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Robert Elsmere

M >> Mrs. Humphry Ward >> Robert Elsmere




He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, looking at
her with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal written in them.
His heart was hungry for that old clinging dependence, that willing
weakness of love, her youth had yielded him so gladly, instead of
this silent strength of antagonism. The memory of her Murewell
self flashed miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate
penitence toward him after her first sight of Newcome, of their
night walks during the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his
arms only the ghost and shadow of that Murewell Catherine?

She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, for she
gave a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a kind of agony
to resist.

'Let me go, Robert!' she said gently, kissing him on the forehead
and drawing back. 'I hear Mary calling, and nurse is out.'

The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville's dinner party
had come round. About seven o'clock that evening Catherine sat
with the child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert. He had gone
off early in the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to
take part in a committee of workmen organized for the establishment
of a choral union in R----, the scheme of which had been Flaxman's
chief contribution so far to the Elgood Street undertaking.

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open on to
the bit of garden, where the trees are already withered and begrimed,
that the air without and her heart within were alike stifling and
heavy with storm. _Something_ must put an end to this oppression,
this misery! She did not know herself. Her whole inner being
seemed to her lessened and degraded by this silent struggle, this
fever of the soul, which made impossible all those serenities and
sweetnesses of thought in which her nature had always lived of old.
The fight into which fate had forced her was destroying her. She
was drooping like a plant cut off from all that nourishes its life.

And yet she never conceived it possible that she should relinquish
that fight. Nay, at times there sprang up in her now a dangerous
and despairing foresight of even worse things in store. In the
middle of her suffering, she already began to feel at moments the
ascetic's terrible sense of compensation. What, after all, is the
Christian life but warfare? '_I came not to send peace, but a
sword!_'

Yes, in these June days Elsmere's happiness was perhaps nearer wreck
than it had ever been. All strong natures grow restless under such
a pressure as was now weighing on Catherine. Shock and outburst
become inevitable.

So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by
vague terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about
her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, with a ceaseless
energy, like her father.

The outer door opened and she heard Robert's step and apparently
Mr. Flaxman's also. There was a hurried rushed word or two in the
hall, and the two entered the room where she was sitting.

Robert came, pressing back the hair from his eyes with a gesture
which with him was the invariable accompaniment of mental trouble.
Catherine sprang up.

'Robert, you look so tired! and how late you are!' Then as she
came nearer to him: 'And your coat--_torn--blood!_'

'There is nothing wrong with _me_, dear,' he said hastily, taking
her hands 'nothing! But it has been an awful afternoon. Flaxman
will tell you. I must go to this place, I suppose, though I hate
the thought of it! Flaxman, will you tell her all about it?' And,
loosing his hold, he went heavily out of the room and upstairs.

'It has been an accident,' said Flaxman gently, coming forward, 'to
one of the men of his class. May we sit down, Mrs. Elsmere? Your
husband and I have gone through a good deal these last two hours.'

He sat down with, a long breath, evidently to regain, his ordinary
even manner. His clothes, too, were covered with dust, and his
hand shook. Catherine stood before him in consternation, while a
nurse came for the child.

'We had just begun our committee at four o'clock,' he said at last,
'though only about half of the men had arrived when there was a
great shouting and commotion outside, and a man rushed in calling
for Elsmere. We ran out, found a great crowd, a huge brewer's dray
standing in the street and a man run over. Your husband pushed his
way in. I followed, and, to my horror, I found him kneeling
by--Charles Richards!'

'Charles Richards?' Catherine repeated vacantly.

Flaxman looked up at her, as though puzzled; then a flash of
astonishment passed over his face.

'Elsmere has never told you of Charles Richards the little gas-fitter,
who has been his right hand for the past three months?'

'No--never,' she said slowly.

Again he looked astonished; then he went on sadly: 'All this spring
he has been your husband's shadow, never saw such devotion. We
found him lying in the middle of the road. He had only just left
work, a man said, who had been with him, and was running to the
meeting. He slipped and fell, crossing the street, which was muddy
from last night's rain. The dray swung round the corner--the driver
was drunk or careless--and they went right over him. One foot was
a sickening sight. Your husband and I luckily know how to lift him
for the best. We sent off for doctors. His home was in the next
street, as it as it happened--nearer than any hospital; so we carried
him there. The neighbors were around the door.'

Then he stopped himself.

'Shall I tell you the whole story?' he said kindly, 'it has been a
tragedy! I won't give you details if you had rather not.'

'Oh, no!' she said hurriedly; 'no--tell me.'

And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his chivalry,
should treat her as though she were a girl with nerves.

'Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When we got
to the house, an old woman rushed at me, "His wife's in there, but
ye'll not find her in her senses; she's been at it from eight o'clock
this morning. We've took the children away." I didn't know what
she meant exactly till we got into the little front room. There,
such a spectacle! A young woman on a chair by the fire sleeping
heavily, dead drunk; the breakfast things on the table, the sun
blazing in on the dust and the dirt, and on the woman's face. I
wanted to carry him into the room on the other side--he was
unconscious; but a doctor had come up with us, and made us put him
down on a bed there was in the corner. Then we got some brandy and
poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his foot, threw
something over it. "Nothing to be done," he said--"internal
injuries--he can't live half an hour." The next minute the poor
fellow opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed from the wall.
Your husband was on the further side, knelling. When he opened
his eyes, clearly the first thing he saw was his wife. He half
sprang up--Elsmere caught him--and gave a horrible cry--indescribably
horrible. "_At it again, at it again! My God!_" Then he fell back
fainting. They got the wife out of the room between them--a perfect
log--you could hear her heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite.
We gave him more brandy and he came to again. He looked up in
your husband's face. "_She hasn't broke out for two months,_" he
said, so piteously, "_two months--and now--I'm done--I'm done--and
she'll just go straight to the devil!_" And it comes out, so the
neighbors told us, that for two years or more he had been patiently
trying to reclaim this woman, without a word of complaint to anybody,
though his life must have been a dog's life. And now, on his
death-bed, what seemed to be breaking his heart was, not that he
was dying, but that his task was snatched from him!'


Flaxman paused, and looked away out of the window. He told his
story with difficulty.

'Your husband tried to comfort him--promised that the wife and
children should be his special case, that everything that could be
done to save and protect them should be done. And the poor little
fellow looked up at him, with the tears running down his cheeks,
and--and--blessed him. "I cared about nothing," he said, "when you
came. You've been--God--to me--I've seen Him--in you." Then he
asked us to say something. Your husband said verse after verse of
the Psalms, of the Gospels, of St. Paul. His eyes grew filmy but
he seemed every now and then to struggle back to, life, and as soon
as he caught Elsmere's face his look lightened. Toward the last
he said something we none of us caught; but your husband thought
it was a line from Emily Brontë's "Hymn," which he said to them
last Sunday in lecture.'

He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in
her face.

'I asked him about it,' the speaker went on, 'as we came home. He
said Grey of St. Anselm's once quoted it to him, and he has had a
love for it ever since.'

'Did he die while you were there?' asked Catherine presently after
a silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He thought her a strange
woman.

'No,' said Flaxman, almost sharply-'but by now, it must be over.
The last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his children's names.
They brought them in, but his hands had to be guided to them. A
few minutes after it seemed to me that he was really gone, though
he still breathed. The doctor was certain there would be no more
consciousness. We stayed nearly another hour. Then his brother
came, and some other relations, and we left him. Oh, it is over
now!'

Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London garden.
Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of Elsmere's
pale, silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How could she,
receive such a story in such a way?

The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly.

'Good-night, Catherine--he has told you?'

He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully looking at
her, the face full of signs of what he had gone through.

'Yes, it was terrible!' she said, with an effort.

His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and went away.

When he was gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leant against the
open French window, looking keenly down on his companion. A new
idea had stirred in him.

And presently, after more talk of the incident of the afternoon,
and when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped gradually
into the subject of his own experiences in North R---- during the
last six months. He assumed all through that she knew as much as
there was to be known of Elsmere's work, and that she was as much
interested as the normal wife is in her husband's doings. His tact,
his delicacy, never failed him for a moment. But he spoke of his
own impressions, of matters within his personal knowledge. And
since the Easter sermon he had been much on Elsmere's track; he had
been filled with curiosity about him.

Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in long
folds about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed on her
lap. Sometimes she gave him a startled look, sometimes she shaded
her eyes, while her other hand played silently with her watch-chain.
Flaxman, watching her closely, however little he might seem to do
so, was struck by her austere and delicate beauty as he had never
been before.

She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without
resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger.
He went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any
excitement, in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now
and then, expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and
not always favorably. But gradually the whole picture emerged,
began to live before them. At last he hurriedly looked at his
watch.

'What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you.'

'You have not had dinner!' she said, looking up at him with a sudden
nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his
impression of her.

'No matter. I will got some at home. Good-night!'

When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was
brought to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterward in the
drawing-room, where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and
starlit night, she mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and
sat bending over it by the window. After about an hour she looked
up straight before her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the
floor, her head resting on the chair.

The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine
Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory,
with God. It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever
known--greater even than that which had convulsed her life at
Murewell.



CHAPTER XLIII.

Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening
for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or
less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his
sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had
to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which
were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westward by the
recurrent memory of that miserable room, the group of men, the
bleeding hand, the white dying face.

In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small number of
people assembled. M. de Quérouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed
old gentleman of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more
lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red
and silver; Lord Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of
a Land Purchase Bill for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last
to wash his hands of 'a beastly set of tenants;' Mr. Wharncliffe,
a young private secretary with a waxed moustache, six feet of height,
and a general air of superlativeness which demanded, and secured
attention; a famous journalist, whose smiling, self-repressive look
assured you that he carried with him the secrets of several empires;
and one Sir John Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man
with a limp--an ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted
in London as an amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked
by one half of society as he was popular with the other.

'Purely for talk, you see, not for show!' said Madame de Netteville
to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood
waiting for the commencement of dinner.

'I shall hardly do my part,' he said with a little sigh. 'I have
just come from a very different scene.'

She looted at him with inquiring eyes.

'A terrible accident in the East End,' he said briefly. 'We won't
talk of it. I only mention it to propitiate you before-hand. Those
things are not forgotten at once.'

She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart,
physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle consideration
for him at dinner. M. de Quérouelle was made to talk. His hostess
wound him up and set him going, tune after tune. He played them
all and, by dint of long practice, to perfection, in the French
way. A visit of his youth to the Island grave of Chateaubriand;
his early memories, as a poetical aspirant, of the magnificent
flatteries by which Victor Hugo made himself the god of young
romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in the days of _L'Avenir_;
his memories of Lamennais' sombre figure, of Maurice de Guérin's
feverish ethereal charm; his account of the opposition _salons_
under the Empire--they had all been elaborated in the course of
years, till every word fitted and each point led to the next with
the 'inevitableness' of true art. Robert, at first silent and
_distraut_, found it impossible after a while not to listen with
interest. He admired the skill, too, of Madame de Netteville's
second in the duet, the finish, the alternate sparkle and melancholy
of it; and at last he too was drawn in, and found himself listened
to with great benevolence by the French man, who had been informed
about him, and regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen
of English religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addlestone,
who had won a European reputation for wisdom by a great scantiness
of speech in society, coupled with the look of Minerva's owl,
attached himself to them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord
Rupert, and Mr. Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party
at the other end.

'Are you still in your old quarters?' Lady Aubrey asked Sir John
Headlam, turning his old, roguish face upon her. 'That house of
Well Gwynne's, wasn't it, in Meade Street?'

'Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then
they made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten
years. There is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and
wants to live in it. I could have left a train of gunpowder and a
slow match behind, I was so cross!'

'Ah,--"Reculer pour mieux _faire_ sauter!"' said Sir John, mincing
out his pun as though he loved it.

'Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, 'but you have
way to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to
dinner, that positively----'

'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the "Société
de Londres,"' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might
have seen an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear Lady Aubrey,
it was simply because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education
had been neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The
last time but one we meet, you gave me the cream of three new French
novels and all the dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived
on it for weeks. By the way, have you read the "Princesse de----"'

He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.

'I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed
a rapier-glance at him, 'but if I had, I should say precisely the
same. Lord Rupert will you kindly keep Sir John in order?'

Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion
characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern
gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The
casual spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably
assumed that all 'the time he could spare from neglecting his duties
he must spend in adorning his person.' Not at all! The _tenue_
of a dandy was never more cleverly used to mask the schemes of a
Disraeli or the hard ambition of a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick
Wharncliffe, who was in reality going up the ladder hand over hand,
and meant very soon to be on the top rungs.

It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain
stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their
own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on
at the other end of the table, or when the party became fused into
one for a while under the genial influence of a good story or the
exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the whole scene--the dainty
oval room, the lights, the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers,
the gleaming silver, the tapestried wall--would seem to him for an
instant like a mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and
arid about it which a dream never has.

The hard self-confidence of these people--did it belong to the same
world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had
shone on him that afternoon from Charles Richards' begrimed and
blood-stained face? '_Blessed are the poor in spirit_,' he said
to himself once with an inward groan. 'Why am I here? Why am I
not at home with Catherine?'

But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had never seen
her so womanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate social
skill. As she talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of literature,
or politics, or famous folk, flashing her beautiful eyes from one
to the other, Sir John Headlam would, every now and then, turn his
odd puckered face observantly toward the farther end of the table.

'By Jove!' he said afterward to Wharncliffe as they walked away
from the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more
rôles than Desforêts!' Sir John and his hostess were very old
friends.

Upstairs, smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining
in. M. de Quérouelle, having talked the best of his repertoire at
dinner, was now inclined for amusement, and had discovered that
Lady Aubrey could amuse him, and was, moreover, _une belle personne_.
Madame de Netteville, was obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert.
The other men stood chatting politics and the latest news, till
Robert, conscious of a complete failure of social energy, began to
took at his watch. Instantly Madame de Netteville glided up to
him.

'Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know
how nay affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come into my
little writing-room.' And she led him into a tiny panelled room
at the far end of the drawing-room and shut off from it by a heavy
curtain, which she now left half-drawn.

'The latest?' said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising his
eyebrows with the slightest motion of the head toward the writing-room.

'I suppose so,' she said indifferently; 'She is East-Ending, for a
change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy's young man who
"liked bad wine, he was so bored with good."'

Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the open window
of the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her.

'You look as if you had had a strain,' she said to him, abruptly,
after they had talked business for a few minutes. 'What has been
the matter?'

He told her Richards' story, very shortly. It would have been
impossible to him to give more than the dryest outline of it in
that room. His companion listened gravely. She was an epicure in
all things, especially in moral sensation, and she liked his moments
of reserve and strong self-control. They made his general expansiveness
more distinguished.

Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying,--

'I was at your lecture last Sunday--you didn't see me!'

'Were you? Ah! I remember a person in black, and veiled, who puzzled
me. I don't think we want you there, Madame de Netteville.'

His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it.

'Why not? Is it only the artisans who have souls? A reformer
should refuse no one.'

'You have your own opportunities,' he said quietly; 'I think the
men prefer to have it to themselves for the present. Some of them
are dreadfully in earnest.'

'Oh, I don't pretend to be in earnest,' she said with a little wave
of her hand; 'or, at any rate, I know better than to talk of
earnestness to _you_.'

'Why to me?' he asked, smiling.

'Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the upper
class and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You
are not interested in any other.'

She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night was
splendid and regal--her dress of black and white brocade, the
diamonds at her throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the marks
of experience and living on the dark subtle face.

'Perhaps not,' he replied; 'it is enough for one life to try and
make out where the English working class is tending to.'

'You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps his eye
only on the lower class will achieve nothing. What can the idealist
do without the men of action--the men who can take his beliefs and
make them enter by violence into existing institutions? And the
men of action are to be found with _us_.'

'It hardly looks just now as if the upper class was to go on enjoying
a monopoly of them,' he said, smiling.

'Then appearances are deceptive, The populace supplies mass and
weight--nothing else. What _you_ want is to touch the leaders, the
men and women whose voices carry, and then your populace would
follow hard enough, For instance'--and she dropped her aggressive
tone and spoke with a smiling kindness--'come down next Saturday
to my little Surrey cottage; you shall see some of these men and
women there, and I will make you confess when you go away that you
have profited your workmen more by deserting them than by staying
with them. Will you come?'

'My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de Netteville.
Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper class can produce a
Brook Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future
will want a vast effusion of feeling and passion to carry it into
action, and feeling and passion are only to be generated in sufficient
volume among the masses, where the vested interests of all kinds
are less tremendous. You upper-class folk have your part, of course.
Woe betide you if you shirk--but----'

'Oh, let us leave it alone,' she said with a little shrug. 'I knew
you would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We
are to starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses
and everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him--which might
be worth doing--but that he may rule us. It is too much!'

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