'I have been in exile for two months—you sent me. I saw that I troubled you in London. You thought I was pursuing you—pressing you. Your manner said "Go!" and I went. But do you think that for one day, or hour, or moment I have thought of anything else in those Norway woods but of you and of this blessed moment when I should be at your feet, as I am now?'
She trembled. Her hand seemed to leap in his. His gaze melted, enwrapped her. He bent forward. In another moment her silence would have so answered for her that his covetous arms would have stolen about her for good and all. But suddenly a kind of shiver ran through her—a shiver which was half memory, half shame. She drew back violently, covering her eyes with her hand.
'Oh no, no!' she cried, and her other hand struggled to get free, 'don't, don't talk to me so—I have a—a—confession.'
He watched her, his lips trembling a little, a smile of the most exquisite indulgence and understanding dawning in his eyes. Was she going to confess to him what he knew so well already? If he could only force her to say it on his breast.
But she held him at arm's length.
'You remember—you remember Mr. Langham?'
'Remember him!' echoed Mr. Flaxman fervently.
'That thought-reading night at Lady Charlotte's, on the way home, he spoke to me. I said I loved him. Ididlove him; I let him kiss me!'
Her flush had quite faded. He could hardly tell whether she was yielding or defiant as the words burst from her.
An expression, half trouble, half compunction, came into his face.
'I knew,' he said very low; 'or rather, I guessed.' And for an instant it occurred to him to unburden himself, to ask her pardon for that espionage of his. But no, no; not till he had her safe. 'I guessed, I mean, that there had been something grave between you. I saw you were sad. I would have given the world to comfort you.'
Her lip quivered childishly.
'I said I loved him that night. The next morning he wrote to me that it could never be.'
He looked at her a moment embarrassed. The conversation was not easy. Then the smile broke once more.
'And you have forgotten him as he deserved. If I were not sure of that I could wish him all the tortures of theInferno! As it is, I cannot think of him; I cannot let you think of him. Sweet, do you know that ever since I first saw you the one thought of my days, the dream of my nights, the purpose of mywhole life, has been to win you? There was another in the field; I knew it. I stood by and waited. He failed you—I knew he must in some form or other. Then I was hasty, and you resented it. Little tyrant, you made yourself a Rose with many thorns! But, tell me, tell me, it is all over—your pain, my waiting. Make yourself sweet to me! unfold to me at last?'
An instant she wavered. His bliss was almost in his grasp. Then she sprang up, and Flaxman found himself standing by her, rebuffed and surprised.
'No, no!' she cried, holding out her hands to him though all the time. 'Oh, it is too soon! I should despise myself, I do despise myself. It tortures me that I can change and forget so easily; it ought to torture you. Oh, don't ask me yet to—to——'
'To be my wife,' he said calmly, his cheek a little flushed, his eye meeting hers with a passion in it that strove so hard for self-control it was almost sternness.
'Not yet!' she pleaded, and then, after a moment's hesitation, she broke into the most appealing smiles, though the tears were in her eyes, hurrying out the broken, beseeching words. 'I want a friend so much—a real friend. Since Catherine left I have had no one. I have been running riot. Take me in hand. Write to me, scold me, advise me, I will be your pupil, I will tell you everything. You seem to me so fearfully wise, so much older. Oh, don't be vexed. And—and—in six months——'
She turned away, rosy as her name. He held her still, so rigidly, that her hands were almost hurt. The shadow of the hat fell over her eyes; the delicate outlines of the neck and shoulders in the pretty pale dress were defined against the green hill background. He studied her deliberately, a hundred different expressions sweeping across his face. A debate of the most feverish interest was going on within him. Her seriousness at the moment, the chances of the future, her character, his own—all these knotty points entered into it, had to be weighed and decided with lightning rapidity. But Hugh Flaxman was born under a lucky star, and the natal charm held good.
At last he gave a long breath; he stooped and kissed her hands.
'So be it. For six months I will be your guardian, your friend, your teasing implacable censor. At the end of that time I will be—well, never mind what. I give you fair warning.'
He released her. Rose clasped her hands before her and stood drooping. Now that she had gained her point, all her bright mocking independence seemed to have vanished. She might have been in reality the tremulous timid child she seemed. His spirits rose; he began to like the rôle she had assigned to him. The touch of unexpectedness, in all she said and did, acted with exhilarating force on his fastidious romantic sense.
'Now, then,' he said, picking up her gloves from the grass, 'you have given me my rights; I will begin to exercise them at once. I must take you home, the clouds are coming upagain, and on the way will you kindly give me a full, true, and minute account of these two months during which you have been so dangerously left to your own devices?'
She hesitated, and began to speak with difficulty, her eyes on the ground. But by the time they were in the main Shanmoor path again, and she was not so weakly dependent on his physical aid, her spirits too returned. Pacing along with her hands behind her, she began by degrees to throw into her accounts of her various visits and performances plenty of her natural malice.
And after a bit, as that strange storm of feeling which had assailed her on the mountain-top abated something of its bewildering force, certain old grievances began to raise very lively heads in her. The smart of Lady Fauntleroy's ball was still there; she had not yet forgiven him all those relations; and the teasing image of Lady Florence woke up in her.
'It seems to me,' he said at last dryly, as he opened a gate for her not far from Burwood, 'that you have been making yourself agreeable to a vast number of people. In my new capacity of censor I should like to warn you that there is nothing so bad for the character as universal popularity.'
'Ihave not got a thousand and one important cousins!' she exclaimed, her lip curling. 'If I want to please, I must take pains, else "nobody minds me."'
He looked at her attentively, his handsome face aglow with animation.
'What can you mean by that?' he said slowly.
But she was quite silent, her head well in air.
'Cousins?' he repeated. 'Cousins? And clearly meant as a taunt at me! Now when did you see my cousins? I grant that I possess a monstrous and indefensible number. I have it. You think that at Lady Fauntleroy's ball I devoted myself too much to my family, and too little to——'
'Not at all!' cried Rose hastily, adding, with charming incoherence, while she twisted a sprig of honeysuckle in her restless fingers, 'Somecousins of course are pretty.'
He paused an instant: then a light broke over his face, and his burst of quiet laughter was infinitely pleasant to hear. Rose got redder and redder. She realised dimly that she was hardly maintaining the spirit of their contract, and that he was studying her with eyes inconveniently bright and penetrating.
'Shall I quote to you,' he said, 'a sentence of Sterne's? If it violate our contract I must plead extenuating circumstances. Sterne is admonishing a young friend as to his manners in society: "You are in love," he says. "Tant mieux.But do not imagine that the fact bestows on you a licence to behave like a bear towards all the rest of the world.Affection may surely conduct thee through an avenue of women to her who possesses thy heart without tearing the flounces of any of their petticoats"—not even those of little cousins of seventeen! I say this, you will observe, in the capacity you have assigned me. In another capacity I venture to think I could justify myself still better.'
'My guardian and director,' cried Rose, 'must not begin his functions by misleading and sophistical quotations from the classics!'
He did not answer for a moment. They were at the gate of Burwood, under a thick screen of wild cherry trees. The gate was half open, and his hand was on it.
'And my pupil,' he said, bending to her, 'must not begin by challenging the prisoner whose hands she has bound, or he will not answer for the consequences!'
His words were threatening, but his voice, his fine expressive face, were infinitely sweet. By a kind of fascination she never afterwards understood, Rose for answer startled him and herself. She bent her head; she laid her lips on the hand which held the gate, and then she was through it in an instant. He followed her in vain. He never overtook her till at the drawing-room door she paused with amazing dignity.
'Mamma,' she said, throwing it open, 'here is Mr. Flaxman. He is come from Norway, and is on his way to Ullswater. I will go and speak to Margaret about tea.'
After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter, Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that night towards the farmhouse where he had established himself, he entertained a very comfortable scepticism as to the permanence of that curious contract into which Rose had just forced him. However, he was quite mistaken. Rose's maiden dignity avenged itself abundantly on Hugh Flaxman for the injuries it had received at the hands of Langham. The restraints, the anomalies, the hairsplittings of the situation delighted her ingenuous youth. 'I am free—he is free. We will be friends for six months. Possibly we may not suit one another at all. If we do—then——'
In the thrill of thatthenlay, of course, the whole attraction of the position.
So that next morning Hugh Flaxman saw the comedy was to be scrupulously kept up. It required a tolerably strong masculine certainty at the bottom of him to enable him to resign himself once more to his part. But he achieved it, and being himself a modern of the moderns, a lover of half-shades and refinements of all sorts, he began very soon to enjoy it, and to play it with an increasing cleverness and perfection.
How Rose got through Agnes's cross-questioning on the matter history sayeth not. Of one thing, however, a conscientious historian may be sure, namely, that Agnes succeeded in knowing as much as she wanted to know. Mrs. Leyburn was a little puzzled by the erratic lines of Mr. Flaxman's journeys. It was, as she said, curious that a man should start on a tour through the Lakes from Long Whindale.
But she took everything naïvely as it came, and as she was told. Nothing with her ever passed through any changing crucible of thought. It required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative scantiness of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have come out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.
Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine's sorrows had raised a whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the vicar's wife. She prowled nervously round Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the vicarage in their company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes, she was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar afterwards that 'no one could tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners were very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people.'
On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman's stay in the valley he entered the Burwood drive about eleven o'clock, and Rose came down the steps to meet him. For a moment he flattered himself that her disturbed looks were due to the nearness of their farewells.
'There is something wrong,' he said, softly detaining her hand a moment—so much, at least, was in his right.
'Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Petites Dalles. He has been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a few days. Catherine writes bravely, but she is evidently very low.'
Hugh Flaxman's face fell. Certain letters he had received from Elsmere in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so pitiful was the half-conscious revelation in them of an incessant physical struggle. An accident! Elsmere was in no state for accidents. What miserable ill-luck!
Rose read him Catherine's account. It appeared that on a certain stormy day a swimmer had been observed in difficulties among the rocks skirting the northern side of the Petites Dalles bay. The oldbaigneurof the place, owner of the still primitiveétablissement des bains, without stopping to strip, or even to take off his heavy boots, went out to the man in danger with a plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to the people watching, it became evident that thebaigneurhimself was in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the water, and the cry rose that he was sinking. Robert, who happened to be bathing near, ran off to the spot, jumped in, and swam out. By this time the old man had drifted some way. Robert succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid an excited crowd, headed by thebaigneur'swailing family, they carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere was certain life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. Meanwhile no one seemed to have any common sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed, but himself. For two hours he stayed on the beach in his dripping bathing-clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to him: rubbing, hot bottles, artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed his last, amid the wild and passionate grief of wife and children.
Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to the doctor, to carry one of thebaigneur'ssobbing grandchildren to its mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold of him, and he submitted to be taken home, shivering, and deeply depressed by the failure of his efforts. A violent gastric and lung chill declared itself almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill. Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. 'I had not the heart to write even to you,' she wrote to her mother. 'I could think of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed eight days, and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey. He is not fit for it in any way.'
Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity. Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides, considering.
'I shall not go on to Scotland,' he said; 'Mrs. Elsmere must not be left. I will go off there at once.'
In Rose's soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it was delicate, not the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be. And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he said good-bye was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him from her belt.
Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetôt to Petites Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A chilly west wind blew up the dust before him and stirred theparched leafage of the valley. He knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.
'This is kind—this is like yourself!' she said, after a first stare of amazement, when he had explained himself. 'He is in there, much better.'
Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up with his old brightness.
'Well, thisisfriendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow? Why aren't you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?'
Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make Robert's eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing touch upon Flaxman's shoulder.
'I shan't try to thank you—Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she pulled me through! And now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself a little more plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together? You need not try and persuademethat Long Whindale is the natural gate of the Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from London to Scotland, though I have no doubt you tried that little fiction on them.'
Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down very deliberately.
'I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that perspicacity for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the day before yesterday I asked your sister Rose to marry me. She——'
'Go on, man,' cried Robert, exasperated by his pause.
'I don't know how to put it,' said Flaxman calmly. 'For six months we are to be rather more than friends, and a good deal less thanfiancés. I am to be allowed to write to her. You may imagine how seductive it is to one of the worst and laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms that his fortunes in love should be made to depend on his correspondence. I may scold herifshe gives me occasion. And in six months, as one says to a publisher, "the agreement will be open to revision."'
Robert stared.
'And you are not engaged?'
'Not as I understand it,' replied Flaxman. 'Decidedly not!' he added with energy, remembering that very platonic farewell.
Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating.
'A fantastic thing, the modern young woman! Still I think I can understand. There may have been more than mere caprice in it.'
His eye met his friend's significantly.
'I suppose so,' said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert'sbenefit was he going to reveal any details of that scene on High Fell 'Never mind, old fellow, I am content. And, indeed,faute de mieux, I should be content with anything that brought me nearer to her, were it but by the thousandth of an inch.'
Robert grasped his hand affectionately.
'Catherine,' he called through the door, 'never mind the supper; let it burn. Flaxman brings news.'
Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly her ways would never have been as her sister's.
'Are we supposed to know?' she asked, very naturally.
'She never forbade me to tell,' said Flaxman smiling. 'I think, however, if I were you, I should say nothing about it—yet. I told her it was part of our bargain thatsheshould explain my letters to Mrs. Leyburn. I gave her free leave to invent any fairy tale she pleased, but it was to beherinvention, not mine.
Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But there was something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself.
Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman's arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched him critically, did not like some of his symptoms, but thought on the whole he must be recovering at the normal rate, considering how severe the attack had been.
'What do you think of him?' Catherine asked him next day, with all her soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established in a sunny nook, and were strolling on along the sands.
'I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, and keep him quiet,' said Flaxman. 'He will be all right presently.'
'Howcanwe keep him quiet?' said Catherine, with a momentary despair in her fine pale face. 'All day long and all night long he is thinking of his work. It is like something fiery burning the heart out of him.'
Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of calm autumn weather he spent with them before the return journey. Robert would talk to him for hours, now on the sands, with the gray infinity of sea before them, now pacing the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him drop heavily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the religious future of the working-class. He described the scene in the Club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, presenting them for Flaxman's criticism, and dealing with them himself, with that startling mixture of acute common-sense and eloquent passion which had always made him so effective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously at first, as he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried away, not by the beliefs, but by the man.Hefound his pleasure in dallying with the magnificentpossibilityof the Church; doubt with himapplied to all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for the provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or social reform was another matter. Since the Revolution, every generous child of the century has been open to the fascination of political or social Utopias. But religion!What—what is truth?Why not let the old things alone?
However, it was through the social passion, once so real in him, and still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, that Robert caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining possession of him all these months.
'Well,' said Flaxman one day, 'suppose I grant you that Christianity of the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, even in England, and in spite of the Church expansion we hear so much about; and suppose I believe with you that things will go badly without religion—what then? Who can have a religion for the asking?'
'But who can have it without?Seek, that you may find. Experiment; try new combinations. If a thing is going that humanity can't do without, and you and I believe it, what duty is more urgent for us than the effort to replace it?'
Flaxman shrugged his shoulders.
'What will you gain? A new sect?'
'Possibly. But what westandto gain is a new social bond,' was the flashing answer—'a new compelling force in man and in society. Can you deny that the world wants it? What are you economists and sociologists of the new type always pining for? Why, for that diminution of the self in man which is to enable the individual to see theworld'sends clearly, and to care not only for his own but for his neighbour's interest, which is to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and the poor bear with the rich. If man onlywould, hecould, you say, solve all the problems which oppress him. It is man's will which is eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great religions of the world are the stimulants by which the power at the root of things has worked upon this sluggish instrument of human destiny. Without religion you cannot make the will equal to its tasks. Our present religion fails us; we must, we will have another!'
He rose and began to pace along the sands, now gently glowing in the warm September evening, Flaxman beside him.
A new religion!Of all words, the most tremendous! Flaxman pitifully weighed against it the fraction of force fretting and surging in the thin elastic frame beside him. He knew well, however—few better—that the outburst was not a mere dream and emptiness. There was experience behind it—a burning, driving experience of actual fact.
Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, 'I must have that whole block of warehouses, Flaxman.'
'Must you?' said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to the practical. 'Why?'
'Look here!' And sitting down again on a sand-hill overgrown with wild grasses and mats of sea-thistle, the poor pale reformer began to draw out the details of his scheme on its material side. Three floors of rooms brightly furnished, well lit and warmed; a large hall for the Sunday lectures, concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for the boys' club; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate entrance; a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well stored with books, and made beautiful by pictures; three or four smaller rooms to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the Naturalist Club which had been started in May on the Murewell plan; and, if possible, a gymnasium.
'Money!' he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. 'There's the rub, of course. But I shall manage it.'
To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely that he would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere's stick had made in the sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, 'I will take the first expense: and draw on me afterwards up to five hundred a year, for the first four years.'
Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand.
'I do not thank you,' he said quietly, after a moment's pause; 'the work itself will do that.'
Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till Flaxman's pulse beat as fast as Robert's; so full of infectious hope and energy was the whole being of the man before him.
'I can take in the women and girls now,' Robert said once. 'Catherine has promised to superintend it all.'
Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he stood an instant looking at his companion. It was the first time he had mentioned Catherine's name in connection with the North R—— work. Flaxman could not mistake the emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned away, nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two men understood each other.
Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere's irrationality was an aversion to doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded admiration for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic; Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went hisway. And for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act favourably upon him. After his first welcome at the Club he came home with bright eye and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man.
Flaxman established himself in St. James's Place. Town was deserted; the partridges at Greenlaws clamoured to be shot; the head-keeper wrote letters which would have melted the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied recklessly that any decent fellow in the neighbourhood was welcome to shoot his birds—a reply which almost brought upon him the resignation of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner's duties, inquiring at the same time what he meant to do with regard to 'that young lady.' To which Flaxman replied calmly that he had just come back from the Lakes, where he had done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still something. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation for six months, and found London the best place for getting through it.
'So far,' he said, 'I am getting on well, and developing an amount of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man. But we must be left "to dream our dream unto ourselves alone." One word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on the subject, and—— But threats are puerile.For the present, dear aunt, I am your devoted nephew,Hugh Flaxman.
'So far,' he said, 'I am getting on well, and developing an amount of energy especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man. But we must be left "to dream our dream unto ourselves alone." One word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on the subject, and—— But threats are puerile.For the present, dear aunt, I am your devoted nephew,
Hugh Flaxman.
'On probation!'
Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter.
He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, and because he loved the Elsmeres for Rose's sake and his own. He thought moreover that a cool-headed friend with an eye for something else in the world than religious reform might be useful just then to Elsmere, and he was determined at the same time to see what the reformer meant to be at.
In the first place, Robert's attention was directed to getting possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing school and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This was a matter of some difficulty, for the floors above were employed in warehousing goods belonging to various minor import trades, and were held on tenures of different lengths. However, by dint of some money and much skill, the requisite clearances were effected during September and part of October. By the end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere's hands.
Meanwhile, at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture—a meeting composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert's helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in the man and his work from all parts—the details of 'The New Brotherhood of Christ' were being hammered out. Catherine was generally present, sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew her well, was always trying to decipher afresh—a sort of sweet aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw, down the vistas of the future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present. Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterwards that in Robert's attitude towards Edwardes at this time, in his constant desire to bring him forward, to associate him with himself as much as possible in the government and formation of the infant society, there was a half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not even the tender wife, the watchful friend.
The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with Elsmere's teaching and Elsmere's thought, showed a responsiveness, a receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of Robert's address—sour, stolid, brutalised, hostile to all things in heaven and earth?
'And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the rôle of the individual lessening day by day! Fool! go andbea saint, go and give yourself to ideas; go andlivethe life hid with Christ in God, and see,'—so would run the quick comment of the observer.
But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him, it was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world. Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had not been for long in Robert's mind—thought out and brought into final shape, perhaps, on the Petites Dalles sands. It was an unobtrusive art, his art of government, but a most effective one.
At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the early meetings, the discussions as to the religious practices which were to bind together the new association might have passed the line, and become puerile or grotesque. At any moment the jarring characters and ambitions of the men Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate atmosphere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole new birth seemed to have been conceived, and upon the maintenance of which its fruition and development depended. But as soon as Elsmere appeared, difficulties vanished, enthusiasm sprang up again. The rules of the new society came simplyand naturally into being, steeped and haloed, as it were, from the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart. The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no less than the sour, half-educated analysis of such a man as Lestrange.
In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist, refusing stoutly to admit anything more than 'an unknowable reality behind phenomena,' was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined to worship one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert's part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible formation of a harassing left wing.
But Robert's manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother. It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood. But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the practical working of it was secured him. And what was more, Robert succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the subject, into the men and youths who had profited in the past by Wardlaw's rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel himself an alien or forgotten.
As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach, and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no case. Robert's quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness, so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the critical half-patronising approval of the young barrister from the West who came down to listen to him, and made a favour of teaching in his night-school, were as precious to him as was the whole-hearted, the self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had begun to show towards the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they had 'seen God.'
At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt the same joy in it, in its clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the rolls of bright-coloured mattingready to be laid down, as he had felt in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.
Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt letters over the door, 'The New Brotherhood of Christ,' shone out into the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of the Brotherhood took place.
For two hours a continuous stream of human beings surrounded the little table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing their names, and receiving from him the silver badge, bearing the head of Christ, which was to be the outward and conspicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts: the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant, stalwart warehousemen, huge carters and draymen, the boy attached to each by the laws of the profession often straggling lumpishly behind his master. Women were there: wives who came because their lords came, or because Mr. Elsmere had been 'that good' to them that anything they could do to oblige him 'they would, and welcome'; prim pupil-teachers, holding themselves with straight superior shoulders; children, who came trooping in, grinned up into Robert's face and retreated again with red cheeks, the silver badge tight clasped in hands which not even much scrubbing could make passable.
Flaxman stood and watched it from the side. It was an extraordinary scene: the crowd, the slight figure on the platform, the two great inscriptions, which represented the only 'articles' of the new faith, gleaming from the freshly coloured walls—
'In Thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust;'
'This do in remembrance of Me;'
—the recesses on either side of the hall lined with white marble, and destined, the one to hold the names of the living members of the Brotherhood, the other to commemorate those who had passed away (empty this last save for the one poor name of 'Charles Richards'); the copies of Giotto's Paduan Virtues—faith, fortitude, charity, and the like—which broke the long wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker tried to assert itself against the feeling with which the air seemed overcharged. In vain.
'Whatever comes of it,' Flaxman said to himself with strong involuntary conviction, 'whether he fails or no, the spirit that is moving here is the same spirit that spread the Church, the spirit that sent out Benedictine and Franciscan into the world, that fired the children of Luther, or Calvin, or George Fox; the spirit of devotion, through a man, to an idea; through one much-loved, much-trusted soul to some eternal verity, newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life; thereis no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea!'
A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not write to her of Rose, he did not care to write of himself, and he knew that Elsmere's club address had left a mark even on her restless and overcrowded mind. Moreover, he himself was absorbed.
'We are in the full stream of religion-making. I watch it with a fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, even when my judgment demurs, and my intelligence protests that the thing cannot live without Elsmere, and that Elsmere's life is a frail one. After the ceremony of enrolment which I described to you yesterday the Council of the New Brotherhood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are working-men, the rest of the upper class; Elsmere, of course, president.
'Since then the first religious service under the new constitution has been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole is "new bottles for the new wine." The opening prayer is recited by everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere's drawing up, I imagine—at any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit, answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.
'Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle, his efforts to make his audience realise the germs of miraculous belief which each man carries with him in the constitution and inherited furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious—perhaps the most convincing—I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvellous element in religion.
'But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins. Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another matter; but that the Christ he preaches moves the human heart as much as—and in the case of the London artisan, more than—the current orthodox presentation of him, I begin to have ocular demonstration.
'I was present, for instance, at his children's Sunday class the other day. He had brought them up to the story of the Crucifixion, reading from the Revised Version, and amplifying wherever the sense required it. Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk before her, and with choking sobs imploredhim not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to do the same. The pure human pity of the story—the contrast between the innocence and the pain of the sufferer—seemed to be more than they could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a jugglery by which the suffering was not real after all, and the sufferer not man but God.
'He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console them. But there is something piercingly penetrating and austere even in the consolations of this new faith. He did but remind the children of the burden of gratitude laid upon them. "Would you let him suffer so much in vain? His suffering has made you and me happier and better to-day, at this moment, than we could have been without Jesus. You will understand how, and why, more clearly when you grow up. Let us in return keep him in our hearts always, and obey his words! It is all you can do for his sake, just as all you could do for a mother who died would be to follow her wishes and sacredly keep her memory."
'That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little scene, wonderfully suggestive and pathetic.
'But a few more words about the Sunday service. After the address came a hymn. There are only seven hymns in the little service book, gathered out of the finest we have. It is supposed that in a short time they will become so familiar to the members of the Brotherhood that they will be sung readily by heart. The singing of them in the public service alternates with an equal number of psalms. And both psalms and hymns are meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the members, and to become part of the everyday life of the Brotherhood. They have been most carefully chosen, and a sort of ritual importance has been attached to them from the beginning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn or psalm.
'Then the whole wound up with another short prayer, also repeated standing, a commendation of the individual, the Brotherhood, the nation, the world, to God. The phrases of it are terse and grand. One can see at once that it has laid hold of the popular sense, the popular memory. The Lord's Prayer followed. Then, after a silent pause of "recollection," Elsmere dismissed them.
'"Go in peace, in the love of God, and in the memory of His servant, Jesus."
'I looked carefully at the men as they were tramping out. Some of them were among the Secularist speakers you and I heard at the club in April. In my wonder, I thought of a saying of Vinet's: "C'est pour la religion que le peuple a le plus de talent; c'est en religion qu'il montre le plus d'esprit."'
In a later letter he wrote—
'I have not yet described to you what is perhaps the most characteristic, the most binding practice of the New Brotherhood. It is that which has raised most angry comment, cries of"profanity," "wanton insult," and what not. I came upon it yesterday in an interesting way. I was working with Elsmere at the arrangement of the library, which is now becoming a most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian chosen from the neighbourhood, when he asked me to go and take a message to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary help in the evenings after his day's work. He thought that as it was the dinner hour, and the man worked in the dock close by, I might find him at home. I went off to the model lodging-house where I was told to look for him, mounted the common stairs, and knocked at his door. Nobody seemed to hear me, and as the door was ajar I pushed it open.
'Inside was a curious sight.
'The table was spread with the midday meal. Round the table stood four children, the eldest about fourteen, and the youngest six or seven. At one end of it stood the carpenter himself in his working apron, a brawny Saxon, bowed a little by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and his horny hands were resting on it. The street was noisy; they had not heard my knock; and as I pushed open the door there was an old coat hanging over the corner of it which concealed me.
'Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, kept me where I was, silent.
'The father lifted his right hand.
'"The Master said, 'This do in remembrance of Me!'"
'The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the youngest said slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that touched me extraordinarily,—
'"Jesus, we remember Thee always!"
'It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected the child perfectly at Elsmere's class. I also remembered that she had no mother; that her mother had died of cancer in June, visited and comforted to the end by Elsmere and his wife.
'Well, the great question of course remains—is there a sufficient strength offeelingandconvictionbehind these things? If so, after all, everything was new once, and Christianity was but modified Judaism.'
'December 22.
'I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. In Elgood Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. But it will be a new sort of Christmas. We shall hear very little, it seems, of angels and shepherds, and a great deal of the humble childhood of a little Jewish boy whose genius grown to maturity transformed the Western world. To see Elsmere, with his boys and girls about him, trying to make them feel themselves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make them understand something of the lessons that child must have learnt, the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that must have come to him, is a spectacle of which I will not miss more than I can help. Don't imagine, however, that I am converted exactly!—but only that I am more interested and stimulated than I have been for years. And don't expect me for Christmas. I shall stay here.'
'New Year's Day.
'I am writing from the library of the New Brotherhood. The amount of activity, social, educational, religious, of which this great building promises to be the centre is already astonishing. Everything, of course including the constitution of the infant society, is as yet purely tentative and experimental. But for a scheme so young, things are falling into working order with wonderful rapidity. Each department is worked by committees under the central council. Elsmere, of course, isex-officiochairman of a large proportion; Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a few other fellows "run" the rest for the present. But each committee contains working-men; and it is the object of everybody concerned to make the workman element more and more real and efficient. What with the "tax" on the members which was fixed by a general meeting, and the contributions from outside, the society already commands a fair income. But Elsmere is anxious not to attempt too much at once, and will go slowly and train his workers.
'Music, it seems, is to be a great feature in the future. I have my own projects as to this part of the business, which, however, I forbid you to guess at.
'By the rules of the Brotherhood, every member is bound to some work in connection with it during the year, but little or much, as he or she is able. And every meeting, every undertaking of whatever kind, opens with the special "word" or formula of the society, "This do in remembrance of Me."'
'January 6.
'Besides the Sunday lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on Saturday evenings at "The History of the Moral Life in Man." It is a remarkable course, and very largely attended by people of all sorts. He tries to make it an exposition of the leading principles of the new movement, of "that continuous and only revelation of God in life and nature," which is in reality the basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters that are pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They show an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind which are surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not surprised—says he always expected it—and that there are thousands who only want a rallying-point.
'His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the passion and energy of the nature—never has our generation seen anything to equal it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it all seriously, and don't know what to make of him or myself.
'She, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with him day after day, and works away. She no more believes inhisideas, I think, than she ever did; but all her antagonism is gone. In the midst of the stir about him her face often haunts me. It has changed lately; she is no longer a young woman, but so refined, so spiritual!
'But he is ailing and fragile.Thereis the one cloud on a scene that fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.'
One cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a young Dr. Edmondson, an able young physician, just set up for himself as a consultant, who had only lately attached himself to Elsmere, and was now helping him with eagerness to organise a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman exchanged a few words on Elsmere's lecture, and then the doctor said abruptly,—
'I don't like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been hoarse like that?'
'More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself, and talks of clergyman's throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once in the country.'
'Clergyman's throat?' Edmondson shook his head dubiously. 'It may be. I wish he would let me overhaul him.'
'I wish he would!' said Flaxman devoutly. 'I will see what I can do. I will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.'
Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. As they entered the study she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite passion gleaming in her face.
'You did not explain Him! You never will!'
He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his face changed, blanched before her—he seemed to gasp for breath—she was only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine's look would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste calamity and grief to the very dregs.
'Robert, to-morrow youwillsee a doctor?' she implored him when at last he was safely in bed—white, but smiling.
He nodded.
'Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,' he said, in a voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.
Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, byill luck, with the morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the squire, but about the squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to Murewell. The squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing Elsmere any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was from old Meyrick. 'The squire has had another bad attack, and ismuchweaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you. If you can, come to-morrow.'
'His mind is clear again!' Horrified by the words and by the images they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently appeared downstairs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for the morning, was going through some household business.
'Imustgo, Imustgo!' he said as he handed her the letter. 'Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!'
Catherine looked at him in despair.
'Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr. Edmondson.'
'Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good.' She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions, but it was useless. His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt it a call impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and Robert drove off to Waterloo.
Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter's day. Robert breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year and a half since he had travelled it. He forgot his weakness, the exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day and was going back to Catherine!
At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.
'Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then you may drive on my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.'
The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a hallucination—his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so easy and swift to-day?
By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the driver kept up an incessant gossipover the neighbourhood, and he jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a boy.
'Go on, Tom; see if I am not there as soon as you.'
'Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself as his horse shambled off. 'Seems as spry as a lark all the same.'
Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered with timid half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth's bareness everywhere—curling mists—blue points of distant hill—a gray luminous depth of sky.
The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old anguish he stood and blessed God!—not for any personal happiness, but simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of common living a revelation.
Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up the lane leading to the vicarage. One look! he might not be able to leave the squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal! Besides, how could the boys have free access except to that ground-floor room? And all that pretty stretch of grass under the acacia had been cut up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to Catherine.
He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In that upper room he had lain through that agonised night of crisis; the dawn-twitterings of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not lie in the wet any longer—thank God! Was there time just to run down to Irwin's cottage, to have a look at the Institute?
He had been standing on the farther side of the road from the rectory that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor's ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath. The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a drowning thing.When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered, drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black—the sun seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds of children's voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart—or was it all sight and sound alike, mirage and delirium?
With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man of seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank down, still gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars near the gate. After a while the attack passed off and he found himself able to walk on. But the joy, the leaping pulse of half an hour ago, were gone from his veins. Was that the river—the house? He looked at them with dull eyes. All the light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the familiar things.
However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will and nature had reasserted themselves, and he knew where he was and what he had to do.
Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.
'Why, sir!Mr.Elsmere!'
The butler's voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding at once into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of the old rector.
Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the dining-room and give him some wine before announcing him. Vincent ministered to him with a long face, pressing all the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon him in turn. The squire was much better, he declared, and had been carried down to the library.
'But, lor, sir, there ain't much to be said for your looks neither—seems as if London didn't suit you, sir.'
Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his throat, and had overtired himself by walking over the common. Then, recognising from a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror hanging by that something of his natural colour had returned to him, he rose and bade Vincent announce him.
'And Mrs. Darcy?' he asked, as they stepped out into the hall again.
'Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she's very well,' said the man, but, as it seemed to Robert, with something of an embarrassed air.
He followed Vincent down the long passage—haunted by old memories, by the old sickening sense of mental anguish—to the curtained door. Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir of feet, and a voice, but at first he saw nothing. The room was very much darkened. Then Meyrick emerged into distinctness.
'Squire, hereisMr. Elsmere! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I'm sure we're very much obliged to you for meeting the squire's wishes so promptly. You'll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but mending—oh yes, mending, sir—no doubt of it.'
Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand was advanced to him out of the gloom.
'That'll do, Meyrick. You won't be wanted till the evening.'
The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden sense of relief. After all, the squire was still capable of trampling on Meyrick.
In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and the two men were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to the dim light. Out of it the squire's face gleamed almost as whitely as the tortured marble of the Medusa just above their heads.
'It's some inflammation in the eyes,' the squire explained briefly, 'that's made Meyrick set up all this d—d business of blinds and shutters. I don't mean to stand it much longer. The eyes are better, and I prefer to see my way out of the world, if possible.'
'But you are recovering?' Robert said, laying his hand affectionately on the old man's knee.
'I have added to my knowledge,' said the squire drily. 'Like Heine, I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth. And I am not in bed, which I was last week. For Heaven's sake don't ask questions. If there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the subject of the human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you so hoarse for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of "the people," who wouldn't even subscribe to bury you? Have you been working up the Apocrypha as I recommended you last time we met?'
Robert smiled.
'For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things with neither of which had you much sympathy in old days—holiday-making and "slumming."'
'Oh, I remember,' interrupted the squire hastily. 'I was low last week, and read the Church papers by way of a counter-irritant. You have been starting a new religion, I see. A new religion!Humph!'
The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the sarcastic gleam of the eyes.
'You are hardly the man to deny,' he said, undisturbed, 'that the old oneslaissent à désirer.'
'Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you should go and set up a brand-new one—an ugly anachronism besides,' retorted the squire. 'However, you and I have no common ground—never had. I sayknow, you sayfeel. Where is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?'
'I have not seen her for six months,' Robert replied, with equal abruptness.
The squire laughed a little under his breath.
'What did you think of her?'
'Very much what you told me to think—intellectually,' replied Robert, facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.
'Well, I certainly never told you to think anything—morally,' said the squire. 'The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see there?'
The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere went through with it, the squire watching him for a while with an expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.
But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle change in the squire's attitude—a relaxation of his own sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness. The squire's head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and defencelessness.
Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so much to him.
Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken—they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so—a river lost in the sands!
Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping squire.
'A bad sign! a bad sign!' he said, and shook his head mournfully.
After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physicalmalaisethan had ever yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up to her with a warm greeting.
'Are you going in to the squire? Let us go together.'
She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into the room behind her, a curious film, so it seemed to him, darkening her small gray eyes.
'The squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen my white mice? Oh, they are such darlings! Only, one of them is ill, and they won't let me have the doctor.'
Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. Shestood in the middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger to a large cage of white mice which stood in the window. The room seemed full besides of other creatures. Robert stood rooted, looking at the tiny withered figure in the black dress, its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in lace, with a perplexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver. Suddenly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent, strong-looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head towards Mrs. Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing the mice with the weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, and went out sick at heart. The careful exquisite beauty of the great hall struck him as something mocking and anti-human.
No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. In the evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in another key. He insisted on a certain amount of light, and, leaning on Robert's arm, went feebly round the bookshelves. He took out one of the volumes of the Fathers that Newman had given him.
'When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rubbish,' he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, 'and of the other hours I maundered away in services and self-examination! Thank Heaven, however, the germ of revolt and sanity was always there. And when once I got to it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick.'
Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the shrunken squire.
'Oh, not oneyouhave any chance of learning, my good friend,' said the other aggressively. 'And after all it's simple.Go to your grave with your eyes open—that's all. But men don't learn it, somehow. Newman was incapable—so are you. All the religions are nothing but so many vulgar anæsthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse.'
'Do you want me to contradict you?' said Robert, smiling; 'I am quite ready.'
The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his chair again, he said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau in the window, 'The book is all there—both parts, first and second. Publish it if you please. If not, throw it into the fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has done its work; it has helped me through half a century of living.'