The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new Institute—sometimes fishing, sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys, hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and miry as his own, to deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room. Once more the rector, though physically perhaps less ardent than of yore, was the life of the party, and a certain awe and strangeness which had developed in his boys' minds towards him, during the last few weeks, passed away.
It was curious that in these days he would neither sit nor walk alone if he could help it. Catherine or a stray parishioner was almost always with him. All the while, vaguely, in the depths of consciousness, there was the knowledge that behind this piece of quiet water on which his life was now sailing, there lay storm and darkness, and that in front loomed fresh possibilities of tempest. He knew, in a way, that it was a treacherous peace which had overtaken him. And yet it was peace. The pressure exerted by the will had temporarily given way, and the deepest forces of the man's being had reasserted themselves. He could feel and love and pray again; and Catherine, seeing the old glow in the eyes, the old spring in the step, made the whole of life one thank-offering.
On the evening following that moment of reaction in the Murewell library, Robert had written to the squire. His letter had been practically a withdrawal from the correspondence.
'I find,' he wrote, 'that I have been spending too much time and energy lately on these critical matters. It seems to me that my work as a clergyman has suffered. Nor can I deny that your book and your letters have been to me a source of great trouble of mind.
'My heart is where it was, but my head is often confused. Let controversy rest a while. My wife says I want a holiday;I think so myself, and we are off in three weeks; not, however, I hope, before we have welcomed you home again, and got you to open the new Institute, which is already dazzling the eyes of the village by its size and splendour, and the white paint that Harris the builder has been lavishing upon it.'
Ten days later, rather earlier than was expected, the squire and Mrs. Darcy were at home again. Robert re-entered the great house the morning after their arrival with a strange reluctance. Its glow and magnificence, the warm perfumed air of the hall, brought back a sense of old oppressions, and he walked down the passage to the library with a sinking heart. There he found the squire busy as usual with one of those fresh cargoes of books which always accompanied him on any homeward journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more shrunken; more full of force, of harsh epigram, of grim anecdote than ever. Robert sat on the edge of the table laughing over his stories of French Orientalists, or Roman cardinals, or modern Greek professors, enjoying the impartial sarcasm which one of the greatest ofsavantswas always ready to pour out upon his brethren of the craft.
The squire, however, was never genial for a moment during the interview. He did not mention his book nor Elsmere's letter. But Elsmere suspected in him a good deal of suppressed irritability; and, as after a while he abruptly ceased to talk, the visit grew difficult.
The rector walked home feeling restless and depressed. The mind had begun to work again. It was only by a great effort that he could turn his thoughts from the squire, and all that the squire had meant to him during the past year, and so woo back to himself 'the shy bird Peace.'
Mr. Wendover watched the door close behind him, and then went back to his work with a gesture of impatience.
'Once a priest, always a priest. What a fool I was to forget it! You think you make an impression on the mystic, and at the bottom there is always something which defies you and common sense. "Two and two do not, and shall not, make four,"' he said to himself, in a mincing voice of angry sarcasm. '"It would give me too much pain that they should." Well, and so I suppose what might have been a rational friendship will go by the board like everything else. What can make the man shilly-shally in this way? He is convinced already, as he knows—those later letters were conclusive! His living, perhaps, and his work! Not for the money's sake—there never was a more incredibly disinterested person born. But his work? Well, who is to hinder his work? Will he be the first parson in the Church of England who looks after the poor and holds his tongue? If you can't speak your mind, it is something at any rate to possess one—nine-tenths of the clergy being without the appendage. But Elsmere—pshaw! he will go muddling on to the end of the chapter!'
The squire, indeed, was like a hunter whose prey escapes him at the very moment of capture, and there grew on him a mocking aggressive mood which Elsmere often found hard to bear.
One natural symptom of it was his renewed churlishness as to all local matters. Elsmere one afternoon spent an hour in trying to persuade him to open the new Institute.
'What on earth do you want me for?' inquired Mr. Wendover, standing before the fire in the library, the Medusa head peering over his shoulder. 'You know perfectly well that all the gentry about here—I suppose you will have some of them—regard me as an old reprobate, and the poor people, I imagine, as a kind of ogre. To me it doesn't matter a twopenny damn—I apologise; it was the Duke of Wellington's favourite standard of value—but I can't see what good it can do either you or the village, under the circumstances, that I should stand on my head for the popular edification.'
Elsmere, however, merely stood his ground, arguing and bantering, till the squire grudgingly gave way. This time, after he departed, Mr. Wendover, instead of going to his work, still stood gloomily ruminating in front of the fire. His frowning eyes wandered round the great room before him. For the first time he was conscious that now, as soon as the charm of Elsmere's presence was withdrawn, his working hours were doubly solitary; that his loneliness weighed upon him more; and that it mattered to him appreciably whether that young man went or stayed. The stirring of a new sensation, however,—unparalleled since the brief days when even Roger Wendover had his friends and his attractions like other men,—was soon lost in renewed chafing at Elsmere's absurdities. The squire had been at first perfectly content—so he told himself—to limit the field of their intercourse, and would have been content to go on doing so. But Elsmere himself had invited freedom of speech between them.
'I would have given him my best,' Mr. Wendover reflected impatiently. 'I could have handed on to him all I shall never use, and he might use, admirably. And now we might as well be on the terms we were to begin with for all the good I get out of him, or he out of me. Clearly nothing but cowardice! He cannot face the intellectual change, and he must, I suppose, dread lest it should affect his work. Good God, what nonsense! As if any one inquired what an English parson believed nowadays, so long as he performs all the usual antics decently!'
And, meanwhile, it never occurred to the squire that Elsmere had a wife, and a pious one. Catherine had been dropped out of his calculation as to Elsmere's future, at a very early stage.
The following afternoon Robert, coming home from a round, found Catherine out, and a note awaiting him from the Hall.
'Can you and Mrs. Elsmere come in to tea?' wrote the squire. 'Madame de Netteville is here, and one or two others.'
Robert grumbled a good deal, looked for Catherine to devise an excuse for him, could not find her, and at last reluctantly set out again alone.
He was tired and his mood was heavy. As he trudged through the park he never once noticed the soft sun-flooded distance, the shining loops of the river, the feeding deer, or any of those natural witcheries to which eye and sense were generally so responsive. The labourers going home, the children—with aprons full of crab-apples, and lips dyed by the first blackberries—who passed him, got but an absent smile or salute from the rector. The interval of exaltation and recoil was over. The ship of the mind was once more labouring in alien and dreary seas.
He roused himself to remember that he had been curious to see Madame de Netteville. She was an old friend of the squire's, the holder of a London salon, much more exquisite and select than anything Lady Charlotte could show.
'She had the same thing in Paris before the war,' the squire explained. 'Renan gave me a card to her. An extraordinary woman. No particular originality; but one of the best persons "to consult about ideas," like Joubert's Madame de Beaumont, I ever saw. Receptiveness itself. A beauty, too, or was one, and a bit of a sphinx, which adds to the attraction. Mystery becomes a woman vastly. One suspects her of adventures just enough to find her society doubly piquant.'
Vincent directed him to the upper terrace, whither tea had been taken. This terrace, which was one of the features of Murewell, occupied the top of the yew-clothed hill on which the library looked out. Evelyn himself had planned it. Along its upper side ran one of the most beautiful of old walls, broken by niches and statues, tapestried with roses and honeysuckle, and opening in the centre to reveal Evelyn's darling conceit of all—a semicircular space, holding a fountain, and leading to a grotto. The grotto had been scooped out of the hill; it was peopled with dim figures of fauns and nymphs who showed white amid its moist greenery; and in front a marble Silence drooped over the fountain, which held gold and silver fish in a singularly clear water. Outside ran the long stretch of level turf, edged with a jewelled rim of flowers; and as the hill fell steeply underneath, the terrace was like a high green platform raised into air, in order that a Wendover might see his domain, which from thence lay for miles spread out before him.
Here, beside the fountain, were gathered the squire, Mrs. Darcy, Madame de Netteville, and two unknown men. One of them was introduced to Elsmere as Mr. Spooner, and recognised by him as a Fellow of the Royal Society, a famous mathematician, sceptic,bon vivant, and sayer of good things. The other was a young Liberal Catholic, the author of a remarkable collection of essays on mediæval subjects in which the squire, treating the man's opinions of course as of no account, hadinstantly recognised the note of the true scholar. A pale, small, hectic creature, possessed of that restless energy of mind which often goes with the heightened temperature of consumption.
Robert took a seat by Madame de Netteville, whose appearance was picturesqueness itself. Her dress, a skilful mixture of black and creamy yellow, lay about her in folds, as soft, as carelessly effective as her manner. Her plumed hat shadowed a face which was no longer young in such a way as to hide all the lines possible; while the half-light brought admirably out the rich dark smoothness of the tints, the black lustre of the eyes. A delicate blue-veined hand lay upon her knee, and Robert was conscious after ten minutes or so that all her movements, which seemed at first merely slow and languid, were in reality singularly full of decision and purpose.
She was not easy to talk to on a first acquaintance. Robert felt that she was studying him, and was not so much at his ease as usual, partly owing to fatigue and mental worry.
She asked him little abrupt questions about the neighbourhood, his parish, his work, in a soft tone which had, however, a distinct aloofness, evenhauteur. His answers, on the other hand, were often a trifle reckless and offhand. He was in a mood to be impatient with amondaine'slanguid inquiries into clerical work, and it seemed to him the squire's description had been overdone.
'So you try to civilise your peasants,' she said at last. 'Does it succeed—is it worth while?'
'That depends upon your general ideas of what is worth while,' he answered smiling.
'Oh, everything is worth while that passes the time,' she said hurriedly. 'The clergy of the oldrégimewent through life half asleep. That was their way of passing it. Your way, being a modern, is to bustle and try experiments.'
Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over Elsmere's keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of intellectual and social assumption enwrapped her, which annoyed Robert in much the same way as Langham's philosophical airs were wont to do. He was drawn without knowing it into a match of wits wherein his strokes, if they lacked the finish and subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness or mental resource. Madame de Netteville's tone insensibly changed, her manner quickened, her great eyes gradually unclosed.
Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the reality of influence, Madame de Netteville paradoxically maintaining that no human being had ever really converted, transformed, or convinced another, the voice of young Wishart, shrill and tremulous, rose above the general level of talk.
'I am quite ready; I am not the least afraid of a definition. Theology is organised knowledge in the field of religion, a science like any other science!'
'Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,' said Mr. Spooner, leaning forward with his hands round his knees, and speaking with the most elegant and good-humouredsangfroidimaginable, 'the science of the world's ghosts! I cannot imagine any more fascinating.'
'Well,' said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a deep breath, 'thatwas a remark to have hurled at you all at once out of doors on a summer's afternoon! Oh, Mr. Spooner!' she said, raising her voice, 'don't play the heretic here! There is no fun in it; there are too many with you.'
'I did not begin it, my dear madam, and your reproach is unjust. On one side of me Archbishop Manning'sfidus Achates,' and the speaker took off his large straw hat and gracefully waved it—first to the right, then to the left. 'On the other, the rector of the parish. "Cannon to right of me, cannon to left of me." I submit my courage is unimpeachable!'
He spoke with a smiling courtesy as excessive as his silky moustache, his long straw-coloured beard, and his Panama hat. Madame de Netteville surveyed him with cool critical eyes. Robert smiled slightly, acknowledged the bow, but did not speak.
Mr. Wishart evidently took no heed of anything but his own thoughts. He sat bolt upright with shining excited eyes.
'Ah, I remember that article of yours in theFortnightly! How you sceptics miss the point!'
And out came a stream of argument and denunciation which had probably lain lava-hot at the heart of the young convert for years, waiting for such a moment as this, when he had before him at close quarters two of the most famous antagonists of his faith. The outburst was striking, but certainly unpardonably ill-timed. Madame de Netteville retreated into herself with a shrug. Robert, in whom a sore nerve had been set jarring, did his utmost to begin his talk with her again.
In vain!—for the squire struck in. He had been sitting huddled together—his cynical eyes wandering from Wishart to Elsmere—when suddenly some extravagant remark of the young Catholic, and Robert's effort to edge away from the conversation, caught his attention at the same moment. His face hardened, and in his nasal voice he dealt a swift epigram at Mr. Wishart, which for the moment left the young disputant floundering.
But only for the moment. In another minute or two the argument, begun so casually, had developed into a serious trial of strength, in which the squire and young Wishart took the chief parts, while Mr. Spooner threw in a laugh and a sarcasm here and there.
And as long as Mr. Wendover talked, Madame de Netteville listened. Robert's restless repulsion to the whole incident, his passionate wish to escape from these phrases and illustrations and turns of argument which were all so wearisomely stale andfamiliar to him, found no support in her. Mrs. Darcy dared not second his attempts at chat, for Mr. Wendover, on the rare occasions when he held forth, was accustomed to be listened to; and Elsmere was of too sensitive a social fibre to break up the party by an abrupt exit, which could only have been interpreted in one way.
So he stayed, and perforce listened, but in complete silence. None of Mr. Wendover's side-hits touched him. Only as the talk went on, the rector in the background got paler and paler; his eyes, as they passed from the mobile face of the Catholic convert, already, for those who knew, marked with the signs of death, to the bronzed visage of the squire, grew duller—more instinct with a slowly-dawning despair.
Half an hour later he was once more on the road leading to the park gate. He had a vague memory that at parting the squire had shown him the cordiality of one suddenly anxious to apologise by manner, if not by word. Otherwise everything was forgotten. He was only anxious, half dazed as he was, to make out wherein lay the vital difference between his present self and the Elsmere who had passed along that road an hour before.
He had heard a conversation on religious topics, wherein nothing was new to him, nothing affected him intellectually at all. What was there in that to break the spring of life like this? He stood still, heavily trying to understand himself.
Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, every word of that hectic young pleader for Christ and the Christian certainties would have roused in him a leaping passionate sympathy—the heart's yearning assent, even when the intellect was most perplexed. Now that inmost strand had given way. Suddenly the disintegrating force he had been so pitifully, so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure offeeling, the first treachery of theheart. Wishart's hopes and hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty faculties, had aroused in him no echo, no response. His soul had been dead within him.
As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the gate it seemed to Robert that he was going through, once more, that old fierce temptation of Bunyan's,—
'For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously delivered me, and had set me down so sweetly in the faith of His Holy Gospel, and had given me such strong consolation and blessed evidence from heaven, touching my interest in His love through Christ, the tempter came upon me again, and that with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than before. And that was, "To sell and part with this most blessed Christ; to exchange Him for the things of life, for anything!" The temptation lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month:no, not sometimes one hour in many days together, for it did always, in almost whatever I thought, intermix itself therewith, in such sort that I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look on this or that, but still the temptation would come: "Sell Christ for this, or sell Christ for that, sell Him, sell Him!"'
Was this what lay before the minister of God now in thisselva oscuraof life? The selling of the Master, of 'the love so sweet, the unction spiritual,' for an intellectual satisfaction, the ravaging of all the fair places of the heart by an intellectual need!
And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, which made the summer air a darkness, and closed every sense in him to the evening beauty, he felt the irresistible march and pressure of the new instincts, the new forces, which life and thought had been calling into being. The words of St. Augustine which he had read to Catherine, taken in a strange new sense, came back to him—'Commend to the keeping of the Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose nothing!'
Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the whole nature in this way?
Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, and his face turned like the face of a blind man towards a world of which it saw nothing, went through a desperate catechism of himself.
'Do I believe in God?Surely, surely! "Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him!"Do I believe in Christ?Yes,—in the teacher, the martyr, the symbol to us Westerns of all things heavenly and abiding, the image and pledge of the invisible life of the spirit—with all my soul and all my mind!
'But in the Man-God, the Word from Eternity,—in a wonder-working Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living Intercessor and Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren?'
He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words of irrevocable meaning.
'Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt, enjoys, equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and "miracles do not happen!"'
It was done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after his lesser defeat.
'Now was the battle won, and down fell I as a bird that is shot from the top of a tree into great guilt and fearful despair. Thus getting out of my bed I went moping in the field; but God knows with as heavy an heart as mortal man I think could bear, where for the space of two hours I was like a man bereft of life.'
All these years of happy spiritual certainty, of rejoicing oneness with Christ, to end in this wreck and loss! Was notthis indeed 'il gran rifiuto'—the greatest of which human daring is capable? The lane darkened round him. Not a soul was in sight. The only sounds were the sounds of a gently-breathing nature, sounds of birds and swaying branches and intermittent gusts of air rustling through the gorse and the drifts of last year's leaves in the wood beside him. He moved mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of desolate terror had passed away, with a new inrushing sense which seemed to him a sense of liberty—of infinite expansion.
Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped away, and there to the left on the westernmost edge of the hill lay the square stone rectory, its windows open to the evening coolness, a white flutter of pigeons round the dovecote on the side lawn, the gold of the August wheat in the great cornfield showing against the heavy girdle of oak-wood.
Robert stood gazing at it—the home consecrated by love, by effort, by faith. The high alternations of intellectual and spiritual debate, the strange emerging sense of deliverance, gave way to a most bitter human pang of misery.
'O God! My wife—my work!'
... There was a sound of a voice calling—Catherine's voice calling for him. He leant against the gate of the wood-path, struggling sternly with himself. This was no simple matter of his own intellectual consistency or happiness. Another's whole life was concerned. Any precipitate speech, or hasty action, would be a crime. A man is bound above all things to protect those who depend on him from his own immature or revocable impulses. Not a word yet, till this sense of convulsion and upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once more its own master.
He opened the gate and went towards her. She was strolling along the path looking out for him, one delicate hand gathering up her long evening dress—that very same black brocade she had worn in the old days at Burwood—the other playing with their Dandie Dinmont puppy who was leaping beside her. As she caught sight of him, there was the flashing smile, the hurrying step. And he felt he could but just drag himself to meet her.
'Robert, how long you have been! I thought you must have stayed to dinner after all! And how tired you seem!'
'I had a long walk,' he said, catching her hand, as it slipped itself under his arm, and clinging to it as though to a support. 'And I am tired. There is no use whatever in denying it.'
His voice was light, but if it had not been so dark she must have been startled by his face. As they went on towards the house, however, she scolding him for over-walking, he won his battle with himself. He went through the evening so that even Catherine's jealous eyes saw nothing but extra fatigue. In the most desperate straits of life love is still the fountain of all endurance, and if ever a man loved it was Robert Elsmere.
But that night, as he lay sleepless in their quiet room, with the window open to the stars and to the rising gusts of wind, which blew the petals of the cluster-rose outside in drifts of 'fair weather snow' on to the window-sill, he went through an agony which no words can adequately describe.
He must, of course, give up his living and his orders. His standards and judgments had always been simple and plain in these respects. In other men it might be right and possible that they should live on in the ministry of the Church, doing the humane and charitable work of the Church, while refusing assent to the intellectual and dogmatic framework on which the Church system rests; but for himself it would be neither right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or reason about it. There was a favourite axiom of Mr. Grey's which had become part of his pupil's spiritual endowment, and which was perpetually present to him at this crisis of his life, in the spirit, if not in the letter—'Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind.' And with this intellectual conscience he was no more capable of trifling than with the moral conscience.
The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds impressed themselves upon him!—the stir of the child's waking soon after midnight in the room overhead; the cry of the owls on the oak-wood; the purring of the night-jars on the common; the morning chatter of the swallows round the eaves.
With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself and looked at Catherine. She was sleeping with that light sound sleep which belongs to health of body and mind, one hand under her face, the other stretched out in soft relaxation beside her. Her husband hung over her in a bewilderment of feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent pictures of the future; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How her sleep, her ignorance, reproached him! He thought of the wreck of all her pure ambitions—for him, for their common work, for the people she had come to love; the ruin of her life of charity and tender usefulness, the darkening of all her hopes, the shaking of all her trust. Two years of devotion, of exquisite self-surrender, had brought her to this! It was for this he had lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she had opened to him all her sweet stores of faith, all the deepest springs of her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer! The thought of it and his own helplessness wrung his heart.
Oh, could he keep her love through it all? There was an unspeakable dread mingled with his grief—his remorse. It had been there for months. In her eyes would not only pain but sin divide them? Could he possibly prevent her whole relation to him from altering and dwindling?
It was to be the problem of his remaining life. With a great cry of the soul to that God it yearned and felt for through allthe darkness and ruin which encompassed it, he laid his hand on hers with the timidest passing touch.
'Catherine, I will make amends! My wife, I will make amends!'
The next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept on after their usual waking time, and remembering his exhaustion of the night before, left him softly, and kept the house quiet that he might not be disturbed. She was in charge of the now toddling Mary in the dining-room when the door opened and Robert appeared.
At sight of him she sprang up with a half-cry; the face seemed to have lost all its fresh colour, its look of sun and air; the eyes were sunk; the lips and chin lined and drawn. It was like a face from which the youth had suddenly been struck out.
'Robert!—' but her question died on her lips.
'A bad night, darling, and a bad headache,' he said, groping his way, as it seemed to her, to the table, his hand leaning on her arm. 'Give me some breakfast.'
She restrained herself at once, put him into an armchair by the window, and cared for him in her tender noiseless way. But she had grown almost as pale as he, and her heart was like lead.
'Will you send me off for the day to Thurston ponds?' he said presently, trying to smile with lips so stiff and nerveless that the will had small control over them.
'Can you walk so far? You did overdo it yesterday, you know. You have never got over Mile End, Robert.'
But her voice had a note in it which in his weakness he could hardly bear. He thirsted to be alone again, to be able to think over quietly what was best for her—for them both. There must be a next step, and in her neighbourhood he was too feeble, too tortured, to decide upon it.
'No more, dear—no more,' he said impatiently, as she tried to feed him; then he added as he rose: 'Don't make arrangements for our going next week, Catherine; it can't be so soon.'
Catherine looked at him with eyes of utter dismay. The sustaining hope of all these difficult weeks, which had slipped with such terrible unexpectedness into their happy life, was swept away from her.
'Robert, yououghtto go.'
'I have too many things to arrange,' he said sharply, almost irritably. Then his tone changed: 'Don't urge it, Catherine.'
His eyes in their weariness seemed to entreat her not to argue. She stooped and kissed him, her lips trembling.
'When do you want to go to Thurston?'
'As soon as possible. Can you find me my fishing-basket and get me some sandwiches? I shall only lounge there and take it easy.'
She did everything for him that wifely hands could do. Then when his fishing-basket was strapped on, and his lunch was slipped into the capacious pocket of the well-worn shooting coat, she threw her arms round him.
'Robert, you will come awaysoon.'
He roused himself and kissed her.
'I will,' he said simply, withdrawing, however, from her grasp as though he could not bear those close pleading eyes. 'Good-bye! I shall be back some time in the afternoon.'
From her post beside the study window she watched him take the short cut across the cornfield. She was miserable, and all at sea. A week ago he had been so like himself again, and now——! Never had she seen him in anything like this state of physical and mental collapse.
'Oh, Robert,' she cried under her breath, with an abandonment like a child's, strong soul that she was, 'whywon'tyou tell me, dear? Why won't you let me share? I might help you through—I might.'
She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A weaker woman would have implored, tormented, till she knew all. Catherine's very strength and delicacy of nature, and that respect which was inbred in her for thesacraof the inner life, stood in her way. She could not catechise him, and force his confidence on this subject of all others. It must be given freely. And oh! it was so long in coming!
Surely, surely, it must be mainly physical, the result of over-strain—expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, just as daily life reproduces itself in dreams. The worldly man suffers at such times through worldly things, the religious man through his religion. Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this kind, and with certain more or less vague preparations for departure, Catherine got through the morning as best she might.
Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under a sky which, after a few threatening showers, promised once more to be a sky of intense heat. He had with him all the tackle necessary for spooning pike, a sport the novelty and success of which had hugely commended it the year before to those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much developed in him.
And now—oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the long stretches of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque group of old brick cottages brought a reminder of man and his works into the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing hisway through the closely-set trees, he made some futile attempts at fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was over and lay it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for hours, vaguely watching the reflection of the clouds, the gambols and quarrels of the waterfowl, the ways of the birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the softly-moving trees,—the real self of him passing all the while through an interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching to the future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret.
He thought of the feelings with which he had taken orders, of Oxford scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes, and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he touched the depths of self-humiliation.
As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. Only thehabitof faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a Power beyond sense—a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had been stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was never a moment when Elsmere felt himselfutterlyforsaken.
But his people—his work! Every now and then into the fragmentary debate still going on within him there would flash little pictures of Murewell. The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning over the village shop, the vane on the old 'Manor-house,' the familiar figures at the doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear to him as though he were that moment in the pulpit; the children he had taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or brutalised peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets he had learnt,—all these memories and images clung about him as though with ghostly hands, asking, 'Why will you desert us? You are ours—stay with us!'
Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him—the arrangements with hislocum tenens, the interview with the bishop, the parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be done with Martha and his mother's cottage.
His mother? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable longing rose and broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes.He had a strange conviction that at this crisis of his life she ofallhuman beings would have understood him best.
When would the squire know? He pictured the interview with him, divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision, Mr. Wendover's start of mingled triumph and impatience—triumph in the new recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man to look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly renounced, or clerical pledges as more than a form of words. So henceforth he was on the same side with the squire, held by an indiscriminating world as bound to the same negations, the same hostilities! The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral repugnance. The squire and Edward Langham—they were the only sceptics of whom he had ever had close and personal experience. And with all his old affection for Langham, all his frank sense of pliancy in the squire's hands, yet in this strait of life how he shrinks from them both!—souls at war with life and man, without holiness, without perfume!
Is it the law of things? 'Once loosen a man'sreligio, once fling away the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.' How often he has heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows cold within him. What good man can ever contemplate with patience the loss, not of friends or happiness, but of his best self? What shall it profit a man, indeed, if he gain the whole world—the whole world of knowledge and speculation—andlose his own soul?
And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward eye the vision of an Oxford lecture room, of a short sturdy figure, of a great brow over honest eyes, of words alive with moral passion, of thought instinct with the beauty of holiness. Thank God for the saint in Henry Grey! Thinking of it, Robert felt his own self-respect re-born.
Oh! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval! Even though it was the depth of vacation, Grey was so closely connected with the town, as distinguished from the university, life of Oxford, it might be quite possible to find him at home. Elsmere suddenly determined to find out at once if he could be seen.
And if so, he would go over to Oxford at once.Thisshould be the next step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till afterwards. He felt himself so dull, so weary, so resourceless. Grey should help and counsel him, should send him back with a clearer brain—a quicker ingenuity of love, better furnished against her pain and his own.
Then everything else was forgotten; and he thought of nothing but that grisly moment of waking in the empty room, when still believing it night, he had put out his hand for his wife, and with a superstitious pang had felt himself alone. His heart torn with a hundred inarticulate cries of memory andgrief, he sat on beside the water, unconscious of the passing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the wood-pigeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash of a kingfisher, at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the trees opposite.
At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few heavy drops of warm rain. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four o'clock. He rose, stiff and cramped with sitting, and at the same instant he saw beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of common a boy's figure, which, after a step or two, he recognised as Ned Irwin.
'You here, Ned?' he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in him reasserting itself at once. 'Why aren't you harvesting?'
'Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and Mr. Carter's job don't begin till to-morrow. He's got a machine coming from Witley, he hev, and they won't let him have it till Thursday, so I've been out after things for the club.'
And opening the tin box strapped on his back, he showed the day's capture of butterflies, and some belated birds' eggs, the plunder of a bit of common where the turf for the winter's burning was just being cut.
'Goatsucker, linnet, stonechat,' said the rector, fingering them. 'Well done for August, Ned. If you haven't got anything better to do with them, give them to that small boy of Mr. Carter's that's been ill so long. He'd thank you for them, I know.'
The lad nodded with a guttural sound of assent. Then his new-born scientific ardour seemed to struggle with his rustic costiveness of speech.
'I've been just watching a queer creetur,' he said at last hurriedly; 'I b'leeve he's that un.'
And he pulled out a well-thumbed handbook, and pointed to a cut of the grasshopper warbler.
'Whereabouts?' asked Robert, wondering the while at his own start of interest.
'In that bit of common t'other side the big pond,' said Ned, pointing, his brick-red countenance kindling into suppressed excitement.
'Come and show me!' said the rector, and the two went off together. And sure enough, after a little beating about, they heard the note which had roused the lad's curiosity, the loud whirr of a creature that should have been a grasshopper, and was not.
They stalked the bird a few yards, stooping and crouching, Robert's eager hand on the boy's arm, whenever the clumsy rustic movements made too much noise among the underwood. They watched it uttering its jarring imitative note on bush after bush, just dropping to the ground as they came near, and flitting a yard or two farther, but otherwise showing no sign of alarm at their presence. Then suddenly the impulse whichhad been leading him on died in the rector. He stood upright, with a long sigh.
'I must go home, Ned,' he said abruptly. 'Where are you off to?'
'Please, sir, there's my sister at the cottage, her as married Jim, the under-keeper. I be going there for my tea.'
'Come along, then, we can go together.'
They trudged along in silence; presently Robert turned on his companion.
'Ned, this natural history has been a fine thing for you, my lad; mind you stick to it. That and good work will make a man of you. When I go away——'
The boy started and stopped dead, his dumb animal eyes fixed on his companion.
'You know I shall soon be going off on my holiday,' said Robert, smiling faintly; adding hurriedly as the boy's face resumed its ordinary expression: 'But some day, Ned, I shall go for good. I don't know whether you've been depending on me—you and some of the others. I think perhaps you have. If so, don't depend on me, Ned, any more! It must all come to an end—everything must—everything!—except the struggle to be a man in the world, and not a beast—to make one's heart clean and soft, and not hard and vile. That is theonething that matters, and lasts. Ah, never forget that, Ned! Never forget it!'
He stood still, towering over the slouching thick-set form beside him, his pale intensity of look giving a rare dignity and beauty to the face which owed so little of its attractiveness to comeliness of feature. He had the makings of a true shepherd of men, and his mind as he spoke was crossed by a hundred different currents of feeling—bitterness, pain, and yearning unspeakable. No man could feel the wrench that lay before him more than he.
Ned Irwin said not a word. His heavy lids were dropped over his deep-set eye; he stood motionless, nervously fiddling with his butterfly net—awkwardness, and, as it seemed, irresponsiveness, in his whole attitude.
Robert gathered himself together.
'Well, good-night, my lad,' he said with a change of tone. 'Good luck to you; be off to your tea!'
And he turned away, striding swiftly over the short burnt August grass in the direction of the Murewell woods, which rose in a blue haze of heat against the slumberous afternoon sky. He had not gone a hundred yards before he heard a clattering after him. He stopped, and Ned came up with him.
'They're heavy, them things,' said the boy, desperately blurting it out, and pointing, with heaving chest and panting breath, to the rod and basket. 'I am going that way, I can leave un at the rectory.'
Robert's eyes gleamed.
'They are no weight, Ned—'cause why? I've been lazy and caught no fish! But there,'—after a moment's hesitation he slipped off the basket and rod, and put them into the begrimed hands held out for them. 'Bring them when you like; I don't know when I shall want them again. Thank you, and God bless you!'
The boy was off with his booty in a second.
'Perhaps he'll like to think he did it for me, by and by,' said Robert sadly to himself, moving on, a little moisture in the clear gray eye.
About three o'clock next day Robert was in Oxford. The night before he had telegraphed to ask if Grey was at home. The reply had been—'Here for a week on way north; come by all means.' Oh! that look of Catherine's when he had told her of his plan, trying in vain to make it look merely casual and ordinary.
'It is more than a year since I have set eyes on Grey, Catherine. And the day's change would be a boon. I could stay the night at Merton, and get home early next day.'
But as he turned a pleading look to her, he had been startled by the sudden rigidity of face and form. Her silence had in it an intense, almost a haughty, reproach, which she was too keenly hurt to put into words.
He caught her by the arm, and drew her forcibly to him. There he made her look into the eyes which were full of nothing but the most passionate imploring affection.
'Have patience a little more, Catherine!' he just murmured. 'Oh, how I have blessed you for silence! Only till I come back!'
'Till you come back,' she repeated slowly. 'I cannot bear it any longer, Robert, that you should give others your confidence, and not me.'
He groaned and let her go. No—there should be but one day more of silence, and that day was interposed for her sake. If Grey from his calmer standpoint bade him wait and test himself, before taking any irrevocable step, he would obey him. And if so, the worst pang of all need not yet be inflicted on Catherine, though as to his state of mind he would be perfectly open with her.
A few hours later his cab deposited him at the well-known door. It seemed to him that he and the scorched plane-trees lining the sides of the road were the only living things in the wide sun-beaten street.
Every house was shut up. Only the Greys' open windows, amid their shuttered neighbours, had a friendly human air.
Yes; Mr. Grey was in, and expecting Mr. Elsmere. Robert climbed the dim familiar staircase, his heart beating fast.
'Elsmere, this is a piece of good fortune!'
And the two men, after a grasp of the hand, stood fronting each other: Mr. Grey, a light of pleasure on the rugged dark-complexioned face, looking up at his taller and paler visitor.
But Robert could find nothing to say in return; and in an instant Mr. Grey's quick eye detected the strained nervous emotion of the man before him.
'Come and sit down, Elsmere—there, in the window, where we can talk. One has to live on this east side of the house this weather.'
'In the first place,' said Mr. Grey, scrutinising him, as he returned to his own book-littered corner of the window-seat. 'In the first place, my dear fellow, I can't congratulate you on your appearance. I never saw a man look in worse condition—to be up and about.'
'That's nothing!' said Robert almost impatiently. 'I want a holiday, I believe. Grey!' and he looked nervously out over garden and apple-trees, 'I have come—very selfishly—to ask your advice; to throw a trouble upon you, to claim all your friendship can give me.'
He stopped. Mr. Grey was silent—his expression changing instantly, the bright eyes profoundly, anxiously attentive.
'I have just come to the conclusion,' said Robert, after a moment, with quick abruptness, 'that I ought now—at this moment—to leave the Church, and give up my living, for reasons which I will describe to you. But before I act on the conclusion, I wanted the light of your mind upon it, seeing that—that—other persons than myself are concerned.'
'Give up your living!' echoed Mr. Grey in a low voice of astonishment. He sat looking at the face and figure of the man before him with a half-frowning expression. How often Robert had seen some rash exuberant youth quelled by that momentary frown! Essentially conservative as was the inmost nature of the man, for all his radicalism there were few things for which Henry Grey felt more instinctive distaste than for unsteadiness of will and purpose, however glorified by fine names. Robert knew it, and, strangely enough, felt for a moment in the presence of the heretical tutor as a culprit before a judge.
'It is, of course, a matter of opinions,' he said, with an effort. 'Do you remember, before I took orders, asking whether I had ever had difficulties, and I told you that I had probably never gone deep enough. It was profoundly true, though I didn't really mean it. But this year—— No, no, I have not been merely vain and hasty! I may be a shallow creature, but it has been natural growth, not wantonness.'
And at last his eyes met Mr. Grey's firmly, almost with solemnity. It was as if in the last few moments he had been instinctively testing the quality of his own conduct and motives by the touchstone of the rare personality beside him; and they had stood the trial. There was such pain, such sincerity, above all such freedom from littleness of soul implied in words andlook, that Mr. Grey quickly held out his hand. Robert grasped it, and felt that the way was clear before him.
'Will you give me an account of it?' said Mr. Grey, and his tone was grave sympathy itself. 'Or would you rather confine yourself to generalities and accomplished facts?'
'I will try and give you an account of it,' said Robert; and sitting there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the yellowing afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden-walls between them and the new Museum, he went through the history of the last two years. He described the beginnings of his historical work, the gradual enlargement of the mind's horizons, and the intrusion within them of question after question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the squire's name.
'Ah!' exclaimed Mr. Grey, 'I had forgotten you were that man's neighbour. I wonder he didn't set you against the whole business, inhuman old cynic!'
He spoke with the strong dislike of the idealist, devoted in practice to an everyday ministry to human need, for the intellectual egotist. Robert caught and relished the old pugnacious flash in the eye, the Midland strength of accent.
'Cynic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought him about his drains and his cottages, however,'—and he smiled sadly—'before I began to read his books. But the man's genius is incontestable, his learning enormous. He found me in a susceptible state, and I recognise that his influence immensely accelerated a process already begun.'
Mr. Grey was struck with the simplicity and fulness of the avowal. A lesser man would hardly have made it in the same way. Rising to pace up and down the room—the familiar action recalling vividly to Robert the Sunday afternoons of bygone years—he began to put questions with a clearness and decision that made them so many guides to the man answering, through the tangle of his own recollections.
'I see,' said the tutor at last, his hands in the pockets of his short gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. 'Well, the process in you has been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had little or nothing to say to it. It has been all a question of literary and historical evidence.Iam old-fashioned enough'—and he smiled—'to stick to theà prioriimpossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher!Youhave come to see how miracle is manufactured, to recognise in it merely a natural inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental, inductive. I imagine'—he looked up—'you didn't get much help out of the orthodox apologists?'
Robert shrugged his shoulders.
'It often seemed to me,' he said drearily, 'I might have got through, but for the men whose books I used to read and respect most in old days. The point of view is generally soextraordinarily limited. Westcott, for instance, who means so much nowadays to the English religious world, first isolates Christianity from all the other religious phenomena of the world, and then argues upon its details. You might as well isolate English jurisprudence, and discuss its details without any reference to Teutonic custom or Roman law! You may be as logical or as learned as you like within the limits chosen, but the whole result is false! You treat Christian witness and Biblical literature as you would treat no other witness, and no other literature in the world. And you cannot show cause enough. For your reasons depend on the very witness under dispute. And so you go on arguing in a circle,ad infinitum.'
But his voice dropped. The momentary eagerness died away as quickly as it had risen, leaving nothing but depression behind it.
Mr. Grey meditated. At last he said, with a delicate change of tone,—
'And now—if I may ask it, Elsmere—how far has this destructive process gone?'
'I can't tell you,' said Robert, turning away almost with a groan; 'I only know that the things I loved once I love still, and that—that—if I had the heart to think at all, I should see more of God in the world than I ever saw before!'
The tutor's eye flashed. Robert had gone back to the window, and was miserably looking out. After all, he had told only half his story.
'And so you feel you must give up your living?'
'What else is there for me to do?' cried Robert, turning upon him, startled by the slow deliberate tone.
'Well, of course, you know that there are many men, men with whom both you and I are acquainted, who hold very much what I imagine your opinions now are, or will settle into, who are still in the Church of England, doing admirable work there!'
'I know,' said Elsmere quickly—'I know; I cannot conceive it, nor could you. Imagine standing up Sunday after Sunday to say the things you donotbelieve,—using words as a convention which those who hear you receive as literal truth,—and trusting the maintenance of your position either to your neighbour's forbearance or to your own powers of evasion! With the ideas at present in my head, nothing would induce me to preach another Easter Day sermon to a congregation that have both a moral and a legal right to demand from me an implicit belief in the material miracle!'
'Yes,' said the other gravely—'yes, I believe you are right. It can't be said the Broad Church movement has helped us much! How greatly it promised!—how little it has performed! For the private person, the worshipper, it is different—or I think so. No man pries into our prayers; and to cut ourselves off from common worship is to lose that fellowship which is in itself a witness and vehicle of God.'
But his tone had grown hesitating, and touched with melancholy.
There was a moment's silence. Then Robert walked up to him again.
'At the same time,' he said falteringly, standing before the elder man, as he might have stood as an undergraduate, 'let me not be rash! If you think this change has been too rapid to last—if you, knowing me better than at this moment I can know myself—if you bid me wait a while, before I take any overt step, I will wait—oh, God knows I will wait!—my wife——' and his husky voice failed him utterly.
'Your wife!' cried Mr. Grey, startled. 'Mrs. Elsmere does not know?'
'My wife knows nothing, or almost nothing—and it will break her heart!'
He moved hastily away again, and stood with his back to his friend, his tall narrow form outlined against the window. Mr. Grey was left in dismay, rapidly turning over the impressions of Catherine left on him by his last year's sight of her. That pale distinguished woman with her look of strength and character,—he remembered Langham's analysis of her, and of the silent religious intensity she had brought with her from her training among the northern hills.
Was there a bitterly human tragedy preparing under all this thought-drama he had been listening to?
Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged hand almost timidly upon him.
'Elsmere, it won't break her heart! You are a good man. She is a good woman.' What an infinity of meaning there was in the simple words! 'Take courage. Tell her at once—tell her everything—and letherdecide whether there shall be any waiting. I cannot help you there; she can; she will probably understand you better than you understand yourself.'
He tightened his grasp, and gently pushed his guest into a chair beside him. Robert was deadly pale, his face quivering painfully. The long physical strain of the past months had weakened for the moment all the controlling forces of the will. Mr. Grey stood over him—the whole man dilating, expanding, under a tyrannous stress of feeling.
'It is hard, it is bitter,' he said slowly, with a wonderful manly tenderness. 'I know it, I have gone through it. So has many and many a poor soul that you and I have known! But there need be no sting in the wound unless we ourselves envenom it. I know—oh! I know very well—the man of the world scoffs, but to him who has once been a Christian of the old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with half the confidence, half the joy, of life! But take heart,' and the tone grew still more solemn, still more penetrating. 'It is the education of God! Do not imagine it will put you fartherfrom Him! He is in criticism, in science, in doubt, so long as the doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as yours is. He is in all life, in all thought. The thought of man, as it has shaped itself in institutions, in philosophies, in science, in patient critical work, or in the life of charity, is the one continuous revelation of God! Look for Him in it all; see how, little by little, the Divine indwelling force, using as its tools—butmerelyas its tools!—man's physical appetites and conditions, has built up conscience and the moral life; think how every faculty of the mind has been trained in turn to take its part in the great work of faith upon the visible world! Love and imagination built up religion,—shall reason destroy it! No!—reason is God's like the rest! Trust it,—trust him. The leading strings of the past are dropping from you; they are dropping from the world, not wantonly, or by chance, but in the providence of God. Learn the lesson of your own pain,—learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history,but in your own soul,—in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. Spiritually you have gone through the last wrench; I promise it you! You being what you are, nothing can cut this ground from under your feet. Whatever may have been the forms of human belief,faith, the faith which saves, has always been rooted here! All things change,—creeds and philosophies and outward systems,—but God remains!