'Now, considering the enormous complication of the facts, the Theistic inference will, to put it at the lowest, always have its place, always command respect. The man of science may not adopt it, but by no advance of science that I, at any rate, can foresee, can it be driven out of the field.
'Christianity is in a totally different position. Its grounds are not philosophical but literary and historical. It rests not upon all fact, but upon a special group of facts. It is, and will always remain, a great literary and historical problem, aquestion of documents and testimony. Hence, the Christian explanation is vulnerable in a way in which the Theistic explanation can never be vulnerable. The contention, at any rate, of persons in my position is: That to the man who has had the special training required, and in whom this training has not been neutralised by any overwhelming bias of temperament, it can be as clearly demonstrated that the miraculous Christian story rests on a tissue of mistake, as it can be demonstrated that the Isidorian Decretals were a forgery, or the correspondence of Paul and Seneca a pious fraud, or that the mediæval belief inwitchcraft was the product of physical ignorance and superstition.'
'You say,' he wrote again, in another connection, to Armitstead from Milan, 'you say you think my later letters have been far too aggressive and positive. I, too, am astonished at myself. I do not know my own mood, it is so clear, so sharp, so combative. Is it the spectacle of Italy, I wonder—of a country practically without religion—the spectacle in fact of Latin Europe as a whole, and the practical Atheism in which it is ingulfed? My dear friend, the problem of the world at this moment is—how to find a religion?—some great conception which shall be once more capable, as the old were capable, of welding societies, and keeping man's brutish elements in check. Surely Christianity of the traditional sort is failing everywhere—less obviously with us, and in Teutonic Europe generally, but egregiously, notoriously, in all the Catholic countries. We talk complacently of the decline of Buddhism. But what have we to say of the decline of Christianity? And yet this last is infinitely more striking and more tragic, inasmuch as it affects a more important section of mankind. I, at any rate, am not one of those who would seek to minimise the results of this decline for human life, nor can I bring myself to believe that Positivism or "evolutional morality" will ever satisfy the race.
'In the period of social struggle which undeniably lies before us, both in the old and the new world, are we then to witness a war of classes, unsoftened by the ideal hopes, the ideal law, of faith? It looks like it. What does the artisan class, what does the town democracy throughout Europe, care any longer for Christian checks or Christian sanctions as they have been taught to understand them? Superstition, in certain parts of rural Europe, there is in plenty, but wherever you get intelligence and therefore movement, you get at once either indifference to, or a passionate break with, Christianity. And consider what it means, what it will mean, this Atheism of the great democracies which are to be our masters! The world has never seen anything like it; such spiritual anarchy and poverty combined with such material power and resource. Every society—Christian and non-Christian—has always till now had its ideal, of greater or less ethical value, its appeal to something beyond man. Has Christianity brought us to this: that the Christian nations are to be the first in the world's history to try the experiment of a life without faith—that life which you and I, at any rate, are agreed in thinking a life worthy only of the brute?
'Oh forgive me! These things must hurt you—they would have hurt me in old days—but they burn within me, and you bid me speak out. What if it be God Himself who is driving His painful lesson home to me, to you, to the world? What does it mean, this gradual growth of what we call infidelity, of criticism and science on the one hand, this gradual death of the old traditions on the other?Sin, you answer,the enmity of thehuman mind against God, the momentary triumph of Satan.And so you acquiesce, heavy-hearted, in God's present defeat, looking for vengeance and requital hereafter. Well, I am not so ready to believe in man's capacity to rebel against his Maker! Where you see ruin and sin, I see the urgent process of Divine education, God's steady ineluctable command "to put away childish things," the pressure of His spirit on ours towards new ways of worship and new forms of love!'
And after a while, it was with these 'new ways of worship and new forms of love' that the mind began to be perpetually occupied. The break with the old things was no sooner complete than the eager soul, incapable then, as always, of resting in negation or opposition, pressed passionately forward to a new synthesis, not only speculative, but practical. Before it rose perpetually the haunting vision of another palace of faith—another church or company of the faithful, which was to become the shelter of human aspiration amid the desolation and anarchy caused by the crashing of the old! How many men and women must have gone through the same strait as itself—how many must be watching with it through the darkness for the rising of a new City of God!
One afternoon, close upon Christmas, he found himself in Parliament Square, on his way towards Westminster Bridge and the Embankment. The beauty of a sunset sky behind the Abbey arrested him, and he stood leaning over the railings beside the Peel statue to look.
The day before he had passed the same spot with a German friend. His companion—a man of influence and mark in his own country, who had been brought up, however, in England, and knew it well—had stopped before the Abbey and had said to him with emphasis: 'I never find myself in this particular spot of London without a sense of emotion and reverence. Other people feel that in treading the Forum of Rome they are at the centre of human things. I am more thrilled by Westminster than Rome; your venerable Abbey is to me the symbol of a nationality to which the modern world owes obligations it can never repay. You are rooted deep in the past; you have also a future of infinite expansiveness stretching before you. Among European nations at this moment you alone have freedom in the true sense, you alone have religion. I would give a year of life to know what you will have made of your freedom and your religion two hundred years hence!'
As Robert recalled the words, the Abbey lay before him, wrapped in the bluish haze of the winter afternoon. Only the towers rose out of the mist, gray and black against the red bands of cloud. A pair of pigeons circled round them, as careless and free in flight as though they were alone with the towers and the sunset. Below, the streets were full of people; the omnibuses rolled to and fro; the lamps were just lit; lines ofstraggling figures, dark in the half light, were crossing the street here and there. And to all the human rush and swirl below, the quiet of the Abbey and the infinite red distances of sky gave a peculiar pathos and significance.
Robert filled his eye and sense, and then walked quickly away towards the Embankment. Carrying the poetry and grandeur of England's past with him, he turned his face eastward to the great new-made London on the other side of St. Paul's, the London of the democracy, of the nineteenth century, and of the future. He was wrestling with himself, a prey to one of those critical moments of life, when circumstance seems once more to restore to us the power of choice, of distributing a Yes or a No among the great solicitations which meet the human spirit on its path from silence to silence. The thought of his friend's reverence, and of his own personal debt towards the country to whose long travail of centuries he owed all his own joys and faculties, was hot within him.
'Here and here did England help me—how can I help England,—say!'
'Here and here did England help me—how can I help England,—say!'
Ah! that vast chaotic London south and east of the great church! He already knew something of it. A Liberal clergyman there, settled in the very blackest, busiest heart of it, had already made him welcome on Mr. Grey's introduction. He had gone with this good man on several occasions through some little fraction of that teeming world, now so hidden and peaceful between the murky river mists and the cleaner light-filled grays of the sky. He had heard much, and pondered a good deal, the quick mind caught at once by the differences, some tragic, some merely curious and stimulating, between the monotonous life of his own rural folk, and the mad rush, the voracious hurry, the bewildering appearances and disappearances, the sudden ingulfments, of working London.
Moreover, he had spent a Sunday or two wandering among the East End churches. There, rather than among the streets and courts outside, as it had seemed to him, lay the tragedy of the city. Such emptiness, such desertion, such a hopeless breach between the great craving need outside and the boon offered it within! Here and there, indeed, a patch of bright coloured success, as it claimed to be, where the primitive tendency of man towards the organised excitement of religious ritual, visible in all nations and civilisations, had been appealed to with more energy and more results than usual. But in general, blank failure, or rather obvious want of success—as the devoted men now beating the void there were themselves the first to admit, with pain and patient submission to the inscrutable Will of God.
But is it not time we assured ourselves, he was always asking, whether God is still in truth behind the offer man is perpetually making to his brother man on His behalf? He was behind it once, and it had efficacy, had power. But now—what if allthese processes of so-called destruction and decay were but the mere workings of that divine plastic force which is for ever moulding human society? What if these beautiful venerable things which had fallen from him, as from thousands of his fellows, represented, in the present stage of the world's history, not the props, but the hindrances, of man?
And if all these large things were true, as he believed, what should be the individual's part in this transition England? Surely, at the least, a part of plain sincerity of act and speech—a correspondence as perfect as could be reached between the inner faith and the outer word and deed. So much, at the least, was clearly required of him!
'Do not imagine, he said to himself, as though with a fierce dread of possible self-delusion, 'that it is in you to play any great, any commanding part. Shun the thought of it, if it were possible! But let me do what is given me to do! Here, in this human wilderness, may I spend whatever of time or energy or faculty may be mine, in the faithful attempt to help forward the new House of Faith that is to be, though my utmost efforts should but succeed in laying some obscure stone in still unseen foundations! Let me try and hand on to some other human soul, or souls, before I die, the truth which has freed, and which is now sustaining, my own heart. Can any man do more? Is not every man who feels any certainty in him whatever bound to do as much? What matter if the wise folk scoff, if even at times, and in a certain sense, one seems to one's self ridiculous—absurdly lonely and powerless! All great changes are preceded by numbers of sporadic, and as the bystander thinks, impotent efforts. But while the individual effort sinks, drowned perhaps in mockery, the general movement quickens, gathers force we know not how, and—
'While the tired wave vainly breaking,Seems here no painful inch to gain,Far back through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in the main!'
'While the tired wave vainly breaking,Seems here no painful inch to gain,Far back through creeks and inlets making,Comes silent, flooding in the main!'
Darkness sank over the river; all the gray and purple distance with its dim edge of spires and domes against the sky, all the vague intervening blacknesses of street, or bridge, or railway station were starred and patterned with lights. The vastness, the beauty of the city filled him with a sense of mysterious attraction, and as he walked on with his face uplifted to it, it was as though he took his life in his hand and flung it afresh into the human gulf.
'What does it matter if one's work be raw and uncomely! All that lies outside the great organised traditions of an age must always look so. Let me bear my witness bravely, not spending life in speech, but not undervaluing speech—above all, not being ashamed or afraid of it, because other wise people may prefer a policy of silence. A man has but the one punylife, the one tiny spark of faith. Better be venturesome with both for God's sake, than over-cautious, over-thrifty. And—to his own Master he standeth or falleth!'
Plans of work of all kinds, literary and practical, thoughts of preaching in some bare hidden room to men and women orphaned and stranded like himself, began to crowd upon him. The old clerical instinct in him winced at some of them. Robert had nothing of the sectary about him by nature; he was always too deeply and easily affected by the great historic existences about him. But when the Oxford man or the ex-official of one of the most venerable and decorous of societies protested, the believer, or, if you will, the enthusiast, put the protest by.
And so the dream gathered substance and stayed with him, till at last he found himself at his own door. As he closed it behind him, Catherine came out into the pretty old hall from the dining-room.
'Robert, have you walked all the way?'
'Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful evening!'
He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs together. She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly aware that these months were to him months of incessant travail of spirit, and she caught at this moment the old strenuous look of eye and brow she knew so well. A year ago, and every thought of his mind had been open to her—and now—she herself had shut them out—but her heart sank within her.
She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over her. But inwardly all the ardour of his mood collapsed at the touch of her. For the protests of a world in arms can be withstood with joy, but the protest that steals into your heart, that takes love's garb and uses love's ways—thereis the difficulty!
But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realising any fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad Church vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He undertook some rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on elementary science to boys and men. But after a while he began to feel his position false and unsatisfactory. In truth, his opinions were in the main identical with those of the vicar under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a Broad Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it absolutely necessary to 'keep things going,' and by a policy of prudent silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great 'plant' of the Establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of the High Churchmen. In consequence he was involved, as Robert held, in endless contradictionsand practical falsities of speech and action. His large church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons. Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach, more than was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe. He was hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.
But if these became Robert's views as to Vernon, Vernon's feeling towards Elsmere after six weeks' acquaintance was not less decided. He was constitutionally timid, and he probably divined in his new helper a man of no ordinary calibre, whose influence might very well turn out some day to be of the 'incalculably diffusive' kind. He grew uncomfortable, begged Elsmere to beware of any 'direct religious teaching,' talked in warm praise of a 'policy of omissions,' and in equally warm denunciation of 'anything like a policy of attack.' In short, it became plain that two men so much alike, and yet so different, could not long co-operate.
However, just as the fact was being brought home to Elsmere, a friendly chance intervened.
Hugh Flaxman, the Leyburns' new acquaintance and Lady Helen's brother, had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight; and a meeting or two, now at Lady Charlotte's, now at the Leyburns', had led both men far on the way to a friendship. Of Hugh Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all that need be recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman's house, overlooking St. James's Park, Robert first met a man who was to give him the opening for which he was looking.
Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast partiesà laRogers, and on the first occasion when Robert could be induced to attend one of these functions, he saw opposite to him what he supposed to be a lad of twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of fun and invincible good humour attracted him greatly.
Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humour and pugnacity, 'lockës crull as they were layde in presse,' the same look of 'wonderly' activity too, in spite of his short stature and dainty make, as Chaucer lends his squire—the type was so fresh and pleasing that Robert was more and more held by it, especially when he discovered to his bewilderment that the supposed stripling must be from his talk a man quite as old as himself, an official besides, filling what was clearly some important place in the world. He took his full share in the politics and literature started at the table, and presently, when conversation fell on the proposed municipality for London, said things to which the whole party listened. Robert's curiosity was aroused, and after breakfast he questioned his host and was promptly introduced to 'Mr. Murray Edwardes.'
Whereupon it turned out that this baby-faced sage was filling a post, in the work of which perhaps few people in London could have taken so much interest as Robert Elsmere.
Fifty years before, a wealthy merchant who had been one of the chief pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and died. His great warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside districts of the city, and in his will he endeavoured to do something according to his lights for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly large bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly it has never been the creed of the poor. In old days it required the presence of a certain arid stratum of the middle classes to live and thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R——, which rejoiced instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square Socialist.
Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking of the dry bones of religious England which we call the Tractarian movement. For many years the new force left R—— quite undisturbed. The parish church droned away, the Unitarian minister preached decorously to empty benches, knowing nothing of the agitations outside. At last, however, towards the end of the old minister's life, a powerful church of the new type, staffed by friends and pupils of Pusey, rose in the centre of R——, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more snuffed out than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally with the parish church. As generally happened, however, in those days, the proceedings at this new and splendid St. Wilfrid's were not long in stirring up the Protestantism of the British rough,—the said Protestantism being always one of the finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war—hectic clergy heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant Litanies on the one side,—mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and blatant Protestant orators on the other.
The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister, a Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to beup to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings was of a much quieter sterner sort, and amongst whom the uproar had mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded. He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living; he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before he had been five years in harness had not only made himself a power in R——, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small interest by many outsiders.
This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-bye to their host, and wandered out together into St. James's Park, where the trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness, even unction; and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other's heart.
They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying little, asking much.
At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.
'You cannot work with the Church!' he said—'it is impossible. You will only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain what you could do infinitely more good, as things stand now, by pouring out. Come to us!—I will put you in the way. You shall be hampered by no pledges of any sort. Come and take the direction of some of my workers. We have all got our hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would be invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England just now for men of your way of thinking and mine. Come! Who knows what we may be putting our hands to—what fruit may grow from the smallest seed?'
The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robertgathered that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating dream of a reorganised Christendom, a new wide-spreading shelter of faith for discouraged browbeaten man, as in his own. 'I will!' he said briefly, after a pause, his own look kindling—'it is the opening I have been pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the chance.'
That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of various engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for 'Fader,' had just been carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs kicking, off to bed. Catherine was straightening the room, which had been thrown into confusion by the child's romps.
It was with an effort—for he knew it would be a shock to her—that he began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. Flaxman's, and his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had made it a rule with himself to tell her everything that he was doing or meant to do. She would not let him tell her what he was thinking. But as much openness as there could be between them, there should be.
Catherine listened—still moving about the while—the thin beautiful lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was hard to her, very hard; the people among whom she had been brought up, her father especially, would have held out the hand of fellowship to any body of Christian people, but not to the Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling divided them from any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them and the Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces—forces of thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time.
'He is going to work with them now,' she thought bitterly; 'soon he will be one of them—perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.'
And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find nothing but embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embarrassed silences, wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.
Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her head against his knee, saying nothing, but gathering his hand closely in both her own.
Poor woman's heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He bent down quickly and kissed her.
'Would you like,' he said presently, after both had sat silent a while in the firelight, 'would you care to go to Madame de Netteville's to-night?'
'By all means,' said Catherine with a sort of eagerness. 'ItwasFriday she asked us for, wasn't it? We will be quick over dinner, and I will go and dress.'
In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the squire in his bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked. Mr. Wendover had drily recommendedElsmere to cultivate Madame de Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical, and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to the Elsmere move.
'You had better go there,' he said huskily, 'it will do you good. She gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte can't. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte's; she waters the wine too much.'
And he had persisted with the subject—using it, as Elsmere thought, as a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere's plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.
There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which evidently troubled the doctor most. But, behind the physical breakdown, there was to Robert's sense something else, a spiritual something, infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the elder man's' will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his correspondence with the squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville's that he might write an account of it to Murewell.
Still the squire's talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The squire's ways of describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert sometimes imagined that he himself had been at one time more under her spell than he cared to confess. If so, it must have been when she was still in Paris, the young English widow of a man of old French family, rich, fascinating, distinguished, and the centre of a smallsalon, admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris.
Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her headquarters in London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that the squire wrote to her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger Wendover debts of various kinds, and she had an encouraging memory of the young clergyman on the terrace at Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings.
'I have never seen the wife,' she meditated, as her delicate jewelled hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of the Elsmeres' lodgings. 'But if she is the ordinary country clergyman's spouse, the squire of course will have given the young man a hint.'
But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim humour towards Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, the squire said not one word about his wife to Robert in the course of their talk of Madame de Netteville.
Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do Robert credit. She put on one of the gowns she had taken toMurewell when she married. It was black, simply made, and had been a favourite with both of them in the old surroundings.
So they drove off to Madame de Netteville's. Catherine's heart was beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting stairs of the luxurious little house. All these new social experiences were a trial to her. But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious ideas of what she was to see in this particular house.
A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most English rooms, it was barely though richly furnished. A Persian carpet, of a self-coloured grayish blue, threw the gilt French chairs and the various figures sitting upon them into delicate relief. The walls were painted white, and had a few French mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine French portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames. The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and seemed to be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly have read or written in the room, but you could see a beautiful woman in a beautiful dress there, and you could talk there, eithertête-à-tête, or to the assembled company, to perfection, so cunningly was it all devised.
When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people present—ten gentlemen and two ladies. One of the ladies, Madame de Netteville, was lying back in the corner of a velvet divan placed against the wall, a screen between her and a splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the room. The other, a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck abnormally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men was talking indiscriminately to both.
As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was a general stir of surprise. The men looked round; Madame de Netteville half rose with a puzzled look. It was more than a month since she had dropped her invitation. Then a flash, not altogether of pleasure, passed over her face, and she said a few hasty words to the woman near her, advancing the moment afterwards to give her hand to Catherine.
'This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so soon. I had imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to give me the pleasure of seeing you.'
But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in everything, were not cordial, for all their smile.
Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive manner, and by the woman's look of conscious sarcastic strength, struggling through all the outer softness of beauty and exquisite dress.
'Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am afraid, as that afternoon on which we met last. Let me introduce you to Count Wielandt—Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will you come over here, beside Lady Aubrey Willert.'
Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, whoseemed to him to look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinised an inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey made an imperceptible movement of the head as Catherine was presented to her, and Madame de Netteville, smiling and biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat.
There was a faint odour of smoke in the room. As Catherine sat down, a young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end of a cigarette into the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand.
Everybody there had the air more or less of anhabituéof the house; and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de Netteville, to take any share in it.
'Well, I believe the story about Desforêts is true,' said the fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling back in his chair.
Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her.
'If you get it from theFerret, my dear Evershed,' said the ex-Tory minister, Lord Rupert, 'you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.'
'What do you mean?' said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.
'Well, it doesn'tpay, you know, to write yourself down a fiend—not quite.'
'What—you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good joke!' and the young man laughed immoderately, joined by several of the other guests.
'I don't imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,' returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; 'but the British public haven't got your nerve. Theymaytake it awkwardly—I don't say they will—when a woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St. Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies, comes to ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.'
'What has one to do with an actress's private life, my dear Lord Rupert?' asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth clearness into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under straight black brows.
'What indeed!' said the young man who had begun the conversation with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching out his hand for another cigarette, and drawing it back with a look under his drooped eyelids—a look of cold impertinent scrutiny—at Catherine Elsmere.
'Ah! well—I don't want to be obtrusively moral—Heaven forbid! But there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to such an extent that you injure your pocket. Desforêts is doing it—doing it actually in Paris too.'
There was a ripple of laughter.
'Paris and illusions—O mon Dieu!' groaned young Evershed, when he had done laughing, laying meditative hands on his knees and gazing into the fire.
'I tell you I have seen it,' said Lord Rupert, waxing combative, and slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. 'The last time I went to see Desforêts in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the house—theatrically speaking—ice. They received her in dead silence—they gave her not one single recall—and they only gave her a clap, that I can remember, at those two or three points in the play where clap they positively must or burst. They go to see her—but they loathe her—and they let her know it.'
'Bah!' said his opponent, 'it is only because they are tired of her. Her vagaries don't amuse them any longer—they know them by heart. And—by George! she has some pretty rivals too, now!' he added reflectively,—'not to speak of the Bernhardt.'
'Well, the Parisianscanbe shocked,' said Count Wielandt in excellent English, bending forward so as to get a good view of his hostess. 'They are just now especially shocked by the condition of English morals!'
The twinkle in his eye was irresistible. The men, understanding his reference to the avidity with which certain English aristocratic scandals had been lately seized upon by the French papers, laughed out—so did Lady Aubrey. Madame de Netteville contented herself with a smile.
'They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan's last book,' said the editor from the other side of the room.
'Dear me!' said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fanning herself lightly the while, her thin but extraordinarily graceful head and neck thrown out against the golden brocade of the cushion behind her.
'Oh! what so many of them feel in Renan's case, of course,' said Madame de Netteville, 'is that every book he writes now gives a fresh opening to the enemy to blaspheme. Your eminent freethinker can't afford just yet, in the present state of the world, to make himself socially ridiculous. The cause suffers.'
'Just my feeling,' said young Evershed calmly. 'Though I mayn't care a rap about him personally, I prefer that a man on my own front bench shouldn't make a public ass of himself if he can help it—not for his sake, of course, but for mine!'
Robert looked at Catherine. She sat upright by the side of Lady Aubrey; her face, of which the beauty to-night seemed lost in rigidity, pale and stiff. With a contraction of heart he plunged himself into the conversation. On his road home that evening he had found an important foreign telegram posted up at the small literary club to which he had belonged since Oxford days. He made a remark about it now to Count Wielandt; and the diplomatist, turning rather unwillingly to face his questioner, recognised that the remark was a shrewd one.
Presently the young man's frank intelligence had told. On his way to and from the Holy Land three years before Robert had seen something of the East, and it so happened that he remembered the name of Count Wielandt as one of the foreign secretaries of legation present at an official party given by the English Ambassador at Constantinople, which he and his mother had attended on their return journey, in virtue of a family connection with the Ambassador. All that he could glean from memory he made quick use of now, urged at first by the remorseful wish to make this new world into which he had brought Catherine less difficult than he knew it must have been during the last quarter of an hour.
But after a while he found himself leading the talk of a section of the room, and getting excitement and pleasure out of the talk itself. Ever since that Eastern journey he had kept an eye on the subjects which had interested him then, reading in his rapid voracious way all that came across him at Murewell, especially in the squire's foreign newspapers and reviews, and storing it when read in a remarkable memory.
Catherine, after the failure of some conversational attempts between her and Madame de Netteville, fell to watching her husband with a start of strangeness and surprise. She had scarcely seen him at Oxford among his equals; and she had very rarely been present at his talks with the squire. In some ways, and owing to the instinctive reserves set up between them for so long, her intellectual knowledge of him was very imperfect. His ease, his resource, among these men of the world, for whom—independent of all else—she felt a countrywoman's dislike, filled her with a kind of bewilderment.
'Are you new to London?' Lady Aubrey asked her presently, in that tone of absolute detachment from the person addressed which certain women manage to perfection. She, too, had been watching the husband, and the sight had impressed her with a momentary curiosity to know what the stiff, handsome, dowdily-dressed wife was made of.
'We have been two months here,' said Catherine, her large gray eyes taking in her companion's very bare shoulders, the costly fantastic dress, and the diamonds flashing against the white skin.
'In what part?'
'In Bedford Square.'
Lady Aubrey was silent. She had no ideas on the subject of Bedford Square at command.
'We are very central,' said Catherine, feeling desperately that she was doing Robert no credit at all, and anxious to talk if only something could be found to talk about.
'Oh yes, you are near the theatres,' said the other indifferently.
This was hardly an aspect of the matter which had yet occurred to Catherine. A flash of bitterness ran through her.Had they left their Murewell life to be 'near the theatres,' and kept at arm's length by supercilious great ladies?
'We are very far from the Park,' she answered with an effort. 'I wish we weren't, for my little girl's sake.'
'Oh, you have a little girl! How old?'
'Sixteen months.'
'Too young to be a nuisance yet. Mine are just old enough to be in everybody's way. Children are out of place in London. I always want to leave mine in the country, but my husband objects,' said Lady Aubrey coolly. There was a certain piquancy in saying frank things to this stiff Madonna-faced woman.
Madame de Netteville, meanwhile, was keeping up a conversation in an undertone with young Evershed, who had come to sit on a stool beside her, and was gazing up at her with eyes of which the expression was perfectly understood by several persons present. The handsome, dissipated, ill-conditioned youth had been her slave and shadow for the last two years. His devotion now no longer amused her, and she was endeavouring to get rid of it and of him. But the process was a difficult one, and took both time andfinesse.
She kept her eye, notwithstanding, on the new-comers whom the squire's introduction had brought to her that night. When the Elsmeres rose to go, she said good-bye to Catherine with an excessive politeness, under which her poor guest, conscious of her owngaucherieduring the evening, felt the touch of satire she was perhaps meant to feel. But when Catherine was well ahead Madame de Netteville gave Robert one of her most brilliant smiles.
'Friday evening, Mr. Elsmere; always Fridays. You will remember?'
Thenaïvetéof Robert's social view, and the mobility of his temper, made him easily responsive. He had just enjoyed half an hour's brilliant talk with two or three of the keenest and most accomplished men in Europe. Catherine had slipped out of his sight meanwhile, and the impression of theirentréehad been effaced. He made Madame de Netteville, therefore, a cordial smiling reply before his tall slender form disappeared after that of his wife.
'Agreeable—rather an acquisition!' said Madame de Netteville to Lady Aubrey, with a light motion of the head towards Robert's retreating figure. 'But the wife! Good heavens! I owe Roger Wendover a grudge. I think he might have made it plain to those good people that I don't want strange women at my Friday evenings.'
Lady Aubrey laughed. 'No doubt she is a genius, or a saint, in mufti. She might be handsome too if some one would dress her.'
Madame de Netteville shrugged her shoulders. 'Oh! life is not long enough to penetrate that kind of person,' she said.
Meanwhile the 'person' was driving homeward very sad andill at ease. She was vexed that she had not done better, and yet she was wounded by Robert's enjoyment. The Puritan in her blood was all aflame. As she sat looking into the motley lamplit night, she could have 'testified' like any prophetess of old.
Robert meanwhile, his hand slipped into hers, was thinking of Wielandt's talk, and of some racy stories of Berlin celebrities told by a youngattachéwho had joined their group. His lips were lightly smiling, his brow serene.
But as he helped her down from the cab, and they stood in the hall together, he noticed the pale discomposure of her looks. Instantly the familiar dread and pain returned upon him.
'Did you like it, Catherine?' he asked her, with something like timidity, as they stood together by their bedroom fire.
She sank into a low chair and sat a moment staring at the blaze. He was startled by her look of suffering, and, kneeling, he put his arms tenderly round her.
'Oh, Robert, Robert!' she cried, falling on his neck.
'What is it?' he asked, kissing her hair.
'I seem all at sea,' she said in a choked voice, her face hidden,—'the old landmarks swallowed up! I am always judging and condemning,—always protesting. What am I that I should judge? But how—how—can I help it?'
She drew herself away from him, once more looking into the fire with drawn brows.
'Darling, the world is full of difference. Men and women take life in different ways. Don't be so sure yours is the only right one.'
He spoke with a moved gentleness, taking her hand the while.
'"Thisis the way, walk ye in it!"' she said presently, with strong, almost stern emphasis. 'Oh, those women, and that talk! Hateful!'
He rose and looked down on her from the mantelpiece. Within him was a movement of impatience, repressed almost at once by the thought of that long night at Murewell, when he had vowed to himself to 'make amends'!
And if that memory had not intervened she would still have disarmed him wholly.
'Listen!' she said to him suddenly, her eyes kindling with a strange childish pleasure. 'Do you hear the wind, the west wind? Do you remember how it used to shake the house, how it used to come sweeping through the trees in the wood-path? It must be trying the study window now, blowing the vine against it.'
A yearning passion breathed through every feature. It seemed to him she saw nothing before her. Her longing soul was back in the old haunts, surrounded by the old loved forms and sounds. It went to his heart. He tried to soothe her withthe tenderest words remorseful love could find. But the conflict of feeling—grief, rebellion, doubt, self-judgment—would not be soothed, and long after she had made him leave her and he had fallen asleep, she knelt on, a white and rigid figure in the dying firelight, the wind shaking the old house, the eternal murmur of London booming outside.
Meanwhile, as if to complete the circle of pain with which poor Catherine's life was compassed, it began to be plain to her that, in spite of the hard and mocking tone Rose generally adopted with regard to him, Edward Langham was constantly at the house in Lerwick Gardens, and that it was impossible he should be there so much unless in some way or other Rose encouraged it.
The idea of such a marriage—nay, of such a friendship—was naturally as repugnant as ever to her. It had been one of the bitterest moments of a bitter time when, at their first meeting after the crisis in her life, Langham, conscious of a sudden movement of pity for a woman he disliked, had pressed the hand she held out to him in a way which clearly showed her what was in his mind, and had then passed on to chat and smoke with Robert in the study, leaving her behind to realise the gulf that lay between the present and that visit of his to Murewell, when Robert and she had felt in unison towards him, his opinions, and his conduct to Rose, as towards everything else of importance in their life.
Now it seemed to her Robert must necessarily look at the matter differently, and she could not make up her mind to talk to him about it. In reality, his objections had never had the same basis as hers, and he would have given her as strong a support as ever, if she had asked for it. But she held her peace, and he, absorbed in other things, took no notice. Besides, he knew Langham too well. He had never been able to take Catherine's alarms seriously.
An attentive onlooker, however, would have admitted that this time, at any rate, they had their justification. Why Langham was so much in the Leyburns' drawing-room during these winter months was a question that several people asked—himself not least. He had not only pretended to forget Rose Leyburn during the eighteen months which had passed since their first acquaintance at Murewell—he had for all practical purposes forgotten her. It is only a small proportion of men and women who are capable of passion on the great scale at all; and certainly, as we have tried to show, Langham was not among them. He had had a passing moment of excitement at Murewell, soon put down, and followed by a week of extremelypleasant sensations, which, like most of his pleasures, had ended in reaction and self-abhorrence. He had left Murewell remorseful, melancholy, and ill at ease, but conscious, certainly, of a great relief that he and Rose Leyburn were not likely to meet again for long.
Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such matters absorb men who have become the slaves of their own solitary habits, and in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh zest for learning it had aroused in him, the beautiful unmanageable child who had disturbed his peace at Murewell was not likely to be more, but less, remembered. When he stumbled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his determining impulse had been merely one of flight.
However, as he had written to Robert towards the beginning of his London residence, there was no doubt that his migration had made him for the time much more human, observant, and accessible. Oxford had become to him an oppression and a nightmare, and as soon as he had turned his back on it his mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his modest part in the life of the capital; happy in the obscurity afforded him by the crowd; rejoicing in the thought that his life and his affairs were once more his own, and the academical yoke had been slipped for ever.
It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that his fresh sight of Rose found him. For the moment, he was perhaps more susceptible than he ever could have been before to her young perfections, her beauty, her brilliancy, her provoking stimulating ways. Certainly, from that first afternoon onwards he became more and more restless to watch her, to be near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so much, she took small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to regard, himself as a mere 'item'—something systematically overlooked and forgotten in the bustle of her days and nights. He saw that she thought badly of him, that the friendship he might have had was now proudly refused him, that their first week together had left a deep impression of resentment and hostility in her mind. And all the same he came; and she asked him! And sometimes, after an hour when she had been more difficult or more satirical than usual, ending notwithstanding with a little change of tone, a careless 'You will find us next Wednesday as usual; So-and-so is coming to play,' Langham would walk home in a state of feeling he did not care to analyse, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a good deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, but in the strangest slightest ways did she not make him suspect every now and then that hewasin some sort important to her, that he sometimes preoccupied her against her will; that her will, indeed, sometimes escaped her, and failed to control her manner to him?
It was not only his relations to the beauty, however, his interest in her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. Elsmere's cold dislike and disapproval of his presence in her mother's drawing-room, that accounted for Langham's heightened mental temperature this winter. The existence and the proceedings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very considerable share in it.
'Tell me about Mr. Langham,' said Mr. Flaxman once to Agnes Leyburn, in the early days of his acquaintance with the family; 'is he an old friend?'
'Of Robert's,' replied Agnes, her cheerful impenetrable look fixed upon the speaker. 'My sister met him once for a week in the country at the Elsmeres'. My mother and I have been only just introduced to him.'
Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little.
'Does he strike you as—well—what shall we say?—unusual?'
His smile struck one out of her.
'Even Robert might admit that,' she said demurely.
'Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and mental strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with anonchalanceI cannot convey: "Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while." "Why?" said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn't know—wouldn't say. But I gathered that, according to him, Elsmere is still swathed in such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags and patches he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort of the change. It seemed to me the tone of the very cool spectator, rather than the friend. However—does your sister like him?'
'I don't know,' said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the face.
Hugh Flaxman's fair complexion flushed a little. He got up to go.
He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I ever saw,' he remarked as he buttoned up his coat. 'Don't you think so?'
'Yes,' said Agnes dubiously, 'if he didn't stoop, and if he didn't in general look half-asleep.'
Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the reason for the constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti-social person at the Leyburns' house. Being himself a man of very subtle and fastidious tastes, he could imagine that so original a suitor, with such eyes, such an intellectual reputation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and the most picturesque capacity for silence,mighthave attractions for a romantic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose rarely talked to him, and was always ready to make him thetarget of a sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to him, and Mrs. Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. Elsmere, too, seemed to dislike him, and yet there he was, week after week. Flaxman could not make it out.
Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started various topics with him—University reform, politics, music. In vain. In his most characteristic Oxford days Langham had never assumed a more wholesale ignorance of all subjects in heaven and earth, and never stuck more pertinaciously to the flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked away at last boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom.
However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of these fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly home in a state of most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the pockets of his overcoat.
'No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything your own way so easily with me or withher! You may break me, but you shall not play upon me. And as for her, I will see it out—I will see it out!'
And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all about him, and a strange new force tingling in every vein.
Meanwhile, however, Mr. Flaxman was certainly having a good deal of his own way. Since the moment when his aunt, Lady Charlotte, had introduced him to Miss Leyburn—watching him the while with a half-smile which soon broadened into one of sly triumph—Hugh Flaxman had persuaded himself that country houses are intolerable even in the shooting season, and that London is the only place of residence during the winter for the man who aspires to govern his life on principles of reason. Through his influence and that of his aunt, Rose and Agnes—Mrs. Leyburn never went out—were being carried into all the high life that London can supply in November and January. Wealthy, high-born, and popular, he was gradually devoting his advantages in the freest way to Rose's service. He was an excellent musical amateur, and he was always proud to play with her; he had a fine country house, and the little rooms on Campden Hill were almost always filled with flowers from his gardens; he had a famous musical library, and its treasures were lavished on the girl violinist; he had a singularly wide circle of friends, and with his whimsical energy he was soon inclined to make kindness to the two sisters the one test of a friend's goodwill.
He was clearly touched by Rose; and what was to prevent his making an impression on her? To her sex he had always been singularly attractive. Like his sister, he had all sorts of bright impulses and audacities flashing and darting about him. He had a certainhauteurwith men, and could play the aristocrat when he pleased, for all his philosophical radicalism. But with women he was the most delightful mixture of deferenceand high spirits. He loved the grace of them, the daintiness of their dress, the softness of their voices. He would have done anything to please them, anything to save them pain. At twenty-five, when he was still 'Citizen Flaxman' to his college friends, and in the first fervours of a poetic defiance of prejudice and convention, he had married a gamekeeper's pretty daughter. She had died with her child—died, almost, poor thing! of happiness and excitement—of the over-greatness of Heaven's boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and death had tenderly embalmed a sentiment to which life might possibly have been less kind. Since then he had lived in music, letters, and society, refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to enter politics, but welcomed and considered, wherever he went, tall, good-looking, distinguished, one of the most agreeable and courted of men, and perhaps the richestpartiin London.
Still, in spite of it all, Langham held his ground—Langham would see it out! And indeed Flaxman's footing with the beauty was by no means clear—least of all to himself. She evidently liked him, but she bantered him a good deal; she would not be the least subdued or dazzled by his birth and wealth, or by those of his friends; and if she allowed him to provide her with pleasures, she would hardly ever take his advice, or knowingly consult his tastes.
Meanwhile she tormented them both a good deal by the artistic acquaintance she gathered about her. Mrs. Pierson's world, as we have said, contained a good many dubious odds and ends, and she had handed them all over to Rose. The Leyburns' growing intimacy with Mr. Flaxman and his circle, and through them with the finer types of the artistic life, would naturally and by degrees have carried them away somewhat from this earlier circle if Rose would have allowed it. But she clung persistently to its most unpromising specimens, partly out of a natural generosity of feeling, but partly also for the sake of that opposition her soul loved, her poor prickly soul, full under all her gaiety and indifference of the most desperate doubt and soreness,—opposition to Catherine, opposition to Mr. Flaxman, but, above all, opposition to Langham.
Flaxman could often avenge himself on her—or rather on the more obnoxious members of her following—by dint of a faculty for light and stinging repartee which would send her, flushed and biting her lip, to have her laugh out in private. But Langham for a long time was defenceless. Many of her friends in his opinion were simply pathological curiosities—their vanity was so frenzied, their sensibilities so morbidly developed. He felt a doctor's interest in them coupled with more than a doctor's scepticism as to all they had to say about themselves. But Rose would invite them, would assume aquasi-intimacy with them; and Langham as well as everybody else had to put up with it.
Even the trodden worm, however—— And there came a time when the concentration of a good many different lines of feeling in Langham's mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp and sudden openness. It began to seem tohimthat she was specially bent often on tormenting him by these caprices of hers, and he vowed to himself finally, with an outburst of irritation due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would assert himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her from her own follies.
One afternoon, at a crowded musical party, to which he had come much against his will, and only in obedience to a compulsion he dared not analyse, she asked him in passing if he would kindly find Mr. MacFadden, a bass singer, whose name stood next on the programme, and who was not to be seen in the drawing-room.
Langham searched the dining-room and the hall, and at last found Mr. MacFadden—a fair, flabby, unwholesome youth—in the little study or cloak-room, in a state of collapse, flanked by whisky and water, and attended by two frightened maids, who handed over their charge to Langham and fled.
Then it appeared that the great man had been offended by a change in the programme, which hurt his vanity, had withdrawn from the drawing-room on the brink of hysterics, had called for spirits, which had been provided for him with great difficulty by Mrs. Leyburn's maids, and was there drinking himself into a state of rage and rampant dignity which would soon have shown itself in a melodramatic return to the drawing-room, and a public refusal to sing at all in a house where art had been outraged in his person.
Some of the old disciplinary instincts of the Oxford tutor awoke in Langham at the sight of the creature, and, with a prompt sternness which amazed himself, and nearly set MacFadden whimpering, he got rid of the man, shut the hall door on him, and went back to the drawing-room.
'Well?' said Rose in anxiety, coming up to him.
'I have sent him away,' he said briefly, an eye of unusual quickness and brightness looking down upon her; 'he was in no condition to sing. He chose to be offended, apparently, because he was put out of his turn, and has been giving the servants trouble.'
Rose flushed deeply, and drew herself up with a look half trouble, half defiance, at Langham.
'I trust you will not ask him again,' he said, with the same decision. 'And if I might say so there are one or two people still here whom I should like to see you exclude at the same time.'
They had withdrawn into the bow window out of earshot of the rest of the room. Langham's look turned significantly towards a group near the piano. It contained one or two men whom he regarded as belonging to a low type; men who, if it suited their purpose, would be quite ready to tell or invent malicious stories of the girl they were now flattering, and whosestandards and instincts represented a coarser world than Rose in reality knew anything about.
Her eyes followed his.
'I know,' she said petulantly, 'that you dislike artists. They are not your world. They are mine.'
'I dislike artists? What nonsense, too! To me personally these men's ways don't matter in the least. They go their road and I mine. But I deeply resent any danger of discomfort and annoyance to you!'
He still stood frowning, a glow of indignant energy showing itself in his attitude, his glance. She could not know that he was at that moment vividly realising the drunken scene that might have taken place in her presence if he had not succeeded in getting that man safely out of the house. But she felt that he was angry, and mostly angry with her, and there was something so piquant and unexpected in his anger!
'I am afraid,' she said, with a queer sudden submissiveness, 'you have been going through something very disagreeable. I am very sorry. Is it my fault?' she added, with a whimsical flash of eye, half fun, half serious.
He could hardly believe his ears.
'Yes, it is your fault, I think!' he answered her, amazed at his own boldness. 'Not thatIwas annoyed—Heavens! what does that matter?—but that you and your mother and sister were very near an unpleasant scene. You will not take advice, Miss Leyburn,—you will take your own way in spite of what any one else can say or hint to you, and some day you will expose yourself to annoyance when there is no one near to protect you!'
'Well, if so, it won't be for want of a mentor,' she said, dropping him a mock curtsey. But her lip trembled under its smile, and her tone had not lost its gentleness.
At this moment Mr. Flaxman, who had gradually established himself as the joint leader of these musical afternoons, came forward to summon Rose to a quartette. He looked from one to the other, a little surprise penetrating through his suavity of manner.
'Am I interrupting you?'
'Not at all,' said Rose; then, turning back to Langham, she said in a hurried whisper: 'Don't say anything about the wretched man; it would make mamma nervous. He shan't come here again.'
Mr. Flaxman waited till the whisper was over, and then led her off, with a change of manner which she immediately perceived, and which lasted for the rest of the evening.
Langham went home, and sat brooding over the fire. Her voice had not been so kind, her look so womanly, for months. Had she been readingShirley, and would she have liked him to play Louis Moore? He went into a fit of silent convulsive laughter as the idea occurred to him.
Some secret instinct made him keep away from her for a time. At last, one Friday afternoon, as he emerged from the Museum, where he had been collating the MSS. of some obscure Alexandrian, the old craving returned with added strength, and he turned involuntarily westward.
An acquaintance of his, recently made in the course of work at the Museum, a young Russian professor, ran after him, and walked with him. Presently they passed a poster on the wall, which contained in enormous letters the announcement of Madame Desforêts's approaching visit to London, a list of plays, and the dates of performances.
The young Russian suddenly stopped and stood pointing at the advertisement, with shaking derisive finger, his eyes aflame, the whole man quivering with what looked like antagonism and hate.
Then he broke into a fierce flood of French. Langham listened till they had passed Piccadilly, passed the Park, and till the youngsavantturned southwards towards his Brompton lodgings.
Then Langham slowly climbed Campden Hill, meditating. His thoughts were an odd mixture of the things he had just heard, and of a scene at Murewell long ago when a girl had denounced him for 'calumny.'
At the door of Lerwick Gardens he was informed that Mrs. Leyburn was upstairs with an attack of bronchitis. But the servant thought the young ladies were at home. Would he come in? He stood irresolute a moment, then went in on a pretext of 'inquiry.'
The maid threw open the drawing-room door, and there was Rose sitting well into the fire—for it was a raw February afternoon—with a book.
She received him with all her old hard brightness. He was, indeed, instantly sorry that he had made his way in. Tyrant! was she displeased because he had slipped his chain for rather longer than usual?
However, he sat down, delivered his book, and they talked first about her mother's illness. They had been anxious, she said, but the doctor, who had just taken his departure, had now completely reassured them.
'Then you will be able probably after all to put in an appearance at Lady Charlotte's this evening?' he asked her.
The omnivorous Lady Charlotte of course had made acquaintance with him in the Leyburns' drawing-room, as she did with everybody who crossed her path, and three days before he had received a card from her for this evening.
'Oh yes! But I have had to miss a rehearsal this afternoon. That concert at Searle House is becoming a great nuisance.'
'It will be a brilliant affair, I suppose. Princes on one side of you—and Albani on the other. I see they have given you the most conspicuous part as violinist.'
'Yes,' she said with a little satirical tightening of the lip. 'Yes—I suppose I ought to be much flattered.'
'Of course,' he said, smiling, but embarrassed. 'To many people you must be at this moment one of the most enviable persons in the world. A delightful art—and every opportunity to make it tell!'
There was a pause. She looked into the fire.
'I don't know whether it is a delightful art,' she said presently, stifling a little yawn. 'I believe I am getting very tired of London. Sometimes I think I shouldn't be very sorry to find myself suddenly spirited back to Burwood!'
Langham gave vent to some incredulous interjection. He had apparently surprised her in a fit ofennuiwhich was rare with her.
'Oh no, not yet!' she said suddenly, with a return of animation. 'Madame Desforêts comes next week, and I am to see her.' She drew herself up and turned a beaming face upon him. Was there a shaft of mischief in her eye? He could not tell. The firelight was perplexing.
'You are to see her?' he said slowly. 'Is she coming here?'
'I hope so. Mrs. Pierson is to bring her. I want mamma to have the amusement of seeing her. My artistic friends are a kind of tonic to her—they excite her so much. She regards them as a sort of show—much as you do, in fact, only in a more charitable fashion.'