miss Leyburn, why are you coughing?’ said Lady Charlotte suddenly.

‘There is a great draught,’ said Rose, shivering a little.

‘So there is!’ cried Lady Charlotte. ‘Why, we have got both the windows

open. Hugh, draw up Miss Leyburn’s.’

He moved over to her and drew it up.

‘I thought you liked a tornado,’ he said to her, smiling. ‘Will you have

a shawl--there is one behind me.’

‘No, thank you,’ she replied rather stiffly, and he was

silent--retaining his place opposite to her, however.

‘Have we reached Mr. Elsmere’s part of the world yet?’ asked Lady

Charlotte, looking out.

‘Yes, we are not far off--the river is to our right. We shall pass St.

Wilfrid’s soon.’

The coachman turned into a street where an open-air market was going on.

The roadway and pavements were swarming; the carriage could barely pick

its way through the masses of human beings. Flaming gas-jets threw it

all into strong satanic light and shade. At this corner of a dingy

alley Rose could see a fight going on; the begrimed, ragged children,

regardless of the April rain, swooped backward and forward under the

very hoofs of the horses, or flattened their noses against the windows

whenever the horses were forced into a walk.

The young girl-figure, with the gray feathered hat, seemed especially

to excite their notice. The glare of the street brought out the lines

of the face, the gold of the hair. The Arabs outside made loutishly

flattering remarks once or twice, and Rose, coloring, drew back as far

as she could into the carriage. Mr. Flaxman seemed not to hear; his

aunt, with that obtrusive thirst for information which is so fashionable

now among all women of position, was cross-questioning him as to the

trades and population of the district, and he was dryly responding. In

reality his mind was full of a whirl of feeling, of a wild longing to

break down a futile barrier and trample on a baffling resistance, to

take that beautiful, tameless creature in strong coercing arms, scold

her, crush her, love her! Why does she make happiness so difficult? What

right has she to hold devotion so cheap? He too grows angry. ‘She was

_not_ in love with that spectral creature,’ the inner self declares with

energy--‘I will vow she never was. But she is like all the rest--a slave

to the merest forms and trappings of sentiment. Because he _ought_ to

have loved her, and didn’t, because she _fancied_ she loved him, and

didn’t, my love is to be an offence to her! Monstrous--unjust!’

Suddenly they swept past St. Wilfrid’s, resplendent with lights, the

jewelled windows of the choir rising above the squalid walls and roofs

into the rainy darkness, as the mystical chapel of the Graal, with

its ‘torches glimmering fair,’ flashed out of the mountain storm and

solitude on to Galahad’s seeking eyes.

Rose bent forward involuntarily. ‘What angel singing!’ she said,

dropping the window again to listen to the retreating sounds, her

artist’s eye Kindling. ‘Did you hear it? It was the last chorus in the

St. Matthew Passion music.’

‘I did not distinguish it,’ he said--‘but their music is famous.’

His tone was distant; there was no friendliness in it. It would have

been pleasant to her if he would have taken up her little remark and

let bygones be bygones. But he showed no readiness to do so. The subject

dropped, and presently he moved back to his former seat, and Lady

Charlotte and he resumed their talk. Rose could not but see that his

manner toward her was much changed. She herself had compelled it, but

all the same she saw him leave her with a capricious little pang of

regret, and afterward the drive seemed to her more tedious and the

dismal streets more dismal than before.

She tried to forget her companions altogether. Oh! what would Robert

have to say? She was unhappy, restless. In her trouble lately it had

often pleased her to go quite alone to strange churches, where for a

moment the burden of the self had seemed lightened. But the old things

were not always congenial to her, and there were modern ferments at work

in her. No one of her family, unless it were Agnes, suspected what was

going on. But in truth the rich crude nature had been touched at

last, as Robert’s had been long ago in Mr. Grey’s lecture-room, by the

piercing under-voices of things--the moral message of the world. ‘What

will he have to say?’ she asked herself again feverishly, and as she

looked across to Mr. Flaxman she felt a childish wish to be friends

again with him, with everybody. Life was too difficult as it was,

without quarrels and misunderstandings to make it worse.

CHAPTER XL.

A long street of warehouses--and at the end of it the horses slackened.

‘I saw the president of the club yesterday,’ said Flaxman, looking out.

‘He is an old friend of mine--a most intelligent fanatic--met him on

a Madison House Fund committee last winter. He promised we should be

looked after. But we shall only get back seats, and you’ll have to put

up with the smoking. They don’t want ladies, and we shall only be there

on sufferance.’

The carriage stopped. Mr. Flaxman guided his charges with some

difficulty through the crowd about the steps, who inspected them and

their vehicle with a frank and not over-friendly curiosity. At the

door they found a man who had been sent to look for them, and were

immediately taken possession of. He ushered them into the back of a

large bare hall, glaringly lit, lined with white brick, and hung at

intervals with political portraits and a few cheap engravings of famous

men, Jesus of Nazareth taking his turn with Buddha, Socrates, Moses,

Shakespeare, and Paul of Tarsus.

‘Can’t put you any forrarder, I’m afraid,’ said their guide, with a

shrug of the shoulders. ‘The committee don’t like strangers coming,

and Mr. Collett, he got hauled over the coals for letting you in this

evening.’

It, was a new position for Lady Charlotte to be anywhere on sufferance.

However, in the presence of three hundred smoking men, who might all

of them be political assassins in disguise for anything she knew, she

accepted her fate with meekness; and she and Rose settled themselves

into their back seat under a rough sort of gallery, glad of their veils,

and nearly blinded with the smoke.

The hall was nearly full, and Mr. Flaxman looked curiously round upon

its occupants. The majority of them were clearly artisans--a spare,

stooping sharp-featured race. Here and there were a knot of stalwart

dock-laborers, strongly marked out in physique from the watchmakers

and the potters, or an occasional seaman out of work, ship-steward,

boatswain, or what not, generally bronzed, quick-eyed, and comely, save

where the film of excess had already deadened color and expression.

Almost everyone had a pot of beer before him, standing on long wooden

flaps attached to the benches. The room was full of noise, coming

apparently from the further end, where some political bravo seemed to be

provoking his neighbors. In their own vicinity the men scattered about

were for the most part tugging silently at their pipes, alternately

eyeing the clock and the new-comers.

There was a stir of feet round the door.

‘There he is,’ said Mr. Flaxman, craning round to see, and Robert

entered.

He started as he saw them, flashed a smile to Rose, shook his head at

Mr. Flaxman, and passed up the room.

‘He looks pale and nervous,’ said Lady Charlotte grimly, pouncing at

once on the unpromising side of things. ‘If he breaks down are you

prepared, Hugh to play Elisha?’

Flaxman was far too much interested in the beginnings of the performance

to answer.

Robert was standing forward on the platform, the chairman of the meeting

at his side, members of the committee sitting behind on either hand.

A good many men put down their pipes, and the hubbub of talk ceased.

Others smoked on stolidly.

The chairman introduced the lecturer. The subject of the address would

be, as they already knew, ‘The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life.’ It was

not very likely, he imagined, that Mr. Elsmere’s opinions would square

with those dominant in the club; but whether or no, he claimed for him,

as for everybody, a patient hearing, and the Englishman’s privilege of

fair play.

The speaker, a cabinetmaker dressed in a decent brown suit, spoke with

fluency, and at the same time with that accent of moderation and _savoir

faire_ which some Englishmen in all classes have obviously inherited

from centuries of government by discussion. Lady Charlotte, whose

Liberalism was the mere varnish of an essentially aristocratic temper,

was conscious of a certain dismay at the culture of the democracy as

the man sat down. Mr. Flaxman, glancing to the right, saw a group of men

standing, and among them a slight, sharp-featured thread-paper of a man,

with a taller companion whom he identified as the pair he had noticed

on the night of the story-telling. The little gas-fitter was clearly all

nervous fidget and expectation; the other, large and gaunt in figure,

with a square impassive face, and close-shut lips that had a perpetual

mocking twist in the corners, stood beside him like some clumsy modern

version, in a commoner clay, of Goothe’s ‘spirit that denies.’

Robert came forward with a roll of papers in his hands.

His first, words were hardly audible. Rose felt her color rising, Lady

Charlotte glanced at her nephew, the standing group of men cried, ‘Speak

up!’ The voice in the distance rose at once, braced by the touch of

difficulty, and what it said came calmly down to them.

In after days Flaxman could not often be got to talk of the experiences

of this evening. When he did he would generally say, briefly, that as

an _intellectual_ effort he had never been inclined to rank this first

public utterance very high among Elsmere’s performances. The speaker’s

own emotion had stood somewhat in his way. A man argues better, perhaps,

when he feels less.

‘I have often heard him put his case, as I thought, more cogently in

conversation,’ Flaxman would say--though only to his most intimate

friends--‘but what I never saw before or since was such an _effect of

personality_ as he produced that night. From that moment at any rate I

loved him, and I understood his secret!’

Elsmere began with a few words of courteous thanks to the club for the

hearing they had promised him.

Then he passed on to the occasion of his address--the vogue in the

district of ‘certain newspapers which, I understand, are specially

relished and patronized by your association.’

And he laid down on the table beside him the copies of the ‘Freethinker’

and of ‘Faith and Fools’ which he had brought with him, and faced his

audience again, his hands on his sides.

‘Well! I am not here to-night to attack those newspapers. I want to

reach your sympathies if I can in another way. If there is anybody

here who takes pleasure in them, who thinks that such writings and such

witticisms as he gets purveyed to him in these sheets do really help the

cause of truth and intellectual freedom, I shall not attack his position

from the front. I shall try to undermine it. I shall aim at rousing in

him such a state of feeling as may suddenly convince him that what is

injured by writing of this sort is not the orthodox Christian, or the

Church, or Jesus of Nazareth, but always and inevitably, the man

who writes it and the man who loves it! His mind is possessed of an

inflaming and hateful image, which drives him to mockery and violence. I

want to replace it, if I can, by one of calm, of beauty and tenderness,

which may drive him to humility and sympathy. And this, indeed, is the

only way in which opinion is ever really altered--by the substitution of

one mental picture for another.

‘But in the first place,’ resumed the speaker, after a moment’s pause,

changing his note a little, ‘a word about myself. I am not here to-night

quite in the position of the casual stranger, coming down to your

district for the first time. As some of you know, I am endeavoring to

make what is practically a settlement among you, asking you working-men

to teach me, if you will, what you have to teach as to the wants and

prospects of your order, and offering you in return whatever there is

in me which may be worth your taking. Well, I imagine I should look at a

man who preferred a claim of that sort with some closeness! You may well

ask me for “antecedents,” and I should like, if I may, to give them to

you very shortly.’

Well, then, though I came down to this place under the wing of Mr.

Edwardes’ (some cheering) ‘who is so greatly liked and respected here, I

am not a Unitarian, nor am I an English Churchman. A year ago I was the

rector of an English country parish, where I should have been proud, so

far as personal happiness went, to spend my life. Last autumn I left it

and resigned my orders because I could no longer accept the creed of the

English Church.’ Unconsciously, the thin dignified figure drew itself

up, the voice took a certain dryness. All this was distasteful but the

orator’s instinct was imperious.

As he spoke about a score of pipes which had till now been active

in Flaxman’s neighborhood went down. The silence in the room became

suddenly of a perceptibly different quality.

‘Since then I have joined no other religious association. But it is

not--God forbid!--because there is nothing left me to believe, but

because in this transition England it is well for a man who has broken

with the old things, to be very _patient_. No good can come of forcing

opinion or agreement prematurely. A generation, nay, more, may have to

spend itself in mere waiting and preparing for those new leaders and

those new forms of corporate action which any great revolution of

opinion, such as that we are now living through, has always produced in

the past, and will, we are justified in believing, produce again. But

the hour and the men will come, and “they also serve who only stand and

wait!”’

Voice and look had kindled into fire. The consciousness of his audience

was passing from him--the world of ideas was growing clearer.

‘So much, then for personalities of one sort. There are some of another,

however, which I must touch upon for a moment. I am to speak to you

to-night of the Jesus of history, but not only as an historian. History

is good, but religion is better!--and if Jesus of Nazareth concerned me,

and, in my belief, concerned you, only as an historical figure, I should

not be here to-night.

‘But if I am to talk religion to you, and I have begun by telling you I

am not this and not that, it seems to me that for mere clearness’ sake,

for the sake of that round and whole image of thought which I want to

present to you, you must let me run through a preliminary confession of

faith--as short and simple as I can make it. You must let me describe

certain views of the universe and of man’s place in it, which make the

framework, as it were, into which I shall ask you to fit the picture of

Jesus which will come after.’

Robert stood a moment considering. An instant’s nervousness, a momentary

sign of self-consciousness, would have broken the spell and set the room

against him. He showed neither.

‘My friends,’ he said at last, speaking to the crowded benches of London

workmen with the same simplicity he would have used toward his boys at

Murewell, ‘the man who is addressing you to-night believes in _God_;

and in _Conscience_, which is God’s witness in the soul; and in

_Experience_, which is at once the record and the instrument of man’s

education at God’s hands. He places his whole trust, for life, and

death, “_in God the Father Almighty!_”--in that force at the root of

things which is revealed to us whenever a man helps his neighbor, or a

mother denies herself for her child; whenever a soldier dies without a

murmur for his country, or a sailor puts out in the darkness to rescue

the perishing; whenever a workman throws mind and conscience into his

work, or a statesman labors not for his own gain but for that of the

State! He believes in an Eternal Goodness---and an Eternal Mind--of

which Nature and Man are the continuous and the only revelation.’...

The room grew absolutely still. And into the silence, there fell, one

by one, the short, terse sentences, in which the seer, the believer,

struggled to express what God has been, is, and will ever be to the soul

which trusts Him. In them the whole effort of the speaker was really

to restrain, to moderate, to depersonalize the voice of faith. But the

intensity of each word burnt it into the hearer as it was spoken. Even

Lady Charlotte turned a little pale--the tears stood in her eyes.

Then, from the witness of God in the soul, and in the history of man’s

moral life, Elsmere turned to the glorification of _Experience_, ‘of

that unvarying and rational order of the world which has been the

appointed instrument of mans training since life and thought began.’

‘_There_,’ he said slowly, ‘in the unbroken sequences of nature, in the

physical history of the world, in the long history of man, physical,

intellectual, moral--_there_ lies the revelation of God. There is no

other, my friends!’

Then, while the room hung on his words, he entered on a brief exposition

of the text, ‘_Miracles do not happen_,’ restating Hume’s old argument,

and adding to it some of the most cogent of those modern arguments drawn

from literature, from history, from the comparative study of religions

and religious evidence, which were not practically at Hume’s disposal,

but which are now affecting the popular mind as Hume’s reasoning could

never have affected it.

‘We are now able to show how miracle, or the belief in it, which is the

same thing, comes into being. The study of miracle in all nations, and

under all conditions, yields everywhere the same results. Miracle may be

the child of imagination, of love, nay, of a passionate sincerity, but

invariably it lives with ignorance and is withered by knowledge!’

And then, with lightning unexpectedness, he turned upon his audience,

as though the ardent soul reacted at once against a strain of mere

negation.

‘But do not let yourselves imagine for an instant that, because in

a rational view of history there is no place for a Resurrection and

Ascension, therefore you may profitably allow yourself a mean and

miserable mirth of _this_ sort over the past!’--and his outstretched

hand struck the newspapers beside him with passion--‘Do not imagine for

an instant that what is binding, adorable, beautiful in that past is

done away with when miracle is given up! No, thank God! We still “live

by admiration, hope, and love.” God only draws closer, great men become

greater, human life more wonderful as miracle disappears. Woe to you if

you cannot see it!--it is the testing truth of our day.’

‘And besides--do you suppose that mere violence, mere invective, and

savage mockery ever accomplished anything--nay, what is more to the

point, ever _destroyed_ anything in human history? No--an idea cannot be

killed from without--it can only be supplanted, transformed, by another

idea, and that one of equal virtue and magic. Strange paradox! In

the moral world you cannot pull down except by gentleness--you cannot

revolutionize except by sympathy. Jesus only superseded Judaism

by absorbing and re-creating all that was best in it. There are no

inexplicable gaps and breaks in the story of humanity. The religion of

the day with all its faults and mistakes, will go on unshaken so long

as there is nothing else of equal loveliness and potency to put in its

place. The Jesus of the churches will remain paramount so long as the

man of to-day imagines himself dispensed by any increase of knowledge

from loving the Jesus of history.

‘But _why?_ you will ask me. What does the Jesus of history matter to

me?’

And so he was brought to the place of great men in the development of

mankind--to the part played in the human story by those lives in which

men have seen all their noblest thoughts of God, of duty, and of law

embodied, realized before them with a shining and incomparable beauty.

... ‘You think--because it is becoming plain to the modern eye that the

ignorant love of his first followers wreathed his life in legend, that

therefore you can escape from Jesus of Nazareth, you can put him aside

as though he had never been? Folly! Do what you will, you cannot escape

him. His life and death underlie our institutions as the alphabet

underlies our literature. Just as the lives of Buddha and of Mohammed

are wrought ineffaceably into the civilization of Africa and Asia, so

the life of Jesus is wrought ineffaceably into the higher civilization,

the nobler social conceptions of Europe. It is wrought into your

being and into mine. We are what we are to-night, as Englishmen and

as citizens, largely because a Galilean peasant was born and grew to

manhood, and preached, and loved, and died. And you think that a fact so

tremendous can be just scoffed away--that we can get rid of it, and of

our share in it, by a ribald paragraph and a caricature!’

‘No. Your hatred and your ridicule are powerless. And thank God they are

powerless. There is no wanton waste in the moral world, any more than

in the material. There is only fruitful change and beneficent

transformation. Granted that the true story of Jesus of Nazareth was

from the beginning obscured by error and mistake; granted that those

errors and mistakes which were once the strength of Christianity are

now its weakness, and by the slow march and sentence of time are now

threatening, unless we can clear them away, to lessen the hold of Jesus

on the love and remembrance of man. What then? The fact is merely a call

to you and me, who recognize it, to go, back to the roots of things, to

re-conceive the Christ, to bring him afresh into our lives, to make the

life so freely given for man minister again in new ways to man’s new

needs. Every great religion is, in truth, a concentration of great

ideas, capable, as all ideas are, of infinite expansion and adaptation.

And woe to our human weakness if it loose its hold one instant before it

must, on any of those rare and precious possessions which have helped it

in the past, and may again inspire it in the future!’

‘_To reconceive the Christ!_ It is the special task of our age, though

in some sort and degree it has been the ever recurring task of Europe

since the beginning.’

He paused, and then very simply, and so as to be understood by those who

heard him, he gave a rapid sketch of that great operation worked by

the best intellect of Europe during the last half-century--broadly

speaking--on the facts and documents of primitive Christianity. From all

sides and by the help of every conceivable instrument those facts have

been investigated, and now at last the great result-’the revivified,

reconceived truth--seems ready to emerge! Much may still be known--much

can never be known; but if we will, we may now discern the true features

of Jesus of Nazareth, as no generation but our own has been able to

discern them, since those who had seen and handled, passed away.’

‘Let me try, however feebly, and draw it afresh for you, that life of

lives, that story of stories, as the labor of our own age in particular

has patiently revealed it to us. Come back with me through the

centuries; let us try and see the Christ of Galilee and the Christ of

Jerusalem as he was, before a credulous love and Jewish tradition and

Greek subtlety had at once dimmed and glorified the truth. Ah! do what

we will, it is so scanty and poor, this knowledge of ours, compared with

all that we yearn to know--but, such as it is, let me, very humbly and

very tentatively, endeavor to put it before you.’

At this point Flaxman’s attention was suddenly distracted by a stir

round the door of entrance on his left hand. Looking round, he saw a

Ritualist priest, in cassock and cloak, disputing in hurried undertones

with the men about the door. At last he gained his point apparently, for

the men, with half-angry, half-quizzing looks at each other, allowed

him to come in, and he found a seat. Flaxman was greatly struck by the

face--by its ascetic beauty, the stern and yet delicate whiteness and

emaciation of it. He sat with both hands resting on the stick he held in

front of him, intently listening, the perspiration of physical weakness

on his brow and round his finely curved mouth. Clearly he could hardly

see the lecturer, for the room had become inconveniently crowded, and

the men about him were mostly standing.

‘One of the St. Wilfrid’s priests, I suppose,’ Flaxman said to himself.

‘What on earth is he doing _dans cette galère?_ Are we to have a

disputation? That would be dramatic.’

He had no attention, however, to spare, and the intruder was promptly

forgotten. When he turned back to the platform he found that Robert,

with Mackay’s help, had hung on a screen to his right, four or five

large drawings of Nazareth, of the Lake of Gennesaret, of Jerusalem, and

the Temple of Herod, of the ruins of that synagogue on the probable site

of Capernaum in which conceivably Jesus may have stood. They were bold

and striking, and filled the bare hall at once with suggestions of the

East. He had used them often at Murewell. Then, adopting a somewhat

different tone, he plunged, into the life of Jesus. He brought to it

all his trained historical power, all his story-telling faculty, all his

sympathy with the needs of feeling. And bit by bit, as the quick nervous

sentences issued and struck, each like the touch of a chisel, the

majestic figure emerged, set against its natural background, instinct

with some fraction at least of the magic of reality, most human, most

persuasive, most tragic. He brought out the great words of the new

faith, to which, whatever may be their literal origin, Jesus, and Jesus

only, gave currency and immortal force. He dwelt on the magic,

the permanence, the expansiveness, of the young Nazarene’s central

conception--the spiritualized, universalized ‘Kingdom of God.’ Elsmere’s

thought, indeed, knew nothing of a perfect man, as it knew nothing of an

incarnate God; he shrank from nothing that he believed true; but every

limitation, every reserve he allowed himself, did but make the whole

more poignantly real, and the claim of Jesus more penetrating.

‘The world has grown since Jesus preached in Galilee and Judæa. We

cannot learn the _whole_ of God’s lesson from him now--nay, we could not

then! But all that is most essential to man--all that saves the soul,

all that purifies the heart--that he has still for you and me, as he had

it for the men and women of his own time.’

Then he came to the last scenes. His voice sank a little his notes

dropped from his hand; and the silence grew oppressive. The dramatic

force, the tender passionate insight, the fearless modernness with which

the story was told, made it almost unbearable. Those listening saw

the trial, the streets of Jerusalem, that desolate place outside the

northern gate; they were spectators of the torture, they heard the last

cry. No one present had ever so seen, so heard before. Rose had hidden

her face. Flaxman for the first time forgot to watch the audience; the

men had forgotten each other; and for the first time that night, in

many a cold embittered heart, there was born that love of the Son of Man

which Nathaniel felt, and John, and Mary of Bethany, and which has in it

now, as then, the promise of the future.

_’”He laid him in a tomb which had been hewn out of a rock, and he

rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.” The ashes of Jesus of

Nazareth mingled with the earth of Palestin--_

‘“Far hence he lies

In the lorn Syrian town,

And on his grave, with shining eyes,

The Syrian stars look down.”’

He stopped. The melancholy cadence of the verse died away. Then a gleam

broke over the pale exhausted face--a gleam of extraordinary sweetness.

‘And in the days and weeks that followed the devout and passionate

fancy of a few mourning Galileans begat the exquisite fable of the

Resurrection. How natural--and amid all its falseness, how true--is that

naïve and contradictory story! The rapidity with which it spread is a

measure of many things. It is, above all, a measure of the greatness of

Jesus, of the force with which he had drawn to himself the hearts and

imaginations of men.’...

‘And now, my friends, what of all this? If these things I have been

saying to you are true, what is the upshot of them for you and me?

Simply this, as I conceive it--that instead of wasting your time, and

degrading your souls, by indulgence in such grime as this’--and he

pointed to the newspapers-’it is your urgent business and mine--at

this moment--to do our very _utmost_ to bring this life of Jesus, our

precious, invaluable possession as a people, back into some real and

cogent relation with our modern lives and beliefs and hopes. Do not

answer me that such an effort is a mere dream and futility, conceived in

the vague, apart from reality--that men must have something to worship,

and that if they cannot worship Jesus they will not trouble to love him.

Is the world desolate with God still in it, and does it rest merely with

us to love or not to love? Love and revere _something_ we must, if we

are to be men and not beasts. At all times and in all nations, as I have

tried to show you, man has helped himself by the constant and passionate

memory of those great ones of his race who have spoken to him most

audibly of God and of eternal hope. And for us Europeans and Englishmen,

as I have also tried to show you, history and inheritance have decided.

If we turn away from the true Jesus of Nazareth because he has been

disfigured and misrepresented by the Churches we turn away from that in

which our weak will; and desponding souls are meant to find their most

obvious and natural help and inspiration from that symbol of the

Divine, which, of necessity, means’ most to us. No! give him back your

hearts--be ashamed that you have ever forgotten your debt to him! Let

combination and brotherhood do for the newer and simpler faith what they

did once for the old--let them give it a practical shape, a practical

grip on human life. Then we too shall have our Easter!--we too shall

have the right to say, _He is not here, he is risen_. Not here--in

legend, in miracle, in the beautiful out-worn forms and crystallizations

of older thought. _He is risen_--in a wiser reverence and a more

reasonable love; risen in new forms of social help inspired by his

memory, called afresh by his name!-Risen--if you and your children will

it--in a church or company of the faithful--over the gates of which

two sayings of man’s past, in to which man’s present has breathed new

meanings, shall be written:--

‘_In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust:_

and--

‘_This do in remembrance of Me._’

The rest was soon over. The audience woke from the trance in which it

had been held with a sudden burst of talk and movement. In the midst

of it, and as the majority of the audience were filing out into the

adjoining rooms, the gas-fitter’s tall companion Andrews mounted the

platform, while the gas-fitter himself with an impatient shrug, pushed

his way into the outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately

to work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal

_sang-froid_ which seemed to change in a moment the whole aspect and

temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. Elsmere had talked of

what great scholars had done to clear up this matter of Christ and

Christianity. Well, he was free to maintain that old Tom Paine was as

good a scholar as any of ‘em, and most of them in that hall knew what he

thought about it. Tom Paine hadn’t anything to say against Jesus Christ,

and he hadn’t. He was a workman and a fine sort of Man, and if he’d been

alive now he’d have been a Socialist, ‘as most of us are,’ and he’d have

made it hot for the rich loafers, and the sweaters, and the middle-men,

‘as we’d like to make it hot for ‘em.’ But as for those people who got

up the Church-Mythologists Tom Paine called ‘em-and the miracles, and

made an uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily speaking, he

didn’t see what they’d got to do with keeping, or mending, or preserving

_their_ precious bit of work. The world had found ‘em out, and serve’em

right.

And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not without harsh

savor and eloquence, which was much clapped by the small knot of workmen

among whom he had been standing.

Then there followed a Socialist--an eager, ugly, black-bearded little

fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of doing without ‘any cultus

whatsoever,’ threw scorn on both the Christians and the Positivists for

refusing so to deny themselves, and appealed earnestly to his group of

hearers ‘to help in brining religion back from heaven to earth, where it

belongs.’ Mr. Elsmere’s new church, if he ever got it, would only be a

fresh instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie. And when the people

had got their rights and brought down the capitalists, they were not

going to be such fools as put their necks under the heel of what were

called ‘the educated classes.’ The people who wrote the newspapers Mr.

Elsmere objected to, know quite enough for the working-man--And people

should not be too smooth-spoken; what the working class wanted beyond

everything just now was _grit_.

A few other short speeches followed, mostly of the common Secularist

type, in defence of the newspapers attacked. But the defence, on the

whole, was shuffling and curiously half-hearted. Robert, sitting by with

his head on his hand, felt that there, at any rate, his onslaught had

told.

He said a few words in reply, in a low husky voice, without a trace

of his former passion, and the meeting broke up. The room had quickly

filled when it was known that he was up again; and as he descended

the steps of the platform, after shaking hands with the chairman, the

hundreds present broke into a sudden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte

pressed forward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home.

‘Come with us, Mr. Elsmere; you look like a ghost.’ But he shook his

head, smiling. No, thank you, Lady Charlotte--I must have some air,’ and

he took her out on his arm, while Flaxman followed with Rose.

It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he had seen

come in. But there were no signs of him. ‘I had an idea he would have

spoken,’ he thought. Just as Well perhaps. We should have had a row.’

Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they drove off,

with a long breath, and the inward reflection, ‘So his wife wouldn’t

come and hear him! Must be a woman with a character, that--a Strafford

in petticoats!’

Robert turned up the street to the City, the tall slight figure

seeming to shrink together as he walked. After his passionate effort,

indescribable depression had overtaken him.

‘Words-words!’ he said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of

feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness,

against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the

enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the mass of Ætna on the

breast of Enceladus.

Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man’s figure in a long black robe

stopped him and laid a hand on his arm.

‘Newcome!’ cried Robert, standing still.

‘I was there,’ said the other, bending forward and looking close into

his eyes. ‘I heard almost all. I went to confront, to denounce you!’

By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the attenuated

whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to which weeks

of fasting and mystical excitement had given a kind of unearthly

remoteness. He gathered himself together with an inward groan. He felt

as though there were no force in him at that moment wherewith to meet

reproaches, to beat down fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength

seemed unbearable.

Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden shrinking and

hesitation. He had often in old days felt the same sense of power over

the man who yet, in what seemed his weakness, had always escaped him in

the end.

‘I went to denounce,’ he continued, in a strange, tense voice; ‘and the

Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching for you here--these words are

not mine I speak. I waited patiently in that room till the Lord should

deliver His enemy into my hand. My wrath was hot against the deserter

that could not even desert in silence--hot against his dupes. Then

suddenly words came to me--they have come to me before, they burn up the

very heart and marrow in me--“_Who is he that saith, and it cometh to

pass, and the Lord commandeth it not?_” There they were in my ears,

written on the walls--the air----’

The hand dropped from Robert’s arm. A dull look of defeat, of regret,

darkened the gleaming eyes. They were standing in a quiet deserted

street, but through a side-opening the lights, the noise, the turbulence

of the open-air market came drifting to them through the rainy

atmosphere which blurred and magnified everything.

‘Ay, after days and nights in His most blessed sanctuary,’ Newcome

resumed slowly, ‘I came, by His commission, as I thought, to fight His

battle, with a traitor! And at the last moment His strength, which was

in me, went from me. I sat there dumb; His hand was heavy upon me. His

will be done!’

The voice sank; the priest drew his thin, shaking hand across his eyes,

as though the awe of a mysterious struggle were still upon him. Then he

turned again to Elsmere, his face softening, radiating.

‘Elsmere, take the sign, the message! I thought it was given to me to

declare the Lord’s wrath. Instead, He sends you once more by me, even

now--even fresh from this new defiance of His mercy, the tender offer of

His grace! He lies at rest to-night, my brother’--what sweetness in the

low vibrating tones! ‘after all the anguish. Let me draw you down on

your knees beside Him. It is you, you, who have helped to drive in the

nails, to embitter the agony! It is you who in His loneliness have been

robbing Him of the souls that should be his! It is you who have been

doing your utmost to make His cross and passion of no effect. Oh, let

it break your heart to think of it! Watch by Him to-night, my friend, my

brother, and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim his own!’

Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beautiful; never

surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more penetrating gentleness.

After the storm of those opening words the change was magical. The tears

stood in Elsmere’s eyes. But his quick insight, in spite of himself,

divined the subtle natural facts behind the outburst, the strained

physical state, the irritable brain--all the consequences of a long

defiance of physical and mental law. The priest repelled him, the man

drew him like a magnet.

‘What can I say to you, Newcome?’ he cried despairingly. ‘Let me say

nothing, dear old friend! I am tired out; so, I expect, are you. I know

what this week has been to you. Walk with me a little. Leave these great

things alone. We cannot agree. Be content--God knows! Tell me about the

old place, and the people. I long for news of them.’

A sort of shudder passed through his companion. Newcome stood wrestling

with himself. It was like the slow departure of a possessing force. Then

he sombrely assented, and they turned toward the City. But his answers,

as Robert questioned him, were sharp and mechanical and presently it

became evident that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere

vigorously held him were more than he could bear.

As they reached St. Paul’s, towering into the watery moon-light of the

clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night.

You came to me in the spirit of war,’ said Robert, with some emotion, as

he held his hand; ‘give me instead the grasp of peace!’

The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A quivering

smile dawned on the priest’s delicate lip.

‘God bless you--God restore you!’ he said sadly, and was gone.

CHAPTER XLI.

A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his

story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or

forty members of the North R---- Club that he would give them a course

of lectures on the New Testament. One of them was the gas-fitter Charles

Richards; another was the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally

challenged Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old

Scotchman of sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of

Hume and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest

of cracked voices, the Club had writhed many an impatient half-hour on

debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a kind of ‘sport’

as compared with the rest of his character, which made him a valued

designer in the pottery works; but his real interests were speculative

and argumentative, concerned with ‘common nawtions of the praimary

elements of reason,’ and the appearance of Robert in the district seemed

to offer him at last a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly

suspected that the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give

mostly as a new and favorable exercising ground for their own wits

but he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday

afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture.

His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was delivered to

thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the political and social

state of Palestine and the East at the time of Christ’s birth; and

Robert, who was as fervent a believer in ‘large maps’ as Lord Salisbury,

had prepared a goodly store of them for the occasion, together with a

number of drawings and photographs which formed part of the collection

he had been gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. There

was nothing he laid more stress on than, these helps to the eye and

imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was accustomed to maintain in

his arguments with Hugh Flaxman that the orthodox traditional teaching

of Christianity would become impossible as soon as it should be the

habit to make a free and modern use of history and geography and social

material in connection with the Gospels. Nothing tends so much, he would

say, to break down the irrational barrier which men have raised about

this particular tract of historical space, nothing helps so much to

let in the light and air of scientific thought upon it, and therefore

nothing prepares the way so effectively for a series of new conceptions.

By a kind of natural selection Richards became Elsmere’s chief helper

and adjutant in the Sunday lectures,--with regard to all such matters as

beating up recruits, keeping guard over portfolios, handing round maps

and photographs, &c.--supplanting in this function the jealous and

sensitive Mackay, who, after his original opposition, had now arrived

at regarding Robert as his own particular property, and the lecturer’s

quick smile of thanks for services rendered as his own especial right.

The bright, quicksilvery, irascible little workman, however, was

irresistible and had his way. He had taken a passion for Robert as for

a being of another order and another world. In the discussions

which generally followed the lecture he showed a receptiveness, an

intelligence, which were in reality a matter not of the mind but of

the heart. He loved, therefore he understood. At the Club he stood for

Elsmere with a quivering, spasmodic eloquence, as against Andrews, and

the Secularists. One thing only puzzled Robert. Among all the little

fellow’s sallies and indiscretions, which were not infrequent, no

reference to his home life was ever included. Here he kept even Robert

absolutely at arm’s length. Robert knew that he was married and had

children, nothing more.

The old Scotchman, Macdonald, came out after the first lecture somewhat

crestfallen.

‘Not the sort of stooff I’d expected!’ he said, with a shade of

perplexity on the rugged face. ‘He doosn’t talk eneuf in the _aa_bstract

for me.’

But he went again, and the second lecture, on the origin of the Gospels,

got hold of him, especially as it supplied him with a whole armory

of new arguments in support of Hume’s doctrine of conscience, and in

defiance of ‘that blatin’ creetur, Reid’. The thesis with which Robert,

drawing on some of the stores supplied him by the Squire’s book, began

his account--i.e. the gradual growth within the limits of history

of man’s capacity for telling the exact truth--fitted in, to the

Scotchman’s thinking, so providentially with his own favorite

experimental doctrines as against the ‘intueetion’ folks, ‘who will have

it that a babby’s got as moch mind as Mr. Gladstone ef it only knew it!’

that afterward he never missed a lecture.

Lestrange was more difficult. He had the inherited temperament of the

Genevese _frondeur_, which made Geneva the headquarters of Calvinism

in the sixteenth century, and bids fair to make her the headquarters of

continental radicalism in the nineteenth. Robert never felt his wits

so much stretched and sharpened as when after the lecture Lestrange was

putting questions and objections with an acrid subtlety and persistence

worthy of a descendant of that burgher class which first built up the

Calvinistic system and then produced the destroyer of it in Rousseau.

Robert bore his heckling, however, with great patience and adroitness.

He had need of all he knew, as Murray Edwardes had warned him. But

luckily he knew a great deal; his thought was clearing and settling

month by month, and whatever he may have lost at any moment by the

turn of an argument, he recovered immediately afterward by the force of

personality, and of a single-mindedness in which there was never a trace

of personal grasping.

Week by week the lecture became more absorbing to him, the men more

pliant, his hold on them firmer. His disinterestedness, his brightness

and resource, perhaps, too, the signs about him of a light and frail

physical organization, the novelty of his position, the inventiveness

of his method, gave him little by little an immense power in the place.

After the first two lectures Murray Edwardes became his constant and

enthusiastic hearer on Sunday afternoons, and, catching some of Robert’s

ways and spirit, he gradually brought his own chapel and teaching more

and more into line with the Elgood Street undertaking. So that the

venture of the two men began to take ever larger proportions; and,

kindled by the growing interest and feeling about him, dreams began to

rise in Elsmere’s mind which as yet he hardly dared to cherish which

came and went, however, weaving a substance for themselves out of each

successive incident and effort.

Meanwhile he was at work on an average three evenings in the week

besides the Sunday. In West End drawing-rooms his personal gift had

begun to tell no less than in this crowded, squalid East; and as his

aims became known, other men, finding the thoughts of their own hearts

revealed in him, or touched with that social compunction which is one

of the notes of our time, came down and became his helpers. Of all the

social projects of which that Elgood Street room became the centre,

Elsmere was, in some sense, the life and inspiration. But it was not

these projects themselves which made this period of his life remarkable.

London at the present moment, if it be honey-combed with vice and

misery, is also honey-combed with the labor of ever expanding charity.

Week, by week men and women of like gifts and energies with Elsmere

spend themselves, as he did, in the constant effort to serve and to

alleviate. What _was_ noticeable, what _was_ remarkable in this work of

his, was the spirit, the religious passion which, radiating from him,

began after a while to kindle the whole body of men about him. It was

from his Sunday lectures and his talks with the children, boys and

girls, who came in after the lecture to spend a happy hour and a half

with him on Sunday afternoons, that in later years hundreds of men and

women will date the beginnings of a new absorbing life. There came a

time, indeed, when, instead of meeting criticism by argument, Robert was

able simply to point to accomplished facts. ‘You ask me,’ he would

say in effect, ‘to prove to you that men can love, can make a new and

fruitful use, for daily life and conduct, of a merely human Christ.

Go among our men, talk to our children, and satisfy yourself. A little

while ago scores of these men either hated the very name of Christianity

or were entirely indifferent to it. To scores of them now the name of

the teacher of Nazareth, the victim of Jerusalem, is dear and sacred;

his life, his death, his words, are becoming once more a constant source

of moral effort and spiritual hope. See for yourself!’

However, we are anticipating. Let us go back to May.

One beautiful morning Robert was sitting working in his study, his

windows open to the breezy blue sky and the budding plane-trees outside,

when the door was thrown open and Mr. Wendover was announced.

The Squire entered; but what a shrunken and aged Squire! The gait was

feeble, the bearing had lost all its old erectness, the bronzed strength

of the face had given place to a waxen and ominous pallor. Robert,

springing up with joy to meet the great gust of Murewell air which

seemed to blow about him with the mention of the Squire’s name, was

struck, arrested. He guided his guest to a chair with an almost filial

carefulness.

‘I don’t believe, Squire,’ he exclaimed, ‘you ought to be doing

this---wandering about London by yourself!’

But the Squire, as silent and angular as ever when anything personal to

himself was concerned, would take no notice of the implied anxiety and

sympathy. He grasped his umbrella between his knees with a pair of brown

twisted hands, and, sitting very upright, looked critically round the

room. Robert, studying the dwindled figure, remembered with a pang the

saying of another Oxford scholar, _à propos_ of the death of a young

man of extraordinary promise, ‘_What learning has perished with him! How

vain seem all toil to acquire!_’--and the words, as they passed through

his mind, seemed to him to ring another death-knell.

But after the first painful impression he could not help losing himself

in the pleasure of the familiar face, the Murewell associations.

‘How is the village, and the lnstitute? And what sort of man is my

successor--the man, I mean, who came after Armitstead?’

‘I had him once to dinner,’ said the Squire briefly; ‘he made a false

quantity, and asked me to subscribe to the Church Missionary Society.

I haven’t seen him since. He and the village have been at loggerheads

about the Institute, I believe. He wanted to turn out the Dissenters.

Bateson came to me, and we circumvented him, of course. But the man’s an

ass. Don’t talk of him!’

Robert sighed a long sigh. Was all his work undone? It wrung his heart

to remember the opening of the Institute, the ardor of his boys.

He asked a few questions about individuals, but soon gave it up as

hopeless. The Squire neither knew nor cared.

‘And Mrs. Darcy?’

‘My sister had tea in her thirtieth summer-house last Sunday,’ remarked

the Squire grimly. ‘She wished me to communicate the fact to you and

Mrs. Elsmere. Also, that the worst novel of the century will be out in

a fortnight, and she trusts to you to see it well reviewed in all the

leading journals.’

Robert laughed, but it was not very easy to laugh. There was a sort of

ghastly undercurrent in the Squire’s sarcasms that effectually deprived

them of anything mirthful.

‘And your book?’

‘Is in abeyance. I shall bequeath you the manuscript in my will, to do

what you like with.’

‘Squire!’

‘Quite true! If you had stayed, I should have finished it, I suppose.

But after a certain age the toil of spinning cobwebs entirely out of his

own brain becomes too much for a man.’

It was the first thing of the sort that iron mouth had ever said to him.

Elsmere was painfully touched.

‘You must not--you shall not give it up,’ he urged. Publish the first

part alone, and ask me for any help you please.’

The Squire shook his head.

‘Let it be. Your paper in the “Nineteenth Century” showed me that the

best thing I can do is to hand on my materials to you. Though I am not

sure that when you have got them you will make the best use of them. You

and Grey between you call yourselves Liberals, and imagine yourselves

reformers, and all the while you are doing nothing but playing into the

hands of the Blacks. All this theistic philosophy of yours only means so

much grist to their mill in the end.’

‘They don’t see it in that light themselves,’ said Robert, smiling.

‘No,’ returned the Squire, ‘because most men are puzzle-heads. Why,’ he

added, looking darkly at Robert, while the great head fell forward on

his breast in the familiar Murewell attitude, ‘why can’t you do your

work and let the preaching alone?’

‘Because,’ said Robert, ‘the preaching seems to me my work. There is the

great difference between us, Squire. You look upon knowledge as an end

in itself. It may be so. But to me, knowledge has always been valuable

first and foremost for its bearing on life.’

‘Fatal twist that,’ returned the Squire harshly. ‘Yes, I know; it was

always in you. Well, are you happy? does this new crusade of yours give

you pleasure?’

‘Happiness,’ replied Robert, leaning against the chimney-piece and

speaking in a low voice, ‘is always relative. No one knows it better

than you. Life is full of oppositions. But the work takes my whole heart

and all my energies.’

The Squire looked at him in disapproving silence for a while.

‘You will bury your life in it miserably,’ he said at last; it will be a

toil of Sisyphus leaving no trace behind it; whereas such a book as you

might write, if you gave your life to it, might live and work, and harry

the enemy when you are gone.’

Robert forbore the natural retort.

The Squire went round his library, making remarks, with all the caustic

shrewdness natural to him, on the new volumes that Robert had acquired

since their walks and talks together.

‘The Germans,’ he said at last, putting back a book into the shelves

with a new accent of distaste and weariness, ‘are beginning to founder

in the sea of their own learning. Sometimes I think I will read no more

German. It is a nation of learned fools, none of whom ever sees an inch

beyond his own professorial nose.’

Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many

feelings--perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate sense

of wrong at this man’s hands--was kind to him, and talked and smiled,

indeed, so much, that the Squire for the first time in his life took

individual notice of her, and as he parted with Elsmere in the hall made

the remark that Mrs. Elsmere seemed to like London, to which Robert,

busy in an opportune search for his guest’s coat made no reply.

‘When are you coming to Murewell?’ the Squire said to him abruptly, as

he stood at the door muffled up as though it were December. ‘There are

a good many points in that last article you want talking to about. Come

next month with Mrs. Elsmere.’

Robert drew a long breath, inspired by many feelings.

‘I will come, but not yet. I must get broken in here more thoroughly

first. Murewell touches me too deeply, and my wife. You are going abroad

in the summer, you say. Let me come to you in the autumn.’

The Squire said nothing, and went his way, leaning heavily on his stick,

across the square. Robert felt himself a brute to let him go, and almost

ran after him.

That evening Robert was disquieted by the receipt of a note from a young

fellow of St. Anselm’s, an intimate friend and occasional secretary

of Grey. Grey, the writer said, had received Robert’s last letter, was

deeply interested in his account of his work, and begged him to write

again. He would have written, but that he was himself in the doctor’s

hands, suffering from various ills, probably connected with an attack of

malarial fever which had befallen him in Rome the year before.

Catherine found him poring over the letter, and, as it seemed to her,

oppressed by an anxiety out of all proportion to the news itself.

‘They are not really troubled, I think,’ she said, kneeling down beside

him, and laying her cheek against his. ‘He will soon get over it,

Robert.’

But, alas! this mood, the tender characteristic mood of the old

Catherine, was becoming rarer and rarer with her. As the spring

expanded, as the sun and the leaves came back, poor Catherine’s temper

had only grown more wintry and more rigid. Her life was full of moments

of acute suffering. Never, for instance, did she forget the evening

of Robert’s lecture to the club. All the time he was away she had

sat brooding by herself in the drawing-room, divining with a bitter

clairvoyance all that scene in which he was taking part, her being

shaken with a tempest of misery and repulsion. And together with that

torturing image of a glaring room in which her husband, once Christ’s

loyal minister, was employing all his powers of mind and speech to make

it easier for ignorant men to desert and fight against the Lord who

bought them, there mingled a hundred memories of her father which were

now her constant companions. In proportion as Robert and she became more

divided, her dead father resumed a ghostly hold upon her. There were

days when she went about rigid and silent, in reality living altogether

in the past, among the gray farms, the crags and the stony ways of the

mountains.

At such times her mind would be full of pictures of her father’s

ministrations--his talks with the shepherds on the hills, with the women

at their doors, his pale dreamer’s face beside some wild death-bed,

shining with the Divine message, the ‘visions’ which to her awe-struck

childish sense would often seem to hold him in their silent walks among

the misty hills.

Robert, taught by many small indications, came to recognize these states

of feeling in her with a dismal clearness, and to shrink more and more

sensitively while they lasted from any collision with her. He kept his

work, his friends, his engagements to himself, talking resolutely of

other things, she trying to do the same, but with less success, as her

nature was less pliant than his.

Then there would come moments when the inward preoccupation would give

way, and that strong need of loving, which was, after all, the basis

of Catherine’s character, would break hungrily through, and the wife

of their early married days would reappear, though still only with

limitations. A certain nervous physical dread of any approach to a

particular range of subjects with her husband was always present in her.

Nay, through all these months it gradually increased in morbid strength.

Shock had produced it; perhaps shock alone could loosen the stiffing

pressure of it. But still every now and then her mood was brighter, more

caressing, and the area of common mundane interests seemed suddenly to

broaden for them.

Robert did not always make a wise use of these happier times; he was

incessantly possessed with his old idea that if she only would allow

herself some very ordinary intercourse with his world, her mood would

become less strained, his occupations and his friends would cease to

be such bugbears to her, and, for his comfort and hers, she might

ultimately be able to sympathize with certain sides at any rate of his

work.

So again and again, when her manner no longer threw him back on himself,

he made efforts and experiments. But he managed them far less cleverly

than he would have managed anybody else’s affairs, as generally happens.

For instance, at a period when he was feeling more enthusiasm than usual

for his colleague Wardlaw, and when Catherine was more accessible than

usual, it suddenly occurred to him to make an effort to bring them

together. Brought face to face, each _must_ recognize the nobleness

of the other. He felt boyishly confident of it. So he made it a point,

tenderly but insistently, that Catherine should ask Wardlaw and his wife

to come and see them. And Catherine, driven obscurely by a longing to

yield in something, which recurred, and often terrified herself, yielded

in this.

The Wardlaws, who in general never went into society, were asked to a

quiet dinner in Bedford Square, and came. Then, of course, it appeared

that Robert, with the idealist blindness, had forgotten a hundred small

differences of temperament and training which must make it impossible

for Catherine, in a state of tension, to see the hero in James Wardlaw.

It was an unlucky dinner. James Wardlaw, with all his heroisms and

virtues, had long ago dropped most of those delicate intuitions and

divinations, which make the charm of life in society, along the rough

paths of a strenuous philanthropy. He had no tact, and, like most

saints, he drew a certain amount of inspiration from a contented

ignorance of his neighbor’s point of view. Also, he was not a man who

made much of women, and he held strong views as to the subordination of

wives. It never occurred to him that Robert might have a Dissenter in

his own household, and as, in spite of their speculative differences,

he had always been accustomed to talk freely with Robert he now talked

freely to Robert plus his wife, assuming, as every good Comtist does,

that the husband is the wife’s pope.

Moreover, a solitary eccentric life, far from the society of his equals,

had developed in him a good many crude Jacobinisms. His experience of

London clergymen, for instance, had not been particularly favorable,

and he had a store of anecdotes on the subject which Robert had heard

before, but which now, repeated in Catherine’s presence, seemed to have

lost every shred of humor they once possessed. Poor Elsmere tried with

all his might to divert the stream, but it showed a tormenting tendency

to recur to the same channel. And meanwhile the little spectacled wife,

dressed in a high home-made cashmere, sat looking at her husband with

a benevolent and smiling admiration. She kept all her eloquence for the

poor.

After dinner things grew worse. Mrs. Wardlaw had recently presented her

husband with a third infant, and the ardent pair had taken advantage

of the visit to London of an eminent French Comtist to have it baptized

with full Comtist rites. Wardlaw stood astride, on the rug, giving the

assembled company a minute account of the ceremony observed, while

his wife threw in gentle explanatory interjections. The manner of both

showed a certain exasperating confidence, if not in the active sympathy,

at least in the impartial curiosity of their audience, and in the

importance to modern religious history of the incident itself.

Catherine’s silence grew deeper and deeper; the conversation fell

entirely to Robert. At last Robert, by main force as it were, got

Wardlaw off into politics, but the new Irish Coercion Bill was hardly

introduced before the irrepressible being turned to Catherine, and said

to her with smiling obtuseness,--

‘I don’t believe I’ve seen you at one of your husband’s Sunday addresses

yet, Mrs. Elsmere? And it isn’t so far from this part of the world

either.’

Catherine slowly raised her beautiful large eyes upon him. Robert

looking at her with a qualm, saw an expression he was learning to dread

flash across the face.

‘I have my Sunday-school at that time, Mr. Wardlaw. I am a Churchwoman.’

The tone had a touch of _hauteur_ Robert had hardly ever heard from his

wife before. It effectually stopped all further conversation. Wardlaw

fell into silence, reflecting that he had been a fool. His wife, with

a timid flush, drew out her knitting and stuck to it for the twenty

minutes that remained. Catherine immediately did her best to talk, to be

pleasant; but the discomfort of the little party was too great. It broke

up at ten, and the Wardlaws departed.

Catherine stood on the rug while Elsmere went with his guests to the

door, waiting restlessly for her husband’s return. Robert, however,

came back to her, tired, wounded, and out of spirits, feeling that the

attempt had been wholly unsuccessful, and shrinking from any further

talk about it. He at once sat down to some letters for the late post.

Catherine lingered a little, watching him longing miserably, like any

girl of eighteen, to throw herself on his neck and reproach him for

their unhappiness, his friends--she knew not what! He all the time was

intimately conscious of her presence, of her pale beauty, which now

at twenty-seven, in spite of its severity, had a subtler finish and

attraction than ever, of the restless little movements so unlike

herself, which she made from time to time. But neither spoke except upon

indifferent things. Once more the difficult conditions of their lives

seemed too obvious, too oppressive. Both were ultimately conquered by

the same sore impulse to let speech alone.

CHAPTER XLII.

And after this little scene, through the busy exciting weeks of the

season which followed, Robert taxed to the utmost on all sides, yielded

to the impulse of silence more and more.

Society was another difficulty between them. Robert delighted in it so

far as his East End life allowed him to have it. No one was ever more

ready to take other men and women at their own valuation than he.

Nothing was so easy to him as to believe in other people’s goodness,

or cleverness, or super-human achievement. On the other hand, London is

kind to such men as Robert Elsmere. His talk, his writing, were becoming

known and relished; and even the most rigid of the old school found it

difficult to be angry with him. His knowledge of the poor and of social

questions attracted the men of action; his growing historical reputation

drew the attention of the men of thought. Most people wished to know him

and to talk to him, and Catherine, smiled upon for his sake, and assumed

to be his chief disciple, felt herself more and more bewildered and

antagonistic as the season rushed on.

For what pleasure could she get out of these dinners and these evenings,

which supplied Robert with so much intellectual stimulus? With her

all the moral nerves were jarring and out of tune. At any time Richard

Leyburn’s daughter would have found it hard to tolerate a society where

everything is an open question and all confessions of faith are more or

less bad taste. But now, when there was no refuge to fall back upon in

Robert’s arms, no certainty of his sympathy--nay, a certainty, that,

however tender and pitiful he might be, he would still think her wrong

and mistaken! She went here and there obediently because he wished; but

her youth seemed to be ebbing, the old Murewell gayety entirely left

her, and people in general wondered why Elsmere should have married

a wife older than himself, and apparently so unsuited to him in

temperament.

Especially was she tried at Madame de Netteville’s. For Robert’s sake

she tried for a time to put aside her first impression and to bear

Madame de Netteville’s evenings--little dreaming, poor thing, all

the time that Madame de Netteville thought her presence at the famous

‘Fridays’ an incubus only to be put up with because her husband was

becoming socially an indispensable.

But after two or three Fridays Catherine’s endurance failed her. On the

last occasion she found herself late in the evening hemmed in behind

Madame de Netteville and a distinguished African explorer, who was the

lion of the evening. Eugénie de Netteville had forgotten her silent

neighbor, and presently, with some biting little phrase or other, she

asked the great man his opinion on a burning topic of the day, the

results of Church missions in Africa. The great man laughed, shrugged

his shoulders, and ran lightly through a string of stories in which both

missionaries and converts played parts which were either grotesque or

worse. Madame de Netteville thought the stories amusing, and as one

ceased she provoked another, her black eyes full of a dry laughter, her

white hand lazily plying her great ostrich fan.

Suddenly a figure rose behind them.

‘Oh, Mrs. Elsmere!’ said Madame de Netteville, starting, and then coolly

recovering herself, ‘I had no idea you were there all alone. I am afraid

our conversation has been disagreeable to you. I am afraid you are a

friend of missions!’

And her glance, turning from Catherine to her companion, made a little

malicious signal to him which only he detected, as though bidding him

take note of a curiosity.

‘Yes, I care for them, I wish for their success,’ said Catherine, one

hand, which trembled slightly, resting on the table beside her, her

great gray eyes fixed on Madame de Netteville. ‘No Christian has any

right to do otherwise.’

Poor brave goaded soul! She had a vague idea of ‘bearing testimony’ as

her father would have borne it in like circumstances. But she turned

very pale. Even to her the word ‘Christian’ sounded like a bombshell in

that room. The great traveller looked up astounded. He saw a tall

woman in white with a beautiful head, a delicate face, a something

indescribably noble and unusual in her whole look and attitude. She

looked like a Quaker prophetess--like Dinah Morris in society--like--but

his comparisons failed him. How did such a being come _there_? He was

amazed; but he was a man of taste, and Madame de Netteville caught a

certain Aesthetic approbation in his look.

She rose, her expression hard and bright as usual.

‘May one Christian pronounce for all?’ she said, with a scornful

affectation of meekness. ‘Mrs. Elsmere, please find some chair more

comfortable than that ottoman; and Mr. Ansdale, will you come and be

introduced to Lady Aubrey?’

After her guests had gone Madame de Netteville came back to the fire

flushed and frowning. It seemed to her that in that strange little

encounter she had suffered, and she never forgot or forgave the smallest

social discomfiture.

‘Can I put up with that again?’ she asked herself with a contemptuous

hardening of the lip. ‘I suppose I must if he cannot be got without her.

But I have an instinct that it is over--that she will not appear here

again. Daudet might make use of her. I can’t. What a specimen! A boy and

girl match, I suppose. What else could have induced that poor wretch to

cut his throat in such fashion? He, of all men.’

And Eugénie de Netteville stood thinking--not, apparently, of the

puritanical wife; the dangerous softness which over-spread the face

could have had no connection with Catherine.

Madame de Netteville’s instinct was just. Catherine Elsmere never

appeared again in her drawing-room.

But, with a little sad confession of her own invincible distaste, the

wife pressed the husband to go without her. She urged it at a bitter

moment, when it was clear to her that their lives must of necessity,

even in outward matters, be more separate than before. Elsmere resisted

for a time; then, lured one evening toward this end of February by the

prospect conveyed in a note from Madame de Netteville, wherein Catherine

was mentioned in the most scrupulously civil terms, of meeting one of

the most eminent of French critics, he went, and thenceforward went

often. He had, so far, no particular liking for the hostess; he hated

some of her _habitués_; but there was no doubt that in some ways she

made an admirable holder of a _salon_, and that round about her there

was a subtle mixture of elements, a liberty of discussion and comment,

to be found nowhere else. And how bracing and refreshing was that free

play of equal mind to the man weary sometimes of his leader’s _rôle_ and

weary of himself!

As to the _woman_, his social naïveté, which was extraordinary, but in

a man of his type most natural, made him accept her exactly as he found

her. If there were two or three people in Paris or London who knew or

suspected incidents of Madame de Netteville’s young married days which

made her reception at some of the strictest English houses a matter of

cynical amusement to them, not the remotest inkling of their knowledge

was ever likely to reach Elsmere. He was not a man who attracted

scandals. Nor was it anybody’s interest to spread them. Madame de

Netteville’s position in London society was obviously excellent. If she

had peculiarities of manner and speech they were easily supposed to be

French. Meanwhile she was undeniably rich and distinguished, and gifted

with a most remarkable power of protecting herself and her neighbors

from boredom. At the same time, though Elsmere was, in truth, more

interested in her friends than in her, he could not possibly be

insensible to the consideration shown for him in her drawing-room.

Madame de Netteville allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates

as to the young reformer’s social simplicity, his dreams, his optimisms.

But those intimates were the first to notice that as soon as he entered

the room those optimisms of his were adroitly respected. She had various

delicate contrivances for giving him the lead; she exercised a kind of

_surveillance_ over the topics introduced; or in conversation with

him she would play that most seductive part of the cynic shamed out of

cynicism by the neighborhood of the enthusiast.

Presently she began to claim a practical interest in his Street work.

Her offers were made with a curious mixture of sympathy and mockery.

Elsmere could not take her seriously. But neither could he refuse to

accept her money, if she chose to spend it on a library for Elgood

Street, or to consult with her about the choice of books. This whim of

hers created a certain friendly bond between them which was not present

before. And on Elsmere’s side it was strengthened when, one evening, in

a corner of her inner drawing-room, Madame de Netteville suddenly, but

very quietly, told him the story of her life--her English youth, her

elderly French husband, the death of her only child, and her flight as a

young widow to England during the war of 1870. She told the story of the

child, as it seemed to Elsmere, with a deliberate avoidance of emotion,

nay, even with a certain hardness. But it touched him profoundly. And

everything else that she said, though she professed no great regret

for her husband, or for the break-up of her French life and though

everything was reticent and measured, deepened the impression of a real

forlornness behind all the outward brilliance and social importance. He

began to feel a deep and kindly pity for her, coupled with an earnest

wish that he could help her to make her life more adequate and

satisfying. And all this he showed in the look of his frank gray eyes,

in the cordial grasp of the hand with which, he said good-by to her.

Madame de Netteville’s gaze followed him out of the room--the tall

boyish figure, the nobly carried head. The riddle of her flushed cheek

and sparkling eye was hard to read. But there were one or two persons

living who could have read it, and who could have warned you that the

_true_ story of Eugénie de Netteville’s life was written, not in her

literary studies or her social triumphs, but in various recurrent

outbreaks of unbridled impulse--the secret, and in one or two cases

the shameful landmarks of her past. And, as persons of experience, they

could also have warned you that the cold intriguer, always mistress of

herself, only exists in fiction, and that a certain poisoned and fevered

interest in the religious leader, the young and pious priest, as such,

is common enough among the corrupter women of all societies.

Toward the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine ‘_en petit comité_, a

gentleman’s dinner--except for my cousin, Lady Aubrey Willert’--to meet

an eminent Liberal Catholic, a friend of Montalembert’s youth.

It was a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw experiment. Do

what each would, the sore silence between the husband and wife was

growing, was swallowing up more of life.

‘Shall I go, Catherine?’ he asked, handing her the note.

‘It would interest you,’ she said gently, giving it back to him

scrupulously, as though she had nothing to do with it.

He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, looking at her

with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal written in them. His

heart was hungry for that old clinging dependence, that willing weakness

of love, her youth had yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent

strength of antagonism. The memory of her Murewell self flashed

miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence

toward him after her first sight of Newcome, of their night walks during

the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his arms only the ghost and

shadow of that Murewell Catherine?

She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, for she

gave a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a kind of agony to

resist.

‘Let me go, Robert!’ she said gently, kissing him on the forehead and

drawing back. ‘I hear Mary calling, and nurse is out.’

The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville’s dinner party

had come round. About seven o’clock that evening Catherine sat with the

child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert. He had gone off early

in the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a

committee of workmen organized for the establishment of a choral union

in R----, the scheme of which had been Flaxman’s chief contribution so

far to the Elgood Street undertaking.

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open on to the

bit of garden, where the trees are already withered and begrimed, that

the air without and her heart within were alike stifling and heavy with

storm. _Something_ must put an end to this oppression, this misery! She

did not know herself. Her whole inner being seemed to her lessened and

degraded by this silent struggle, this fever of the soul, which made

impossible all those serenities and sweetnesses of thought in which her

nature had always lived of old. The fight into which fate had forced her

was destroying her. She was drooping like a plant cut off from all that

nourishes its life.

And yet she never conceived it possible that she should relinquish

that fight. Nay, at times there sprang up in her now a dangerous and

despairing foresight of even worse things in store. In the middle of her

suffering, she already began to feel at moments the ascetic’s terrible

sense of compensation. What, after all, is the Christian life but

warfare? ‘_I came not to send peace, but a sword!_’

Yes, in these June days Elsmere’s happiness was perhaps nearer wreck

than it had ever been. All strong natures grow restless under such a

pressure as was now weighing on Catherine. Shock and outburst become

inevitable.

So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by vague

terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about her, cooing,

shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, with a ceaseless energy, like

her father.

The outer door opened and she heard Robert’s step and apparently Mr.

Flaxman’s also. There was a hurried rushed word or two in the hall, and

the two entered the room where she was sitting.

Robert came, pressing back the hair from his eyes with a gesture which

with him was the invariable accompaniment of mental trouble. Catherine

sprang up.

‘Robert, you look so tired! and how late you are!’ Then as she came

nearer to him: ‘And your coat--_torn--blood!_’

‘There is nothing wrong with _me_, dear,’ he said hastily, taking her

hands ‘nothing! But it has been an awful afternoon. Flaxman will tell

you. I must go to this place, I suppose, though I hate the thought of

it! Flaxman, will you tell her all about it?’ And, loosing his hold, he

went heavily out of the room and upstairs.

‘It has been an accident,’ said Flaxman gently, coming forward, ‘to one

of the men of his class. May we sit down, Mrs. Elsmere? Your husband and

I have gone through a good deal these last two hours.’

He sat down with, a long breath, evidently to regain, his ordinary even

manner. His clothes, too, were covered with dust, and his hand shook.

Catherine stood before him in consternation, while a nurse came for the

child.

‘We had just begun our committee at four o’clock,’ he said at last,

‘though only about half of the men had arrived when there was a great

shouting and commotion outside, and a man rushed in calling for Elsmere.

We ran out, found a great crowd, a huge brewer’s dray standing in the

street and a man run over. Your husband pushed his way in. I followed,

and, to my horror, I found him kneeling by--Charles Richards!’

‘Charles Richards?’ Catherine repeated vacantly.

Flaxman looked up at her, as though puzzled; then a flash of

astonishment passed over his face.

‘Elsmere has never told you of Charles Richards the little gas-fitter,

who has been his right hand for the past three months?’

‘No--never,’ she said slowly.

Again he looked astonished; then he went on sadly: ‘All this spring he

has been your husband’s shadow, never saw such devotion. We found him

lying in the middle of the road. He had only just left work, a man said,

who had been with him, and was running to the meeting. He slipped and

fell, crossing the street, which was muddy from last night’s rain. The

dray swung round the corner--the driver was drunk or careless--and they

went right over him. One foot was a sickening sight. Your husband and I

luckily know how to lift him for the best. We sent off for doctors.

His home was in the next street, as it as it happened--nearer than any

hospital; so we carried him there. The neighbors were around the door.’

Then he stopped himself.

‘Shall I tell you the whole story?’ he said kindly, ‘it has been a

tragedy! I won’t give you details if you had rather not.’

‘Oh, no!’ she said hurriedly; ‘no--tell me.’

And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his chivalry, should

treat her as though she were a girl with nerves.

‘Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When we got to the

house, an old woman rushed at me, “His wife’s in there, but ye’ll

not find her in her senses; she’s been at it from eight o’clock this

morning. We’ve took the children away.” I didn’t know what she meant

exactly till we got into the little front room. There, such a spectacle!

A young woman on a chair by the fire sleeping heavily, dead drunk; the

breakfast things on the table, the sun blazing in on the dust and the

dirt, and on the woman’s face. I wanted to carry him into the room on

the other side--he was unconscious; but a doctor had come up with us,

and made us put him down on a bed there was in the corner. Then we got

some brandy and poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his

foot, threw something over it. “Nothing to be done,” he said--“internal

injuries--he can’t live half an hour.” The next minute the poor fellow

opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed from the wall. Your

husband was on the further side, knelling. When he opened his eyes,

clearly the first thing he saw was his wife. He half sprang up--Elsmere

caught him--and gave a horrible cry--indescribably horrible. “_At it

again, at it again! My God!_” Then he fell back fainting. They got the

wife out of the room between them--a perfect log--you could hear her

heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We gave him more brandy and

he came to again. He looked up in your husband’s face. “_She hasn’t

broke out for two months,_” he said, so piteously, “_two months--and

now--I’m done--I’m done--and she’ll just go straight to the devil!_” And

it comes out, so the neighbors told us, that for two years or more

he had been patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a word of

complaint to anybody, though his life must have been a dog’s life. And

now, on his death-bed, what seemed to be breaking his heart was, not

that he was dying, but that his task was snatched from him!’

Flaxman paused, and looked away out of the window. He told his story

with difficulty.

‘Your husband tried to comfort him--promised that the wife and children

should be his special case, that everything that could be done to save

and protect them should be done. And the poor little fellow looked up at

him, with the tears running down his cheeks, and--and--blessed him.

“I cared about nothing,” he said, “when you came. You’ve been--God--to

me--I’ve seen Him--in you.” Then he asked us to say something. Your

husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of the Gospels, of St.

Paul. His eyes grew filmy but he seemed every now and then to struggle

back to, life, and as soon as he caught Elsmere’s face his look

lightened. Toward the last he said something we none of us caught; but

your husband thought it was a line from Emily Brontë’s “Hymn,” which he

said to them last Sunday in lecture.’

He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in her

face.

‘I asked him about it,’ the speaker went on, ‘as we came home. He said

Grey of St. Anselm’s once quoted it to him, and he has had a love for it

ever since.’

‘Did he die while you were there?’ asked Catherine presently after a

silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He thought her a strange woman.

‘No,’ said Flaxman, almost sharply-’but by now, it must be over. The

last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his children’s names. They

brought them in, but his hands had to be guided to them. A few minutes

after it seemed to me that he was really gone, though he still breathed.

The doctor was certain there would be no more consciousness. We stayed

nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other relations,

and we left him. Oh, it is over now!’

Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London garden.

Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of Elsmere’s pale,

silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How could she, receive such a

story in such a way?

The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly.

‘Good-night, Catherine--he has told you?’

He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully looking at her, the

face full of signs of what he had gone through.

‘Yes, it was terrible!’ she said, with an effort.

His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and went away.

When he was gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leant against the open

French window, looking keenly down on his companion. A new idea had

stirred in him.

And presently, after more talk of the incident of the afternoon, and

when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped gradually into

the subject of his own experiences in North R---- during the last six

months. He assumed all through that she knew as much as there was to

be known of Elsmere’s work, and that she was as much interested as the

normal wife is in her husband’s doings. His tact, his delicacy, never

failed him for a moment. But he spoke of his own impressions, of matters

within his personal knowledge. And since the Easter sermon he had been

much on Elsmere’s track; he had been filled with curiosity about him.

Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in long folds

about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed on her lap. Sometimes

she gave him a startled look, sometimes she shaded her eyes, while her

other hand played silently with her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching

her closely, however little he might seem to do so, was struck by her

austere and delicate beauty as he had never been before.

She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without

resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger. He

went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any excitement,

in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now and then,

expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and not always

favorably. But gradually the whole picture emerged, began to live before

them. At last he hurriedly looked at his watch.

‘What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you.’

‘You have not had dinner!’ she said, looking up at him with a sudden

nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his impression

of her.

‘No matter. I will got some at home. Good-night!’

When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought

to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterward in the drawing-room,

where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she

mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by

the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her, threw

her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on the

chair.