Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (page 10)

only have been interpreted in one way.

So he stayed, and perforce listened, but in complete silence. None of Mr. Wendover’s side-hits touched him. Only as the talk went on, the Rector in the background got paler and paler; his eyes, as they passed from the mobile face of the Catholic convert, already, for those who knew, marked with the signs of death, to the bronzed visage of the Squire, grew duller–more instinct with a slowly dawning despair.

Half an hour later he was once more on the road leading to the park gate. He had a vague memory that at parting the Squire had shown him the cordiality of one suddenly anxious to apologize by manner, if not by word. Otherwise everything was forgotten. He was only anxious, half dazed as he was, to make out wherein lay the vital difference between his present self and the Elsmere who had passed along that road an hour before.

He had heard a conversation on religious topics, wherein nothing was new to him, nothing affected him intellectually at all. What was there in that to break the spring of life like this? He stood still, heavily trying to understand himself.

Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, every word of that hectic young pleader for Christ and the Christian certainties would have roused in him a leaping passionate sympathy,–the heart’s yearning assent, even when the intellect was most perplexed. Now that inmost strand had given way. Suddenly, the disintegrating force he had been so pitifully, so blindly, holding at bay, had penetrated once for all into the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure of feeling, the first treachery of the Heart. Wishart’s hopes and hatreds, and sublime defiances of man’s petty faculties, had aroused in him no echo, no response. His soul had been dead within him.

As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the gate, it seemed to Robert that he was going through, once more, that old fierce temptation of Bunyan’s,–

‘For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously delivered me, and had set me down so sweetly in the faith of His Holy Gospel, and had given me such strong consolation and blessed evidence from heaven, touching my interest in His love through Christ, the tempter came upon me again, and that with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than before. And that was, “To sell and part with this most blessed Christ; to exchange Him for the things of life, for anything!” The temptation lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so continually that I was not rid of it one day in a month: no, not sometimes one hour in many days together, for it did always, in almost whatever I thought, intermix itself therewith, in such sort that I could neither eat my food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look on this or that, but still the temptation would come: “Sell Christ for this, or sell Christ for that, sell Him, sell Him!”‘

Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this _selva oscura_ of life? The selling of the Master, of ‘the love so sweet, the unction spiritual,’ for an intellectual satisfaction, the ravaging of all the fair places of the heart by an intellectual need!

And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, which made the summer air a darkness, and closed every sense in him to the evening beauty, he felt the irresistible march and pressure of the new instincts, the new forces, which life and thought had been calling into being. The words of St. Augustine which be had read to Catherine taken in a strange new sense, came back to him–‘Commend to the keeping of the Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose nothing!’

Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the whole nature in this way?

Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, and his face turned like the face of a blind man toward a world of which it saw nothing, went through a desperate catechism of himself.

‘_Do I believe in God?_ Surely, surely! “Though He slay me yet will I trust in Him!” _Do I believe in Christ?_ Yes,–in the teacher, the martyr, the symbol to us Westerns of all things heavenly and abiding, the image and pledge of the invisible life of the spirit–with all my soul and all my mind!’

‘_But in the Man-God_, the Word from Eternity,–in a wonder-working Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living Intercessor and Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren?’

He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words of irrevocable meaning.

‘Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt, enjoys, equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and “_miracles do not happen!_”‘

It was done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after his lesser defeat.

‘Now was the battle won, and down fell I as a bird that is shot from the top of a tree into great guilt and fearful despair. Thus getting out of my bed I went moping in the field; but God knows with as heavy an heart as mortal man I think could bear, where for the space of two hours I was like a man bereft of life.’

All these years of happy spiritual certainty, of rejoicing oneness with Christ, to end in this wreck and loss! Was not this indeed ‘_il gran rifiuto?_’ the greatest of which human daring is capable?

The lane darkened round him. Not a soul was in sight. The only sounds were the sounds of a gently breathing nature, sounds of birds and swaying branches and intermittent gusts of air rustling through the gorse and the drifts of last year’s leaves in the wood beside him. He moved mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of desolate terror had passed away, with a new inrushing sense which seemed to him a sense of liberty–of infinite expansion.

Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped away, and there to the left on the westernmost edge of the hill lay the square-stone rectory, its windows open to the evening coolness, a white flutter of pigeons round the dovecote on the side lawn, the gold of the August wheat in the great cornfield showing against the heavy girdle of oak-wood.

Robert stood gazing at it,–the home consecrated by love, by effort, by faith. The high alterations of intellectual and spiritual debate, the strange emerging sense of deliverance, gave way to a most bitter human pang of misery.

‘Oh God! My wife–my work!’

. . . There was a sound of voice calling–Catherine’s voice calling for him. He leant against the gate of the wood-path, struggling sternly with himself. This was no simple matter of his own intellectual consistency or happiness. Another’s whole life was concerned. Any precipitate speech, or hasty action, would be a crime. A man is bound above all things to protect those who depend on him from his own immature or revocable impulses. Not a word yet–till this sense of convulsion and upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once more its own master.

He opened the gate and went toward her. She was strolling along the path looking out for him, one delicate hand gathering up her long evening dress–that very same black brocade she had worn in the old days at Burwood–the other playing with their Dandie Dinmont puppy who was leaping beside her. As she caught sight of him, there was the flashing smile–the hurrying step. And he felt he could but just drag himself to meet her.

‘Robert, how long you have been! I thought you mast have stayed to dinner after all! And how tired you seem!’

‘I had a long walk,’ he said, catching her hand, as it slipped itself under his arm, and clinging to it as though to a support. ‘And I am tired. There is no use whatever in denying it.’

His voice was light, but if it had not been so dark, she must have been startled by his face. As they went on toward the house, however, she scolding him for over-walking, he won his battle with himself. He went through the evening so that even Catherine’s jealous eyes saw nothing but extra fatigue. In the most desperate straits of life, love is still the fountain of all endurance, and if ever a man loved it was Robert Elsmere.

But that night, as he lay sleepless in their quiet room, with the window open to the stars and to the rising gusts of wind, which blow the petals of the cluster-rose outside in drifts of ‘fair weather snow’ on to the window-sill, he went through an agony which no words can adequately describe.

He must, of course, give up his living and his Orders. His standards and judgments had always been simple and plain in these respects. In other men it might be right and possible that they should live on in the ministry of the Church, doing the humane and charitable work of the Church, while refusing assent to the intellectual and dogmatic frame-work on which the Church system rests; but for himself it would be neither right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or reason about it. There was a favorite axiom of Mr. Grey’s which had become part of his pupil’s spiritual endowment, and which was perpetually present to him at this crisis of his life, in the spirit, if not in the letter–‘Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind.’ And with this intellectual conscience he was no more capable of trifling than with the moral conscience.

The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds impressed themselves upon him!–the stir of the child’s waking soon after midnight in the room overhead; the cry of the owls in the oak-wood; the purring of the night-jars on the common; the morning chatter of the swallows round the eaves.

With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself and looked at Catherine. She was sleeping with that light sound sleep which belongs to health of body and mind, one hand under her face, the other stretched out in soft relaxation beside her. Her husband hung over her in a bewilderment of feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent pictures of the future; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How her sleep, her ignorance, reproached him! He thought of the wreck of all her pure ambitions–for him, for their common work, for the people she had come to love; the ruin of her life of charity and tender usefulness, the darkening of all her hopes, the shaking of all her trust. Two years of devotion, of exquisite self-surrender, had brought her to this! It was for this he had lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she had opened to him all her sweet stores of faith, all the deepest springs of her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer! The thought of it and his own helplessness wrung his heart.

Oh, could he keep her love through it all? There was an unspeakable dread mingled with his grief–his remorse. It had been there for months. In her eyes would not only pain but sin divide them? Could he possibly prevent her whole relation to him from altering and dwindling?

It was to be the problem of his remaining life. With a great cry of the soul to that God it yearned and felt for through all the darkness and ruin which encompassed it, he laid his hand on hers with the timidest passing touch.

‘Catherine, I will make amends! My wife, I will make amends!’

CHAPTER XXVII.

The next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept on, after their usual waking time, and remembering his exhaustion of the night before, left him softly, and kept the house quiet that he might not be disturbed. She was in charge of the now toddling Mary in the dinning-room, when the door opened and Robert appeared.

At sight of him she sprang up with a half-cry; the face seemed to have lost all its fresh color, its look of sure and air: the eyes were sunk; the lips and chin lined and drawn. It was like a face from which the youth had suddenly been struck out.

‘Robert!—-‘ but her question died on her lips.

‘A bad night, darling, and a bad headache,’ he said, groping his way, as it seemed to her, to the table, his hand leaning on her arm. ‘Give me some breakfast.’

She restrained herself at once, put him into an arm-chair by the window, and cared for him in her tender, noiseless way. But she had grown almost as pale as he, and her heart was like lead.

‘Will you send me off for the day to Thurston ponds?’ he said presently, trying to smile with lips so stiff and nerveless that the will had small control over them.

‘Can you walk so far? You did overdo it yesterday, you know. You have never got over Mile End, Robert.’

But her voice had a note in it which in his weakness he could hardly bear. He thirsted to be alone again, to be able to think over quietly what was best for her–for them both. There must be a next step, and in her neighborhood, he was too feeble, too tortured, to decide upon it.

‘No more, dear–no more,’ he said, impatiently, as she tried to feed him; then he added as he rose: ‘Don’t make arrangements for our going next week, Catherine; it can’t be so soon.’

Catherine looked at him with eyes of utter dismay. The sustaining hope of all these difficult weeks, which had slipped with such terrible unexpectedness into their happy life, was swept away from her.

‘Robert, you _ought_ to go.’

‘I have too many things to arrange,’ he said, sharply, almost irritably. Then his tone changed. ‘Don’t urge it, Catherine.’

His eyes in their weariness seemed to entreat her not to argue. She stooped and kissed him, her lips trembling.

‘When do you want to go to Thurston?’

‘As soon as possible. Can you find me my fishing basket and get me some sandwiches? I shall only lounge there and take it easy.’

She did everything for him that wifely hands could do. Then when his fishing basket was strapped on, and his lunch was slipped into the capacious pocket of the well-worn shooting coat, she threw her arms round him.

‘Robert, you will come away _soon_.’

He roused himself and kissed her.

‘I will,’ he said simply, withdrawing, however, from her grasp, as though he could not bear those close, pleading eyes. ‘Good-by! I shall be back some time in the afternoon.

From her post beside the study window she watched him take the short cut across the cornfield. She was miserable, and all at sea. A week ago he had been so like himself again, and now–! Never had she seen him in anything like this state of physical and mental collapse.

‘Oh, Robert,’ she cried under her breath, with an abandonment like a child’s, strong soul that she was, ‘why won’t you tell me, dear? Why _won’t_ you let me share? I might help you through–I might.’

She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A weaker woman would have implored, tormented, till she knew all. Catherine’s very strength and delicacy of nature, and that respect which was inbred in her for the _sacra_ of the inner life, stood in her way. She could not catechise him, and force his confidence on this subject of all others. It must be given freely. And oh! it was so long in coming!

Surely, surely, it must be mainly physical, the result of over-strain–expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, just as daily life reproduces itself in dreams. The worldly man suffers at such times through worldly things, the religious man through his religion. Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this kind, and with certain more or less vague preparations for departure, Catherine got through the morning as best she might.

Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under a sky which, after a few threatening showers, promised once more to be a sky of intense heat. He had with him all the tackle necessary for spooning pike, a sport the novelty and success of which had hugely commended it the year before to, those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much developed in him.

And now, oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the long stretches of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque group of old brier cottages brought a remainder of man and his world into the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing his way through the closely set trees, he made some futile attempts at fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was over, and lay it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for hours, vaguely watching the reflection of the clouds, the gambols and quarrel of the water-fowl, the ways of the birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the softly moving trees–the real self of him passing all the while through an interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching to the future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret.

He thought of the feelings with which he had taken Orders, of Oxford scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes, and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he touched the depths of self-humiliation.

As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone. The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh. Only the _habit_ of faith held the close instinctive clinging to a Power beyond sense–a Goodness, a Will, not man’s. The soul had been stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was never a moment when Elsmere felt himself _utterly_ forsaken.

But his people–his work! Every now and then into the fragmentary debate still going on within him, there would flash little pictures of Murewell. The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning over the village shop, the vane on the old ‘Manor-house,’ the familiar figures at the doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear to him as though he were that moment in the pulpit; the children he had taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or brutalized peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets he had learnt–all these memories and images clung about him as though with ghostly hands, asking–‘Why will you desert us? You are ours–stay with us!’

Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense, realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him—the arrangements with his _locum tenens_, the interview with the Bishop, the parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be done with Martha and his mother’s cottage.

His mother? As he thought of her a wave of unutterable longing rose and broke. The difficult tears stood in his eyes. He had a strange conviction that at this crisis of his life, she of all human beings would have understood him best.

When would the Squire know? He pictured the interview with him, divining, with the same abnormal clearness of inward vision Mr. Wendover’s start of mingled triumph and impatience–triumph in the new recruit, impatience with the Quixotic folly which could lead a man to look upon orthodox dogma as a thing real enough to be publicly renounced, or clerical pledges as more than form of words. So henceforth he was on the same side with the Squire, held by an indiscriminating world as bound to the same negations, the same hostilities! The thought roused in him a sudden fierceness of moral repugnance. The Squire and Edward Langham–they were the only sceptics of whom he had ever had close and personal experience. And with all his old affection for Langham, all his frank sense of pliancy in the Squire’s hands,–yet in this strait of life how he shrinks from them both!–souls at war with life and man, without holiness, without perfume!

Is it the law of things? ‘Once loosen a man’s _religio_, once fling away the old binding elements, the old traditional restraints which have made him what he is, and moral deterioration is certain.’ How often he has heard it said! How often he has endorsed it! Is it true? His heart grows cold within him. What good man can ever contemplate with patience the loss–not of friends or happiness, but of his best self? What shall it profit a man, indeed, if he gain the whole world–the whole world of knowledge, and speculation,–and _lose his own soul_?

And then, for his endless comfort, there rose on the inward eye the vision of an Oxford lecture room, of a short, sturdy figure, of a great brow over honest eyes, of words alive with moral passion, of thought instinct with the beauty of holiness. Thank God for the saint in Henry Grey! Thinking of it, Robert felt his own self-respect re-born.

Oh! to see Grey in the flesh, to get his advice, his approval! Even though it was the depth of vacation, Grey was so closely connected with the town, as distinguished from the university, life of Oxford, it might be quite possible to find him at home. Elsmere suddenly determined to find out at once if he could be seen.

And if so, he would go over to Oxford at once. _This_ should be the next step, and he would say nothing to Catherine till afterward. He felt himself so dull, so weary, so resourceless. Grey should help and counsel him, should send him back with a clearer brain–a quicker ingenuity of love, better furnished against her pain and his own.

Then everything else was forgotten; and he thought of nothing but that grisly moment of waiting in the empty room, when still believing it night, he had put out his hand for his wife, and with a superstitious pang had found himself alone. His heart torn with a hundred inarticulate cries of memory and grief, he sat on beside the water, unconscious of the passing of time, his gray eyes staring sightlessly at the wood-pigeons as they flew past him, at the occasional flash of a kingfisher, at the moving panorama of summer clouds above the trees opposite.

At last he was startled back to consciousness by the fall of a few heavy drops of warm rain. He looked at his watch. It was nearly four o’clock. He rose, stiff and cramped with sitting and at the same instant he saw beyond the birchwood on the open stretch of common, a boy’s figure, which, after a start or two, he recognized as Ned Irwin.

‘You here, Ned?’ he said, stopping, the pastoral temper in him reasserting itself at once. ‘Why aren’t you harvesting?’

‘Please, sir, I finished with the Hall medders yesterday, and Mr. Carter’s job don’t begin till to-morrow. He’s got a machine coming from Witley, he hev, and they won’t let him have it till Thursday, so I’ve been out after things for the club.’

And opening the tin box strapped on his back, he showed the day’s capture of butterflies, and some belated birds’ eggs, the plunder of a bit of common where the turf for the winter’s burning was just being cut.

Goatsucker, linnet, stonechat,’ said the Rector, fingering them. ‘Well done for August, Ned. If you haven’t got anything better to do with them, give them to that small boy of Mr. Carter’s that’s been ill so long. He’d thank you for them, I know.’

The lad nodded with a guttural sound of assent. Then his new-born scientific ardor seemed to struggle with his rustic costiveness of speech.

‘I’ve been just watching a queer creetur,’ he said at last hurriedly; ‘I b’leeve he’s that un.’

And he pulled out a well-thumbed handbook, and pointed to a cut of the grasshopper warbler.

‘Whereabouts?’ asked Robert, wondering the while at his own start of interest.

‘In that bit of common t’other side the big pond,’ said Ned pointing, his brick-red countenance kindling into suppressed excitement.

‘Come and show me!’ said the Rector, and the two went off together. And sure enough, after a little beating about, they heard the note which had roused the lad’s curiosity, the loud whirr of a creature that should have been a grasshopper, and was not.

They stalked the bird a few yards, stooping and crouching, Robert’s eager hand on the boy’s arm, whenever the clumsy rustic movements made too much noise among the underwood. They watched it uttering its jarring imitative note on bush after bush, just dropping to the ground as they came near, and flitting a yard or two farther, but otherwise showing no sign of alarm at their presence. Then suddenly the impulse which had been leading him on died in the Rector. He stood upright, with a long sigh.

‘I must go home, Ned,’ he said abruptly. ‘Where are you off to?’

‘Please, sir, there’s my sister at the cottage, her as married Jim, the under-keeper. I be going there for my tea.’

‘Come along then, we can go together.’

They trudged along in silence; presently Robert turned on his companion.

‘Ned, this natural history has been a fine thing for you, my lad; mind you stick to it. That and good work will make a man of you. When I go away—-‘

The boy started and stopped dead, his dumb animal eyes fixed on his companion.

‘You know I shall soon be going off on my holiday,’ said Robert smiling faintly; adding hurriedly as the boy’s face resumed its ordinary expression, ‘but some day, Ned, I shall go for good. I don’t know whether you’ve been depending on me–you and some of the others. I think perhaps you have. If so, don’t depend on me, Ned, any more! It must all come to an end–everything must– _everything!_–except the struggle to be a man in the world, and not a beast–to make one’s heart clean and soft, and not hard and vile. That is the one thing that matters, and lasts. Ah, never forget that, Ned! Never forget it!’

He stood still, towering over the slouching thickset form beside him, his pale intensity of look giving a rare dignity and beauty to the face which owed so little of its attractiveness to comeliness of feature. He had the makings of a true shepherd of men, and his mind as he spoke was crossed by a hundred different currents of feeling,–bitterness, pain, and yearning unspeakable. No man could feel the wrench that lay before him more than he.

Ned Irwin said not a word. His heavy lids were dropped over his deep-set eyes; he stood motionless, nervously fiddling with his butterfly net–awkwardness, and, as it seemed, irresponsiveness, in his whole attitude.

Robert gathered himself together.

‘Well, good night, my lad,’ he said with a change of tone. ‘Good luck to you; be off to your tea!’

And he turned away, striding swiftly over the short burnt August grass, in the direction of the Murewell woods, which rose in a blue haze of heat against the slumberous afternoon sky. He had not gone a hundred yards, before he heard a clattering after him. He stopped and Ned came up with him.

‘They’re heavy, them things,’ said the boy, desperately blurting it out, and pointing, with heaving chest and panting breath, to the rod and basket. ‘I am going that way, I can leave un at the rectory.’

Robert’s eyes gleamed.

‘They are no weight, Ned–’cause why? I’ve been lazy and caught no fish! But there,’–after a moment’s hesitation, he slipped off the basket and rod, and put them into the begrimed hands held out for them. ‘Bring them when you like; I don’t know when I shall want them again. Thank you, and God bless you!’

The boy was off with his booty in a second.

‘Perhaps he’ll like to think he did it for me, by-and-by,’ said Robert sadly to himself, moving on, a little moisture in the clear gray eye.

About three o’clock next day Robert was in Oxford. The night before, he had telegraphed to ask if Grey was at home. The reply had been–‘Here for a week on way north; come by all means.’ Oh! that look of Catherine’s when he had told her of his plan, trying in vain to make it look merely casual and ordinary.

‘It is more than a year since I have set eyes on Grey, Catherine. And the day’s change would be a boon. I could stay at night at Morton, and get home early next day.’

But as he turned a pleading look to her, he had been startled by the sudden rigidity of face and form. Her silence had in it an intense, almost a haughty, reproach, which she was too keenly hurt to put into words.

He caught her by the arm, and drew her forcibly to him. There he made her look into the eyes which were full of nothing but the most passionate, imploring affection.

‘Have patience a little more, Catherine!’ he just murmured. ‘Oh, how I have blessed you for silence! Only till I come back!’

‘Till you come back,’ she repeated slowly. ‘I cannot bear it any longer, Robert, that you should give others your confidence, and not me.’

He groaned and let her go. No–there should be but one day more of silence, and that day was interposed for her sake. If Grey from his calmer standpoint bade him wait and test himself, before taking any irrevocable step, he would obey him. And if so, the worst pang of all need not yet be inflicted on Catherine, though as to his state of mind he would be perfectly open with her.

A few hours later his cab deposited him at the well-known door. It seemed to him that he and the scorched plane-trees lining the sides of the road were the only living things in the wide sun-beaten street.

Every house was shut up. Only the Greys’ open windows, amid their shuttered neighbors, had a friendly human air.

Yes; Mr. Grey was in, and expecting Mr. Elsmere. Robert climbed the dim, familiar staircase, his heart beating fast.

‘Elsmere–this _is_ a piece of good fortune!’

And the two men, after a grasp of the hand, stood fronting each other: Mr. Grey, a light of pleasure on the rugged, dark-complexioned face, looking up at his taller and paler visitor.

But Robert could find nothing to say in return; and in an instant Mr. Grey’s quick eye detected the strained, nervous emotion of the man before him.

‘Come and sit down, Elsmere–there, in the window, where we can talk. One has to live on this east side of the house this weather.’

‘In the first place,’ said Mr. Grey, scrutinizing him, as he returned to his own book-littered corner of the window-seat. ‘In the first place, my dear fellow, I can’t congratulate you on your appearance. I never saw a man look in worse condition–to be up and about.’

‘That’s nothing!’ said Robert almost impatiently. ‘I want a holiday, I believe. Grey!’ and he looked nervously out over garden and apple trees, ‘I have come very selfishly, to ask your advice; to throw a trouble upon you, to claim all your friendship can give me.’

He stopped. Mr. Grey was silent–his expression changing instantly–the bright eyes profoundly, anxiously attentive.

‘I have just come to the conclusion,’ said Robert, after a moment, with quick abruptness, ‘that I ought, now–at this moment–to leave the Church, and give up my living, for reasons which I shall describe to you. But before I act on the conclusion, I wanted the light of your mind upon it, seeing that–that–other persons than myself are concerned.’

‘Give up your living!’ echoed Mr. Grey in a low voice of astonishment. He sat looking at the face and figure of the man before him with a half-frowning expression. How often Robert had seen some rash exuberant youth quelled by that momentary frown! Essentially conservative as was the inmost nature of the man, for all his radicalism, there were few things for which Henry Grey felt more instinctive, distaste than for unsteadiness of will and purpose, however glorified by fine names. Robert knew it, and, strangely enough, felt for a moment in the presence of the heretical tutor as a culprit before a judge.

‘It is, of course, a matter of opinions,’ he said, with an effort. ‘Do you remember, before I took Orders, asking whether I had ever had difficulties, and I told you that I had probably never gone deep enough. It was profoundly true, though I didn’t really mean it. But this year–No, no, I have not been merely vain and hasty! I may be a shallow creature, but it has been natural growth, not wantonness.’

And at last his eyes met Mr. Grey’s firmly, almost with solemnity. It was as if in the last few moments he had been instinctively testing the quality of his own conduct and motives, by the touchstone of the rare personality beside him, and they had stood the trial. There was such pain, such sincerity, above all such freedom from littleness of soul implied in words and look, that Mr. Grey quickly held out his hand. Robert grasped it, and felt that the way was clear before him.

‘Will you give me an account of it?’ said Mr. Grey, and his tone was grave sympathy itself. ‘Or would you rather confine yourself to generalities and accomplished facts?’

‘I will try and give you an account of it,’ said Robert; and sitting there with his elbows on his knees, his gaze fixed on the yellowing afternoon sky, and the intricacies of the garden walls between them and the new Museum, he went through the history of the last two years. He described the beginnings of his historical work, the gradual enlargement of the mind’s horizons, and the intrusions within them of question after question, and subject after subject. Then he mentioned the Squire’s name.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Mr. Grey, ‘I had forgotten you were that man’s neighbor. I wonder he didn’t set you against the whole business, inhuman old cynic!’

He spoke with the strong, dislike of the idealist, devoted in practice to an every-day ministry to human need, for the intellectual egotist. Robert caught and relished the old pugnacious flash in the eye, the Midland strength of accent.

‘Cynic he is, not altogether inhuman, I think. I fought him about his drains and his cottages, however,’–and he smiled sadly–‘before I began to read his books. But the man’s genius is incontestable, his learning enormous. He found me in a susceptible state, and I recognize that his influence immensely accelerated a process already begun.’

Mr. Grey was struck with the simplicity and fulness of the avowal. A lesser man would hardly have made it in the same way. Rising to pace up and down the room–the familiar action recalling vividly to Robert the Sunday afternoons of bygone years–he began to put questions with a clearness and decision that made them so many guides to the man answering, through the tangle of his own recollections.

‘I see,’ said the tutor at last, his hands in the pockets of his short gray coat, his brow bent and thoughtful. ‘Well, the process in you has been the typical process of the present day. Abstract thought has had little or nothing to say to it. It has been all a question of literary and historical evidence. _I_ am old-fashioned enough’–and he smiled–‘to stick to the _a priori_ impossibility of miracles, but then I am a philosopher! You have come to see how miracle is manufactured, to recognize in it merely a natural, inevitable outgrowth of human testimony, in its pre-scientific stages. It has been all experimental, inductive. I imagine’–he looked up–‘you didn’t get much help out of the orthodox apologists?’

Robert shrugged his shoulders.

‘It often seems to me,’ he said drearily, ‘I might have got through, but for the men whose books I used to read and respect most in old days. The point of view is generally so extraordinarily limited. Westcott, for instance, who means so much nowadays to the English religious world, first isolates Christianity from all the other religious phenomena of the world, and then argues upon its details. You might as well isolate English jurisprudence, and discuss its details without any reference to Teutonic custom or Roman law! You may be as logical or as learned as you like within the limits chosen, but the whole result is false! You treat Christian witness and Biblical literature as you would treat no other witness, and no other literature in the world. And you cannot show cause enough. For your reasons depend on the very witness under dispute. And so you go on arguing in a circle, _ad infinitum_.’

But his voice dropped. The momentary eagerness died away as quickly as it had risen, leaving nothing but depression behind it.

Mr. Grey meditated. At last he said, with a delicate change of tone,–

‘And now–if I may ask it, Elsmere–how far has this destructive process gone?’

‘I can’t tell you,’ said Robert, turning away almost with a groan–‘I only know that the things I loved once I love still, and that–that–if I had the heart to think at all, I should see more of God in the world than I ever saw before!’

The tutor’s eye flashed. Robert had gone back to the window, and was miserably looking out. After all, he had told only half his story.

‘And so you feel you must give up your living?’

‘What else is there for me to do?’ cried Robert, turning upon him, startled by the slow, deliberate tone.

‘Well, of course, you know that there are many men, men with whom both you and I are acquainted, who hold very much what I imagine your opinions now are, or will settle into, who are still in the Church of England, doing admirable work there!’

‘I know,’ said Elsmere quickly; I know! I cannot conceive it, nor could you. Imagine standing up Sunday after Sunday to say the things you do _not_ believe,–using words as a convention which those who hear you receive as literal truth,–and trusting the maintenance of your position either to your neighbor’s forbearance or to your own powers of evasion! With the ideas at present in my head, nothing would induce me to preach another Easter Day sermon to a congregation that have both a moral and a legal right to demand from me an implicit belief in the material miracle!’

‘Yes,–said the other gravely–‘Yes, I believe you are right. It can’t be said the Broad Church movement has helped us much! How greatly it promised!–how little it has performed!–For the private person, the worshipper, it is different–or I think so. No man pries into our prayers; and to out ourselves off from common worship is to lose that fellowship which is in itself a witness and vehicle of God.’

But his tone had grown hesitating, and touched with melancholy.

There was a moment’s silence. Then Robert walked up to him again.

‘At the same time,’ he said falteringly, standing before the elder man, as he might have stood as an undergraduate, ‘let me not be rash! If you think this change has been too rapid to last–if you, knowing me better than at this moment I can know myself–if you bid me wait awhile, before I take any overt step, I will wait–oh, God knows I will wait!–my wife–‘ and his husky voice failed him utterly.

‘Your wife!’ cried Mr. Grey, startled. ‘Mrs. Elsmere does not know?’

‘My wife knows nothing, or almost nothing–and it will break her heart!’

He moved hastily away again, and stood with his back to his friend, his tall narrow form outlined against the window. Mr. Grey was left in dismay, rapidly turning over the impressions of Catherine left on him by his last year’s sight of her. That pale distinguished woman with her look of strength and character,–he remembered Langham’s analysis of her, and of the silent religious intensity she had brought with her from her training among the northern hills.

Was there a bitterly human tragedy preparing under all this thought-drama he had been listening to?

Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged hand almost timidly upon him.

‘Elsmere, it won’t break her heart! You are a good man. She is a good woman.’ What an infinity of meaning there was in the simple words! ‘Take courage. Tell her at once–tell her everything–and let _her_ decide whether there shall be any waiting. I cannot help you there; she can; she will probably understand you better than you understand yourself.’

He tightened his grasp, and gently pushed his guest into a chair beside him. Robert was deadly pale, his face quivering painfully. The long physical strain of the past months had weakened for the moment all the controlling forces of the will. Mr. Grey stood over him–the whole man dilating, expanding, under a tyrannous stress of feeling.

‘It is hard, it is bitter,’ he said slowly, with a wonderful manly tenderness. ‘I know it, I have gone through it. So has many and many a poor soul that you and I have known! But there need be no sting in the wound unless we ourselves envenom it. I know–oh! I know very well–the man of the world scoffs, but to him who has once been a Christian of the old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with half the confidence, half the joy, of life! But take heart’–and the tone grew still more solemn, still more penetrating. ‘It is the education of God! Do not imagine it will put you farther from him! He is in criticism, in science, in doubt, so long as the doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as yours is. He is in all life,–in all thought. The thought of man, as it has shaped itself in institutions, in philosophies, in science, in patient critical work, or in the life of charity, is the one continuous revelation of God! Look for him in it all; see how, little by little, the Divine indwelling force, using as its tools,–but _merely_ as its tools!–man’s physical appetites and conditions, has built up conscience and the moral life:–think how every faculty of the mind has been trained in turn to take its part in the great work of faith upon the visible world! Love and imagination built up religion,–shall reason destroy it? No! reason is God’s like the rest! Trust it,–trust Him. The leading strings of the past are dropping from you; they are dropping from the world, not wantonly, or by chance, but in the providence of God. Learn the lesson of your own pain,–learn to seek God, not in any single event of past history, but in your own soul,–in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. Spiritually you have gone through the last wrench, I promise it you! You being what you are, nothing can out this ground from under your feet. Whatever may have been the forms of human belief–_faith_, the faith which saves, has always been rooted here! All things change,–creeds and philosophies and outward systems,–but God remains!’

“‘Life, that in me has rest,
As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!'”

The lines dropped with low vibrating force from lips unaccustomed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it seemed to Robert, gazing at him with fixed eyes, that the man’s whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, was charged with benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing and consecration had been laid upon him. The fiery soul beside him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own. So the torch of God passes on its way, hand reaching out to hand.

He bent forward, stammering incoherent words of assent and gratitude, he knew not what. Mr. Grey, who had sunk into his chair, gave him time to recover himself. The intensity of the tutor’s own mood relaxed; and presently he began to talk to his guest, in a wholly different tone, of the practical detail of the step before him, supposing it to be taken immediately, discussing the probable attitude of Robert’s bishop, the least conspicuous mode of withdrawing from the living, and so on–all with gentleness and sympathy indeed, but with an indefinable change of manner, which showed that he felt it well both for himself and Elsmere to repress any further expression of emotion. There was something, a vein of stoicism perhaps, in Mr. Grey’s temper of mind, which, while it gave a special force and sacredness to his rare moments of fervent speech, was wont in general to make men more self-controlled than usual in his presence. Robert felt now the bracing force of it.

‘Will you stay with us to dinner?’ Mr. Grey asked when at last Elsmere got up to go. ‘There are one or two lone Fellows coming, asked before your telegram came, of course. Do exactly as you like.’

‘I think not,’ said Robert, after a pause. ‘I longed to see you, but I am–not fit for general society.’

Mr. Grey did not press him. He rose and went with his visitor to the door.

‘Good-by, good-by! Let me always know what I can do for you. And your wife–poor thing, poor thing! Go and tell her, Elsmere: don’t lose a moment you can help. God help her and you!’

They grasped each other’s hands. Mr. Grey followed him down the stairs and along the narrow hall. He opened the hall door, and smiled a last smile of encouragement and sympathy into the eyes that expressed such a young moved gratitude. The door closed. Little did Elsmere realize that never, in this life, would he see that smile or hear that voice again!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

In half an hour from the time Mr. Grey’s door closed upon him, Elsmere had caught a convenient cross-country train, and had left the Oxford towers and spires, the shrunken summer Isis, and the flat, hot, river meadows far behind him. He had meant to stay at Merton, as we know, for the night. Now, his one thought was to get back to Catherine. The urgency of Mr. Grey’s words was upon him, and love had a miserable pang that it should have needed to be urged.

By eight o’clock he was again at Churton. There were no carriages waiting at the little station, but the thought of the walk across the darkening common through the August moonrise, had been a refreshment to him in the heat and crowd of the train. He hurried through the small town, where the streets were full of simmer idlers, and the lamps were twinkling in the still balmy air, along a dusty stretch of road, leaving man and his dwellings, farther and farther to the rear of him, till at last he emerged on a boundless tract of common, and struck to the right into a cart-track leading to Murewell.

He was on the top of a high sandy ridge, looking west and north, over a wide evening world of heather, and wood and hill. To the right, far ahead, across the misty lower grounds into which he was soon to plunge, rose the woods of Murewell, black and massive in the twilight distance. To the left, but on a nearer plane, the undulating common stretching downward from where he stood, rose suddenly toward a height crowned with a group of gaunt and jagged firs–land-marks for all the plain–of which every ghostly bough and crest was now sharply outlined against a luminous sky. For the wide heaven in front of him was still delicately glowing in all its under parts with soft harmonies of dusky red or blue, while in its higher zone the same tract of sky was closely covered with the finest network of pearl-white cloud, suffused at the moment with a silver radiance so intense, that a spectator might almost have dreamed the moon had forgotten its familiar place of rising, and was about to mount into a startled expectant west. Not a light in all the wide expanse, and for a while not a sound of human life, save the beat of Robert’s step, or the occasional tap of his stick against the pebbles of the road.

Presently he reached the edge of the ridge, whence the rough track he was following sank sharply to the lower levels. Here was a marvellous point of view, and the Rector stood a moment, beside a bare weather-blasted fir, a ghostly shadow thrown behind him. All around the gorse and heather seemed still radiating light, as though the air had been so drenched in sunshine that even long after the sun had vanished the invading darkness found itself still unable to win firm possession of earth and sky. Every little stone in the sandy road was still weirdly visible: the color of the heather, now in lavish bloom, could be felt though hardly seen.

Before him melted line after line of woodland, broken by hollow after hollow, filled with vaporous wreaths of mist. About him were the sounds of a wild nature. The air was resonant with the purring of the night-jars, and every now and then he caught the loud clap of their wings as they swayed unsteadily through the furze and bracken. Overhead a trio of wild ducks flew across, from pond to pond, their hoarse cry descending through the darkness. The partridges on the hill called to each other, and certain sharp sounds betrayed to the solitary listener the presence of a flock of swans on a neighboring pool.

The Rector felt himself alone on a wide earth. It was almost with a sort of pleasure that he caught at last the barking of dogs on a few distant farms, or the dim thunderous rush of a train through the wide wooded landscape beyond the heath. Behind that frowning, mass of wood lay the rectory. The lights must be lit in the little drawing-room; Catherine must be sitting by the lamp, her fine head bent over book or work, grieving for him perhaps, her anxious expectant heart going out to him through the dark. He thinks of the village lying wrapped in the peace of the August night, the lamp rays from shop-front or casement streaming out on to the green; he thinks of his child, of his dead mother feeling heavy and bitter within him all the time the message of separation and exile.

But his mood was no longer one of mere dread, of helpless pain, of miserable self-scorn. Contact with Henry Grey had brought him that rekindling of the flame of conscience, that medicinal stirring of the soul’s waters, which is the most precious boon that man can give to man. In that sense which attaches to every successive resurrection of our best life from the shades of despair or selfishness, he had that day, almost that hour, been born again. He was no longer filled mainly with the sense of personal failure, with scorn for his own blundering, impetuous temper, so lacking in prescience and in balance; or, in respect to his wife, with such an anguished impotent remorse. He was nerved and braced; whatever oscillations the mind might go through in its search for another equilibrium, to-night there was a moment of calm. The earth to him was once more full of God, existence full of value.

‘The things I have always loved, I love still!’ he had said to Mr. Grey. And in this healing darkness it was as if the old loves, the old familiar images of thought, returned to him new-clad, re-entering the desolate heart in a white-winged procession of consolation. On the heath beside him Christ stood once more, and as the disciple felt the sacred presence, he could bear for the first time to let the chafing, pent-up current of love flow into the new channels, so painfully prepared for it by the toil of thought. ‘_Either God or an impostor_.’ What scorn the heart, the intellect, threw on the alternative! Not in the dress of speculations which represent the product of long past, long superseded looms of human thought, but in the guise of common manhood, laden like his fellows with the pathetic weight of human weakness and human ignorance, the Master moves toward him–

‘_Like you, my son, I struggled and I prayed. Like you, I had my days of doubt and nights of wrestling. I had my dreams, my delusions, with my fellows. I was weak; I suffered; I died. But God was in me, and the courage, the patience, the love He gave to me; the scenes of the poor human life He inspired; have become by His will the world’s eternal lesson–man’s primer of Divine things, hung high in the eyes of all, simple and wise, that all may see and all may learn. Take it to your heart again–that life, that pain, of mine! Use it to new ends; apprehend it in new ways; but knowledge shall not take it from you; love, instead of weakening or forgetting, if it be but faithful, shall find ever fresh power of realizing and renewing itself._’

So said the vision; and carrying the passion of it deep in his heart the Rector went his way, down the long stony hill, past the solitary farm amid the trees at the foot of it, across the grassy common beyond, with its sentinel clumps of beeches, past an ethereal string of tiny lakes just touched by the moonrise, beside some of the first cottages of Murewell, up the hill, with pulse beating and step quickening, and round into the stretch of road leading to his own gate.

As soon as he had passed the screen made by the shrubs on the lawn, he saw it all as be had seen it in his waking dream on the common–the lamp-light, the open windows, the white muslin curtains swaying a little in the soft evening air, and Catherine’s figure seen dimly through them.

The noise of the gate, however–of the steps on the drive–had startled her. He saw her rise quickly from her low chair, put some work down beside her, and move in haste to the window.

‘Robert!’ she cried in amazement.

‘Yes,’ he answered, still some yards from her, his voice coming strangely to her out of the moonlit darkness. ‘I did my errand early; I found I could get back; and here, I am.’

She flew to the door, opened it, and felt herself caught in his arms.

‘Robert, you are quite damp!’ she said, fluttering and shrinking, for all her sweet habitual gravity of manner–was it the passion of that yearning embrace? ‘Have you walked?’

‘Yes. It is the dew on the common I suppose. The grass was drenched.’

‘Will you have some food? They can bring back the supper directly.’

‘I don’t want any food now,’ he said banging up his hat; I got some lunch in town, and a cup of soup at Reading coming back. Perhaps you will give me some tea soon–not yet.’

He came up to her, pushing back the thick disordered locks of hair from his eyes with one hand, the other held out to her. As he came under the light of the hall lamp she was so startled by the gray pallor of the face that she caught hold of his outstretched hand with both hers. What she said he never knew–her look was enough. He put his arm round her, and as he opened the drawing-room door holding her pressed against him, she felt the desperate agitation in him penetrating, beating against an almost iron self-control of manner. He shut the door behind them.

‘Robert! dear Robert,’ she said, clinging to him–‘there is bad news,–tell me–there is something to tell me! Oh! what is it–what is it?’

It was almost like a child’s wail. His brow contracted still more painfully.

‘My darling,’ he said; ‘my darling–my dear, dear wife!’ and he bent his head down to her as she lay against his breast, kissing her hair with a passion of pity, of remorse, of tenderness, which seemed to rend his whole nature.

‘Tell me–tell me–Robert!’

He guided her gently across the room, past the sofa over which her work lay scattered, past the flower-table, now a many-colored mass of roses, which was her especial pride, past the remains of a brick castle which had delighted Mary’s wondering eyes and mischievous fingers an hour or two before, to a low chair by the open window looking on the wide moonlit expanse of cornfield. He put her into it, walked to the window on the other side of the room, shut it, and drew down the blind. Then he went back to her, and sank down beside her, kneeling, her hands in his–

‘My dear wife–you have loved me–you do love me?’

She could not answer, she could only press his hands with her cold fingers, with a look and gesture that implored him to speak.

‘Catherine’–he said, still kneeling before her–‘you remember that night you came down to me in the study, the night I told you I was in trouble and you could not help me. Did you guess from what I said what the trouble was?’

‘Yes,’ she answered trembling, ‘yes, I did, Robert; I thought you were depressed–troubled–about religion.’

‘And I know,’–he said with an outburst of feeling, kissing her hands as they lay in his–‘I know very well that you went up stairs and prayed for me, my white-souled angel! But Catherine, the trouble grew–it got blacker and blacker. You were there beside me, and you could not help me. I dared not tell you about it; I could only struggle on alone, so terribly alone, sometimes; and now I am beaten, beaten. And I come to you to ask you to help me in the only thing that remains to me. Help me, Catherine, to be an honest man–to follow conscience–to say and do the truth!’

‘Robert,’ she said piteously, deadly pale; ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Oh, my poor darling!’ he cried, with a kind of moan of pity and misery. Then still holding her, he said, with strong deliberate emphasis, looking into the gray-blue eyes–the quivering face so full of austerity and delicacy,–

‘For six or seven months, Catherine–really for much longer, though I never knew it–I have been fighting with _doubt_–doubt of orthodox Christianity–doubt of what the Church teaches–of what I have to say and preach every Sunday. First it crept on me I knew not how. Then the weight grew heavier, and I began to struggle with it. I felt I must struggle with it. Many men, I suppose, in my position would have trampled on their doubts–would have regarded them as sin in themselves, would have felt it their duty to ignore them as much as possible, trusting to time and God’s help. I _could_ not ignore them. The thought of questioning the most sacred beliefs that you and I–‘ and his voice faltered a moment–‘held in common, was misery to me. On the other hand, I knew myself. I knew that I could no more go on living to any purpose, with a whole region of the mind shut up, as it were, barred away from the rest of me, than I could go on living with a secret between myself and You. I could not hold my faith by a mere tenure of tyranny and fear. Faith that is not free–that is not the faith of the whole creature, body, soul, and intellect–seemed to me a faith worthless both to God and man!’

Catherine looked at him stupefied. The world seemed to be turning round her. Infinitely more terrible than his actual words was the accent running through words and tone and gesture–the accent of irreparableness, as of something dismally _done_ and _finished_. What did it all mean? For what had he brought her there? She sat stunned, realizing with awful force the feebleness, the inadequacy, of her own fears.

He, meanwhile, had paused a moment, meeting her gaze with those yearning, sunken eyes. Then he went on, his voice changing a little.

‘But if I had wished it ever so much, I could not have helped myself. The process, so to speak, had gone too far by the time I knew where I was. I think the change must have begun before the Mile End time. Looking back, I see the foundations were laid in–in–the work of last winter.’

She shivered. He stooped and kissed her hands again passionately. ‘Am I poisoning even the memory of our past for you?’ he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, be hurried on again–‘After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the Squire. Oh, my wife, don’t look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don’t wish to minimize it. I was not made to stand alone!’

And again that bitter, perplexed, half-scornful sense of his own pliancy at the hands of circumstance as compared with the rigidity of other men, descended upon him. Catherine made a faint movement as though to draw her hands away.

‘Was it well,’ she said, in a voice which sounded like a harsh echo of her own, ‘was it right for a clergyman to discuss sacred things–with such a man?’

He let her hands go, guided for the moment by a delicate imperious instinct which bade him appeal to something else than love. Rising, he sat down opposite to her on the low window seat, while she sank back into her chair, her fingers clinging to the arm of it, the lamp-light far behind deepening all the shadows of the face, the hollows in the cheeks, the line of experience and will about the mouth. The stupor in which she had just listened to him was beginning to break up. Wild forces of condemnation and resistance were rising in her; and he knew it. He knew, too, that as yet she only half realized the situation, and that blow after blow still remained to him to deal.

‘Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with the Squire?’ he repeated, his face resting on his hands. ‘What are religious matters, Catherine, and what are not?’

Then still controlling himself rigidly, his eyes fixed on the shadowy face of his wife, his ear catching her quick uneven breath, he went once more through the dismal history of the last few months, dwelling on his state of thought before the intimacy with Mr. Wendover began, on his first attempts to escape the Squire’s influence, on his gradual pitiful surrender. Then he told the story of the last memorable walk before the Squire’s journey, of the moment in the study afterward, and of the months of feverish reading and wrestling which had followed. Half-way through it a new despair seized him. What was the good of all he was saying? He was speaking a language she did not really understand. What were all these critical and literary considerations to her?

The rigidity of her silence showed him that her sympathy was not with him, that in comparison with the vibrating protest of her own passionate faith which must be now ringing through her, whatever he could urge must seem to her the merest culpable trifling with the soul’s awful destinies. In an instant of tumultuous speech he could not convey to her the temper and results of his own complex training, and on that training, as he very well knew, depended the piercing, convincing force of all that he was saying. There were gulfs between them–gulfs which as it seemed to him in a miserable insight, could never be bridged again. Oh! the frightful separateness of experience!

Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the conversation at the Hall, described–in broken words of fire and pain–the moment of spiritual wreck which had come upon him in the August lane, his night of struggle, his resolve to go to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so much narrating as pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love’s. Love was at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the pale varying face, were really pleading, through all the long story of intellectual change.

At the mention of Mr. Grey, Catherine grew restless, she sat up suddenly, with a cry of bitterness.

‘Robert, why did you go away from me? It was cruel. I should have known first. He had no right–no right!’

She clasped her hands round her knees, her beautiful mouth set and stern. The moon had been sailing westward all this time, and as Catherine bent forward the yellow light caught her face, and brought out the haggard change in it. He held out his hands to her with a low groan, helpless against her reproach, her jealousy. He dared not speak of what Mr. Grey had done for him, of the tenderness of his counsel toward her specially. He felt that everything he could say would but torture the wounded heart still more.

But she did not notice the outstretched hands. She covered her face in silence a moment as though trying to see her way more clearly through the maze of disaster; and he waited. At last she looked up.

‘I cannot follow all you have been saying,’ she said, almost harshly. ‘I know so little of books, I cannot give them the place you do. You say you have convinced yourself the Gospels are like other books, full of mistakes, and credulous, like the people of the time; and therefore you can’t take what they say as you used to take it. But what does it all quite mean? Oh, I am not clever–I cannot see my way clear from thing to thing as you do. If there are mistakes, does it matter so–so–terribly to you?’ and she faltered. ‘Do you think _nothing_ is true because something may be false? Did not–did not–Jesus still live, and die, and rise again?–_can_ you doubt–_do_ you doubt–that He rose–that He is God–that He is in heaven–that we shall see Him?’

She threw an intensity into every word, which made the short, breathless questions thrill through him, through the nature saturated and steeped as hers was in Christian association, with a bitter accusing force. But he did not flinch from them.

‘I can believe no longer in an incarnation and resurrection,’ he said slowly, but with a resolute plainness. ‘Christ is risen in our hearts, in the Christian life of charity. Miracle is a natural product of human feeling and imagination and God was in Jesus–pre-eminently, as He is in all great souls, but not otherwise–not otherwise in kind than He is in me or you.’

His voice dropped to a whisper. She grow paler and paler.

‘So to you,’ she said presently in the same strange altered voice, ‘my father–when I saw that light on his face before he died, when I heard him cry, “Master, _I come!_” was dying–deceived–deluded. Perhaps even,’ and she trembled, ‘you think it ends here–our life–our love?’

It was agony to him to see her driving herself through this piteous catechism. The lantern of memory flashed a moment on to the immortal picture of Faust and Margaret. Was it not only that winter they had read the scene together?

Forcibly he possessed himself once more of those closely locked hands, pressing their coldness on his own burning eyes and forehead in hopeless silence.

‘Do you, Robert?’ she repeated insistently.

‘I know nothing,’ he said, his eyes still hidden. ‘I know nothing! But I trust God with all that is clearest to me, with our love, with the soul that is His breath, His work in us!’

The pressure of her despair seemed to be wringing his own faith out of him, forcing into definiteness things and thoughts that had been lying in an accepted, even a welcomed, obscurity.

She tried again to draw her hands away, but he would not let them go. ‘And the end of it all, Robert?’ she said–‘the end of it?’

Never did he forget the note of that question, the desolation of it, the indefinable change of accent. It drove him into a harsh abruptness of reply–

‘The end of it–so far–must be, if I remain an honest man, that I must give up my living, that I must cease to be a minister of the Church of England. What the course of our life after that shall be, is in your hands–absolutely.’

She caught her breath painfully. His heart was breaking for her, and yet there was something in her manner now which kept down caresses and repressed all words.

Suddenly, however, as he sat there mutely watching her, he found her at his knees, her dear arms around him, her face against his breast.

‘Robert, my husband, my darling, it _cannot_ be! It is a madness–a delusion. God is trying you, and me! You cannot be planning so to desert Him, so to deny Christ–you cannot, my husband. Come away with me, away from books and work, into some quiet place where He can make Himself heard. You are overdone, overdriven. Do nothing now–say nothing–except to me. Be patient a little and He will give you back himself! What can books and arguments matter to you or me? Have we not _known_ and _felt_ Him as He is–have we not, Robert? Come!’

She Pushed herself backward, smiling at him with an exquisite tenderness. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. They were wet on his own. Another moment and Robert would have lost the only clew which remained to him through the mists of this bewildering world. He would have yielded again as he had many times yielded before, for infinitely less reason, to the urgent pressure of another’s individuality, and having jeopardized love for truth, he would now have murdered–or tried to murder–in himself, the sense of truth, for love.

But he did neither.

Holding her close pressed against him, he said in breaks of intense speech: ‘If you wish, Catherine, I will wait–I will wait till you bid me speak–but I warn you–there is something dead in me–something gone and broken. It can never live again–except in forms which now it would only pain you more to think of. It is not that I think differently of this point or that point–but of life and religion altogether.–I see God’s purposes in quite other proportions as it were.–Christianity seems to me something small and local.–Behind it, around it–including it–I see the great drama of the world, sweeping on–led by God–from change to change, from act to act. It is not that Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect human reflection of a part of truth. Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system!’

She heard, but through her exhaustion, through the bitter sinking of hope, she only half understood. Only she realized that she and he were alike helpless–both struggling in the grip of some force outside of themselves, inexorable, ineluctable.

Robert felt her arms relaxing, felt the dead weight of her form against him. He raised her to her feet, he half carried her to the door, and on to the stairs. She was nearly fainting, but her will held her at bay. He threw open the door of their room, led her in, lifted her–unresisting–on to the bed. Then her head fell to one side, and her lips grew ashen. In an instant or two he had done for her all that his medical knowledge could suggest with rapid, decided hands. She was not quite unconscious; she drew up round her, as though with a strong vague sense of chill the shawl he laid over her, and gradually the slightest shade of color came back to her lips. But as soon as she opened her eyes and met those of Robert fixed upon her, the heavy lids dropped again.

‘Would you rather be alone?’ he said to her, kneeling beside her.

She made a faint affirmative movement of the head and the cold hand he had been chafing tried feebly to withdraw itself. He rose at once, and stood a moment beside her, looking down at her. Then he went.

CHAPTER XXIX.

He shut the door softly, and went downstairs again. It was between ten and eleven. The lights in the lower passage were just extinguished; everyone else in the house had gone to bed. Mechanically he stooped and put away the child’s bricks, he pushed the chairs back into their places, and then he paused awhile before the open window. But there was not a tremor on the set face. He felt himself capable of no more emotion. The fount of feeling, of pain, was for the moment dried up. What he was mainly noticing was the effect of some occasional gusts of night wind on the moonlit cornfield; the silver ripples they sent through it; the shadows thrown by some great trees in the western corners of the field; the glory of the moon itself in the pale immensity of the sky.

Presently he turned away, leaving one lamp still burning in the room, softly unlocked the hall door, took his hat and went out. He walked up and down the wood-path or sat on the bench there for some time, thinking indeed, but thinking with a certain stern practical dryness. Whenever he felt the thrill of feeling stealing over him again, he would make a sharp effort at repression. Physically he could not bear much more, and he knew it. A part remained for him to play, which must be played with tact, with prudence, and with firmness. Strength and nerves had been sufficiently weakened already. For his wife’s sake, his people’s sake, his honorable reputation’s sake, he must guard himself from a collapse which might mean far more than physical failure.

So in the most patient, methodical way he began to plan out the immediate future. As to waiting, the matter was still in Catherine’s hands; but he knew that finely tempered soul; he knew that when she had mastered her poor woman’s self, as she had always mastered it from her childhood, she would not bid him wait. He hardly took the possibility into consideration. The proposal had had some reality in his eyes when he went to see Mr. Grey; now it had none, though he could hardly have explained why.

He had already made arrangements with an old Oxford friend to take his duty during his absence on the Continent. It had been originally suggested that this Mr. Armitstead should come to Murewell on the Monday following the Sunday they were now approaching, spend a few days with them before their departure, and be left to his own devices in the house and parish, about the Thursday or Friday. An intense desire now seized Robert to get hold of the man at once, before the next Sunday. It was strange how the interview with his wife seemed to have crystallized, precipitated everything. How infinitely more real the whole matter looked to him since the afternoon! It had passed–at any rate for the time–out of the region of thought, into the hurrying evolution of action, and as soon as action began it was characteristic of Robert’s rapid energetic nature to feel this thirst to make it as prompt, as complete, as possible. The fiery soul yearned for a fresh consistency, though it were a consistency of loss and renunciation.

To-morrow he must write to the Bishop. The Bishop’s residence was only eight or ten miles from Murewell; he supposed his interview with him would take place about Monday or Tuesday. He could see the tall stooping figure of the kindly old man rising to meet him–he knew exactly the sort of arguments that would be brought to bear upon him. Oh, that it were done with–this wearisome dialectical necessity! His life for months had been one long argument. If he were but left free to feel and live again.

The practical matter which weighed most heavily upon him was the function connected with the opening of the new Institute, which had been fixed for the Saturday-the next day but one. How was he–but much more how was Catherine–to get through it? His lips would be sealed as to any possible withdrawal from the living, for he could not by then have seen the Bishop. He looked forward to the gathering, the crowds, the local enthusiasm, the signs of his own popularity, with a sickening distaste. The one thing real to him through it all would be Catherine’s white face, and their bitter joint consciousness.

And then he said to himself, sharply, that his own feelings counted for nothing. Catherine should be tenderly shielded from all avoidable pain, but for himself there must be no flinching, no self-indulgent weakness. Did he not owe every last hour he had to give to the people among whom he had planned to spend the best energies of life, and from whom his own act was about to part him in this lame, impotent fashion.

Midnight! The sounds rolled silverly out, effacing the soft murmurs of the night. So the long interminable day was over, and a new morning had begun. He rose, listening to the echoes of the bell, and–as the tide of feeling surged back upon him–passionately commending the new-born day to God.

Then he turned toward the house, put the light out in the drawing-room, and went upstairs, stepping cautiously. He opened the door of Catherine’s room. The moonlight was streaming in through the white blinds. Catherine, who had undressed, was lying now with her face hidden in the pillow, and one white-sleeved arm flung across little Mary’s cot. The night was hot, and the child would evidently have thrown off all its coverings had it not been for the mother’s hand, which lay lightly on the tiny shoulder, keeping one thin blanket in its place.

‘Catherine,’ he whispered, standing beside her.

She turned, and by the light of the candle he held shaded from her, he saw the austere remoteness of her look, as of one who had been going through deep waters of misery, alone with God. His heart sank. For the first time that look seemed to exclude him from her inmost life.

He sank down beside her, took the hand lying on the child, and laid down his head upon it, mutely kissing it. But he said nothing. Of what further avail could words be just then to either of them? Only he felt through every fibre the coldness, the irresponsiveness of those fingers lying in his.

‘Would it prevent your sleeping,’ he asked her presently, ‘if I came to read here, as I used to when you were ill? I could shade the light from you, of course.’

She raised her head suddenly.

‘But you–you ought to sleep.’

Her tone was anxious, but strangely quiet and aloof.

‘Impossible!’ he said, pressing his hand over his eyes as he rose. ‘At any rate I will read first.’

His sleeplessness at any time of excitement or strain was so inveterate, and so familiar to them both by now, that she could say nothing. She turned away with a long sobbing breath which seemed to go through her from head to foot. He stood a moment beside her, fighting strong impulses of remorse and passion, and ultimately maintaining silence and self-control.

In another minute or two he was sitting beside her feet, in a low chair drawn to the edge of the bed, the light arranged so as to reach his book without touching either mother or child. He had run over the book-shelf in his own room, shrinking painfully from any of his common religious favorites as one shrinks from touching a still sore and throbbing nerve, and had at last carried off a volume of Spenser.

And so the night began to wear away. For the first hour or two, every now and then, a stifled sob would make itself just faintly heard. It was a sound to wring the heart for what it meant was that not even Catherine Elsmere’s extraordinary powers of self-suppression could avail to chock the outward expression of an inward torture. Each time it came and went, it seemed to Elsmere that a fraction of his youth went with it.

At last exhaustion brought her a restless sleep. As soon as Elsmere caught the light breathing which told him she was not conscious of her grief, or of him, his book slipped on to his knee.

Open the temple gates unto my love, Open them wide that she may enter in, And all the posts adorn as doth behove, And all the pillars deck with garlands trim, For to receive this saint with honor due That cometh in to you.
With trembling steps and humble reverence, She cometh in before the Almighty’s view.

The leaves fell over as the book dropped, and these lines, which had been to him, as to other lovers, the utterance of his own bridal joy, emerged. They brought about him a host of images–a little gray church penetrated everywhere by the roar of a swollen river; outside, a road filled with empty farmers’ carts, and shouting children carrying branches of mountain-ash–winding on and up into the heart of wild hills dyed with reddening fern, the sun-gleams stealing from crag to crag, and shoulder to shoulder; inside, row after row of intent faces, all turned toward the central passage, and, moving toward him, a figure ‘clad all in white, that seems a virgin best,’ whose every step brings nearer to him the heaven of his heart’s desire. Everything is plain to him–Mrs. Thornburgh’s round checks and marvellous curls and jubilant airs,–Mrs. Leyburn’s mild and tearful pleasure, the Vicar’s solid satisfaction. With what confiding joy had those who loved her given her to him! And he knows well that out of all griefs, the grief he has brought upon her in two short years is the one which will seem to her hardest to bear. Very few women of the present day could feel this particular calamity as Catherine Elsmere must feel it.

‘Was it a crime to love and win you, my darling?’ he cited to her in his heart. ‘Ought I to have had more self-knowledge, could I have guessed where I was taking you? Oh how could I know–how could I know!’

But it was impossible to him to sink himself wholly in the past. Inevitably such a nature as Elsmere’s turns very quickly from despair to hope; from the sense of failure to the passionate planning of new effort. In time will he not be able to comfort her, and, after a miserable moment of transition, to repair her trust in him and make their common life once more rich toward God and man? There must be painful readjustment and friction no doubt. He tries to see the facts as they truly are, fighting against his own optimist tendencies, and realizing as best he can all the changes which his great change must introduce into their most intimate relations. But after all can love, and honesty, and a clear conscience do nothing to bridge over, nay, to efface, such differences as theirs will be?

Oh to bring her to understand him! At this moment he shrinks painfully from the thought of touching her faith–his own sense of loss is too heavy, too terrible. But if she will only be still open with him–still give him her deepest heart, any lasting difference between them will surely be impossible. Each will complete the other, and love knit, up the ravelled strands again into a stronger unity.

Gradually he lost himself in half-articulate prayer, in the solemn girding of the will to this future task of a re-creating love. And by the time the morning light had well established itself sleep had fallen on him. When he became sensible of the longed-for drowsiness, he merely stretched out a tired hand and drew over him a shawl hanging at the foot of the bed. He was too utterly worn out to think of moving.

When he woke the sun was streaming into the room, and behind him sat the tiny Mary on the edge of the bed, the rounded apple cheeks and wild-bird eyes aglow with mischief and delight. She had climbed out of her cot, and, finding no check to her progress, had crept on, till now she sat triumphantly, with one diminutive leg and rosy foot doubled under her, and her father’s thick hair at the mercy of her invading fingers, which, however, were as yet touching him half timidly, as though something in his sleep had awed the baby sense.

But Catherine was gone.

He sprang up with a start. Mary was frightened by the abrupt movement, perhaps disappointed by the escape of her prey, and raised a sudden wail.

He carried her to her nurse, even forgetting to kiss the little wet cheek, ascertained that Catherine was not in the house, and then came back, miserable, with the bewilderment of sleep still upon him. A sense of wrong rose high within him. How _could_ she have left him thus without a word?

It had been her way sometimes, during the summer, to go out early to one or other of the sick folk who were under her especial charge. Possibly she had gone to a woman just confined, on the further side of the village, who yesterday had been in danger.

But, whatever explanation he could make for himself, he was none the less irrationally wretched. He bathed, dressed, and sat down to his solitary meal in a state of tension and agitation indescribable. All the exaltation, the courage of the night, was gone.

Nine o’clock, ten o’clock, and no sign of Catherine.

‘Your mistress must have been detained somewhere,’ he said as quietly and carelessly as he could to Susan, the parlor-maid, who had been with them since their marriage. ‘Leave breakfast things for one.’

‘Mistress took a cup of milk when she went out, cook says,’ observed the little maid with a consoling intention, wondering the while at the Rector’s haggard mien and restless movements.

‘Nursing other people, indeed!’ she observed severely downstairs, glad, as we all are at times, to pick holes in excellence which is inconveniently high. ‘Missis had a deal better stay at home and nurse _him!_’

The day was excessively hot. Not a leaf moved in the garden; over the cornfield the air danced in long vibrations of heat; the woods and hills beyond were indistinct and colorless. Their dog Dandy, lay sleeping in the sun, waking up every now and then to avenge himself on the flies. On the far edge of the cornfield reaping was beginning. Robert stood on the edge of the sunk fence, his blind eyes resting on the line of men, his ear catching the shouts of the farmer directing operations from his gray horse. He could do nothing. The night before in the wood-path, he had clearly mapped out the day’s work. A mass of business was waiting, clamoring to be done. He tried to begin on this or that, and gave up everything with a groan, wandering out again to the gate on the wood-path to sweep the distances of road or field with hungry, straining eyes.

The wildest fears had taken possession of him. Running in his head was a passage from _The Confessions_, describing Monica’s horror of her son’s heretical opinions. ‘Shrinking from and detesting the blasphemies of his error, she began to doubt whether it was right in her to allow her son to live in her house and to eat at the same table with her;’ and the mother’s heart, he remembered, could only be convinced of the lawfulness of its own yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth’s conversion. He recalled, with a shiver, how, in the Life of Madame Guyon, after describing the painful and agonizing death of a kind but comparatively irreligious husband, she quietly adds, ‘As soon as I heard that my husband had just expired, I said to Thee, O my God, Thou hast broken my bonds, and I will offer to Thee a sacrifice of praise!’ He thought of John Henry Newman, disowning all the ties of kinship with his younger brother because of divergent views on the question of baptismal regeneration; of the long tragedy of Blanco White’s life, caused by the slow dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground of heretical belief. What right had he, or any one in such a strait as his, to assume that the faith of the present is no longer capable of the same stern self-destructive consistency as the faith of the past? He knew that to such Christian purity, such Christian inwardness as Catherine’s, the ultimate sanction and legitimacy of marriage rest, both in theory and practice, on a common acceptance of the definite commands and promises of a miraculous revelation. He had had a proof of it in Catherine’s passionate repugnance to the idea of Rose’s marriage with Edward Langham.

Eleven o’clock striking from the distant tower. He walked desperately along the wood-path, meaning to go through the copse at the end of it toward the park, and look there. He had just passed into the copse, a thick interwoven mass of young trees, when he heard the sound of the gate which on the further side of it led on to the road. He hurried on; the trees closed behind him; the grassy path broadened; and there, under an arch of young oak and hazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the sound of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her; he could not go on. Husband and wife looked at each other one long, quivering moment. Then Catherine sprang forward with a sob and threw herself on his breast.

They clung to each other, she in a passion of tears–tears of such self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living soul had ever seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him he was trembling from head to foot, his arms scarcely strong enough to hold her, his young worn face bent down over her.

‘Oh, Robert!’ she sobbed at last, putting up her hand and touching his hair, ‘you look so pale, so sad.’

‘I have you again!’ he said simply.

A thrill of remorse ran through her.

‘I went away,’ she murmured, her face still hidden–‘I went away because when I woke up it all seemed to me, suddenly, too ghastly to be believed; I could not stay still and bear it. But, Robert, Robert, I kissed you as I passed! I was so thankful you could sleep a little and forget. I hardly know where I have been most of the time–I think I have been sitting in a corner of the park, where no one ever comes. I began to think of all you said to me last night–to put it together–to try and understand it, and it seemed to me more and more horrible! I thought of what it would be like to have to hide my prayers from you–my faith in Christ–my hope of heaven. I thought of bringing up the child–how all that was vital to me would be a superstition to you, which you would bear with for my sake. I thought of death,’ and she shuddered–‘your death, or my death, and how this change in you would cleave a gulf of misery between us. And then I thought of losing my own faith, of, denying Christ. It was a nightmare–I saw myself on a long road, escaping with Mary in my arms, escaping from you! Oh, Robert! it wasn’t only for myself,’–and she clung to him as though she were a child, confessing, explaining away, some grievous fault, hardly to be forgiven. ‘I was agonized by the thought that I was not my own–I and my child were _Christ’s_. Could I risk what was His? Other men and women had died, had given up all for His sake. Is there no one now strong enough to suffer torment, to kill even love itself rather than deny Him–rather than crucify Him afresh?’

She paused, struggling for breath. The terrible excitement of that bygone moment had seized upon her again and communicated itself to him.

‘And then–and then,’ she said sobbing, ‘I don’t know how it was. One moment I was sitting up looking straight before me, without a tear, thinking of what was the least I must do, even–even–if you and I stayed together–of all the hard compacts and conditions I must make–judging you all the while from a long, long distance, and feeling as though I had buried the old self–sacrificed the old heart–for ever! And the next I was lying on the ground crying for you, Robert, crying for you! Your face had come back to me as you lay there in the early morning light. I thought how I had kissed you–how pale and gray and thin you looked. Oh, how I loathed myself! That I should think it could be God’s will that I should leave you, or torture you, my poor husband! I had not only been wicked toward you–I had offended Christ. I could think of nothing as I lay there–again and again’–but “_Little children, love one another; Little children, love one another._” Oh, my beloved’–and she looked up with the solemnest, tenderest smile, breaking on the marred, tear-stained face–‘I will never give up hope, I will pray for you night and day. God will bring you back. You cannot lose yourself so. No, no! His grace is stronger than our wills. But I will not preach to you–I will not persecute you–I will only live beside you–in your heart–and love you always. Oh how could I–how could I have such thoughts!’

And again she broke off, weeping, as if to the tender, torn heart the only crime that could not be forgiven was its own offence against love. As for him he was beyond speech. If he had ever lost his vision of God, his wife’s love would that moment have given it back to him.

‘Robert,’ she said presently, urged on by the sacred yearning to heal, to atone, ‘I will not complain–I will not ask you to wait. I take your word for it that it is best not, that it would do no good. The only hope is in time–and prayer. I must suffer, dear, I must be weak sometimes; but oh, I am so sorry for you! Kiss me, forgive me, Robert; I will be your faithful wife unto our lives’ end.’

He kissed her, and in that kiss, so sad, so pitiful, so clinging, their new life was born.

CHAPTER XXX.

But the problems of these two lives was not solved by a burst of feeling. Without that determining impulse of love and pity in Catherine’s heart the salvation of an exquisite bond might indeed have been impossible. But in spite of it the laws of character had still to work themselves inexorably out on either side.

The whole gist of the matter for Elsmere lay really in this question–Hidden in Catherine’s nature, was there, or was there not, the true stuff of fanaticism? Madame Guyon left her infant children to the mercies of chance, while she followed the voice of God to the holy war with heresy. Under similar conditions Catherine Elsmere might have planned the same. Could she ever have carried it out?

And yet the question is still ill-stated. For the influences of our modern time on religious action are so blunting and dulling, because in truth the religious motive itself is being constantly modified, whether the religious person knows it or not. Is it possible now for a good woman with a heart, in Catherine Elsmere’s position, to maintain herself against love, and all those subtle forces to which such a change as Elsmere’s opens the house doors, without either hardening, or greatly yielding? Let Catherine’s further story give some sort of an answer.

Poor soul! As they sat together in the study, after he had brought her home, Robert, with averted eyes, went through the plans he had already thought into shape. Catherine listened, saying almost nothing. But never, never had she loved this life of theirs so well as now that she was called on, at barely a week’s notice, to give it up for ever! For Robert’s scheme, in which her reason fully acquiesced, was to keep to their plan of going to Switzerland, he having first, of course, settled all things with the Bishop, and having placed his living in the hands of Mowbray Elsmere. When they left the rectory, in a week or ten days time, he proposed, in fact, his voice almost inaudible as he did so, that Catherine should leave it for good.

‘Everybody, had better suppose,’ he said choking, ‘that we are coming back. Of course we need say nothing. Armitstead will be here for next week certainly. Then afterward I can come down and manage everything. I shall get it over in a day if I can, and see nobody. I cannot say good-by, nor can you.’

‘And next Sunday, Robert?’ she asked him, after a pause.

‘I shall write to Armitstead this afternoon and ask him, if he possibly can, to come to-morrow afternoon, instead of Monday, and take the service.’

Catherine’s hands clasped each other still more closely. So then she had heard her husband’s voice for the last time in the public ministry of the Church, in prayer, in exhortation, in benediction! One of the most sacred traditions of her life was struck from her at a blow.

It was long before either of them spoke again. Then she ventured another question.

‘And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert–of–of our future?’

‘Shall we try London for a little?’ he answered in a queer, strained voice, leaning against the window, and looking out, that he might not see her. ‘I should find work among the poor–so would you–and I could go on with my book. And your mother and sister will probably be there part of the winter.’

She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future it seemed to them both, beside the wide and honorable range of his clergyman’s life as he and she had developed it. But she did not dwell long on that. Her thoughts were suddenly invaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in which she had recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of fifteen, from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago ruined, the victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his teeth in fierce and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a shelter, and was to see her through her ‘trouble;’ the girl, a frail, half-witted creature, who could find no words even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while with the dumbest, pitifulest tenacity.

How _could_ she leave that girl? It was as if all the fibres of life were being violently wrenched from all their natural connections.

‘Robert!’ she cried at last with a start. ‘Had you forgotten the Institute to-morrow?’

‘No–no,’ he said with the saddest smile. ‘No, I had not forgotten it. Don’t go, Catherine–don’t go. I must. But why should you go through it?’

‘But there are all those flags and wreaths,’ she said, getting up in pained bewilderment. ‘I must go and look after them.’

He caught her in his arms.

‘Oh my wife, my wife, forgive me!’ It was a groan of misery. She put up her hands and pressed his hair back from his temples.

‘I love you, Robert,’ she said simply, her face colorless but perfectly calm.

Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, he went into the workroom and found her surrounded with flags, and a vast litter of paper roses and evergreens, which she and the new agent’s daughters who had come up to help her were putting together for the decorations of the morrow. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to smile and talk as usual, her lap full of ever-greens, and her politeness exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to Robert one of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He fled from it out into the village, driven by a restless longing for change and movement.

Here he found a large gathering round the new Institute. There were carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, and close by, an admiring circle of children and old men, huddling in the shade of a great chestnut.

Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending, stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting friendliness of those about him, or worried by their blunt comments on his looks. He could not bear more than a glance into the new rooms apportioned to the Naturalists’ Club. There against the wall stood the new glass cases he had wrung out of the Squire, with various new collections lying near, ready to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections stood out bravely in the added space and light; the walls were hung here and there with a wonderful set of geographical pictures he had carried off from a London exhibition, and fed his boys on for weeks; the floors were freshly matted; the new pine fittings gave out their pleasant cleanly scent; the white paint of doors and windows shone in the August sun. The building had been given by the Squire. The fittings and furniture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had planned for it all!–only to see the fruits of two years’ effort out of doors, and personal frugality at home, handed over to some possibly unsympathetic stranger. The heart beat painfully against the iron bars of fate, rebelling against the power of a mental process so to affect a man’s whole practical and social life!

He went out at last by the back of the Institute, where a little bit of garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to a lane.

At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge made by the builders’ carts, he saw a man standing, who turned away down the lane, however, as soon as the Rector’s figure emerged into view.

Robert had recognized the slouching gait and unwieldy form of Henslowe. There were at this moment all kinds of gruesome stories afloat in the village about the ex-agent. It was said that he was breaking up fast; it was known that he was extensively in debt; and the village shopkeepers had already held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best mode of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of cautious action toward his custom in future. The man, indeed, was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, maintaining all the while a snarling, exasperating front to the world, which was rapidly converting the careless half-malicious pity wherewith the village had till now surveyed his fall, into that more active species of baiting which the human animal is never very loath to try upon the limping specimens of his race.

Henslowe stopped and turned as he heard the steps behind him. Six months’ self-murdering had left ghastly traces. He was many degrees nearer the brute than he had been even when Robert made his ineffectual visit. But at this actual moment Roberts practised eye–for every English parish clergyman becomes dismally expert in the pathology of drunkenness–saw that there was no fight in him. He was in one of the drunkard’s periods of collapse–shivering, flabby, starting at every sound, a misery to himself and a spectacle to others.

‘Mr. Henslowe!’ cried Robert, still pursuing him, ‘may I speak to you a moment?’

The ex-agent turned, his prominent bloodshot eyes glowering at the speaker. But he had to catch at his stick for support, or at the nervous shock of Robert’s summons his legs would have given way under him.

Robert came up with him and stood a second, fronting the evil silence of the other, his boyish face deeply flushed. Perhaps the grotesqueness of that former scene was in his mind. Moreover the vestry meetings had furnished Henslowe with periodical opportunities for venting his gall on the Rector, and they had never been neglected. But he plunged on boldly.

‘I am going away next week, Mr. Henslowe; I shall be away some considerable time. Before I go I should like to ask you whether you do not think the feud between us had better cease. Why will you persist in making an enemy of me? If I did you an injury it was neither wittingly nor willingly. I know you have been ill, and I gather that–that–you are in trouble. If I could stand between you and further mischief I would–most gladly. If help–or–or