In Rose’s soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as if was delicate, not the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be. And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he said good-by was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him from her belt.
Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetot to Petites Dalles. It was the first of September. A chilly west wind blew up the dust before him and stirred the parched leafage of the valley. He knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.
‘This is kind–this is like yourself!’ she said, after a first stare of amazement, when he had explained himself. ‘He is in there, much better.’
Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up with his old brightness.
Well, this _is_ friendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow? Why aren’t you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?’
Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make Robert’s eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing touch upon Flaxman’s shoulder.
‘I shan’t try to thank you–Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she pulled me through! And now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself, a little more plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together? You-need not try and persuade _me_ that Long Whindale is the natural gate of the Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from London to Scotland, though I have no doubt you tried that little fiction on them.’
Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down, very deliberately.
‘I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that perspicacity for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the day before yesterday I asked your sister Rose to marry me. She—-‘
‘Go on man,’ cried Robert, exasperated by his pause.
‘I don’t know how to put it,’ said Flaxman calmly. ‘For six months we are to be rather more than friends, and a good deal less than _fiances_. I am to be allowed to write to her. You may imagine how seductive it is to one of the worst and laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms, that his fortunes in love should be made to depend on his correspondence. I may scold her _if_ she gives me occasion. And in six months, as one says to a publisher, “the agreement will be open to revision.”‘
Robert stared.
‘And you are not engaged?’
‘Not as I understand it,’ replied Flaxman. ‘Decidedly not!’ he added with energy, remembering that very platonic farewell.
Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating.
‘A fantastic thing, the modern young woman! Still I think I can understand. There may have been more than mere caprice in it.’
His eye met his friend’s significantly.
‘I suppose so,’ said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert’s benefit was he going to reveal any details of that scene on High Fell. ‘Never mind, old fellow, I am content. And, indeed, _faute de mieux_, I should be content with anything that brought me nearer to her, were it but by the thousandth of an inch.’
Robert grasped his hand affectionately.
‘Catherine,’ he called through the door, ‘never mind the supper; let it burn. Flaxman brings news.’
Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly her ways would never have been as her sister’s.
‘Are we supposed to know?’ she asked, very naturally.
‘She never forbade me to tell,’ said Flaxman, smiling. ‘I think, however, if I were you, I should say nothing about it–yet. I told her it was part of our bargain that _she_ should explain my letters to Mrs. Leyburn. I gave her free leave to invent any fairy tale she pleased, but it was to be _her_ invention, not mine.’
Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But there was something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself.
Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman’s arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched him critically, did not like some of his symptoms, but thought on the whole he must be recovering at the normal rate, considering how severe the attack had been.
‘What do you think of him?’ Catherine asked him next day, with all her soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established in a sunny nook, and were strolling on along the sands.
‘I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, and keep him quiet,’ said Flaxman. ‘He will be all right presently.’
‘How _can_ we keep him quiet?’ said Catherine, with a momentary despair in her fine pale face. ‘All day long and all night long he is thinking of his work. It is like something fiery burning the heart out of him.’
Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of calm autumn weather he spent with them before the return journey. Robert would talk to him for hours–now on the sands, with the gray infinity of sea before them-now pacing the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him drop heavily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the religious future of the working-class. He described the scene in the club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, presenting them for Flaxman’s criticism, and dealing with them himself, with that startling mixture of acute common-sense and eloquent passion which had always made him so effective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously at first, as he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried away, not by the beliefs, but by the man. _He_ found his pleasure in dallying with the magnificent _possibility_ of the Church; doubt with him applied to all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for the provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or social reform was another matter. Since the Revolution, every generous child of the century has been open to the fascination of political or social Utopias. But religion! _What–what is truth?_ Why not let the old things alone?
However, it was through the social passion, once so real in him, and still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, that Robert caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining possession of him all these months.
‘Well,’ said Flaxman one day, ‘suppose I grant you that Christianity of the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, even in England, and in spite of the Church expansion we hear so much about; and suppose I believe with you that things will go badly without religion: what then? Who can have a religion for the asking?’
‘But who can have it without? _Seek_, that you may find. Experiment; try new combinations. If a thing is going that humanity can’t do without, and you and I believe it, what duty is more urgent for us than the effort to replace it?’
Flaxman shrugged his shoulders.
‘What will you gain? A new sect?’
‘Possibly. But what we _stand_ to gain is a new social bond,’ was the flashing answer-‘a new compelling force in man and in society. Can you deny that the world wants it? What are you economists and sociologists of the new type always pining for? Why, for that diminution of the self in man which is to enable the individual to see the _world’s_ ends clearly, and to care not only for his own but for his neighbor’s interest, which is to make the rich devote themselves to the poor, and the poor bear with the rich. If man only _would_, he _could_, you say, solve all the problems which oppress him. It is man’s will which is eternally defective, eternally inadequate. Well, the great religions of the world are the stimulants by which the power at the root of things has worked upon this sluggish instrument of human destiny. Without religion you cannot make the will equal to its tasks. Our present religion fails us; we must, we will have another!’
He rose, and began to pace along the sands, now gently glowing in the warm September evening, Flaxman beside him.
_A new religion!_ Of all words, the most tremendous? Flaxman pitifully weighed against it the fraction of force fretting and surging in the thin elastic frame beside him. He knew well, however–few better–that the outburst was not a mere dream and emptiness. There was experience behind it–a burning, driving experience of actual fact.
Presently Robert said, with a change of tone, ‘I must have that whole block of warehouses, Flaxman.’
‘Must You? said Flaxman, relieved by the drop from speculation to the practical. ‘Why?’
‘Look here!’ And sitting down again on a sandhill overgrown with wild grasses and mats of seathistle, the poor pale reformer began to draw out the details of his scheme on its material side. Three floors of rooms brightly furnished, well lit and warmed; a large hall for the Sunday lectures, concerts, entertainments, and story-telling; rooms for the boys’ club; two rooms for women and girls, reached by a separate entrance; a library and reading-room open to both sexes, well stored with books, and made beautiful by pictures; three or four smaller rooms to serve as committee rooms and for the purposes of the Naturalist Club which had been started in May on the Murewell plan; and, if possible, a gymnasium.
‘_Money!_’ he said, drawing up with a laugh in mid-career. ‘There’s the rub, of course. But I shall manage it.’
To judge from the past, Flaxman thought it extremely likely that he would. He studied the cabalistic lines Elsmere’s stick had made in the sand for a minute or two; then he said dryly, ‘I will take the first expense; and draw on me afterward up to five hundred a year, for the first four years.’
Robert turned upon him and grasped his hand.
‘I do not thank you,’ he said quietly, after a moment’s pause; ‘the work itself will do that.’
Again they strolled on, talking, plunging into details, till Flaxman’s pulse beat as fast as Robert’s; so full of infectious hope and energy was the whole being of the man before him.
‘I can take in the women and girls now,’ Robert said at once. ‘Catherine has promised to superintend it all.’
Then suddenly something struck the mobile mind, and he stood an instant looking at his companion. It was the first time he had mentioned Catherine’s name in connection with the North R—- work. Flaxman could not mistake the emotion, the unspoken thanks in those eyes. He turned away, nervously knocking off the ashes of his cigar. But the two men understood each other.
CHAPTER XLIX.
Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere’s irrationality was an aversion to doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded admiration for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic; Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his way. And for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act favorably upon him. After his first welcome at the Club he came home with bright eye and vigorous step, declaring that he was another man.
Flaxman established himself in St. James’ Place. Town was deserted, the partridges at Greenlaws clamored to be shot; the head-keeper wrote letters which would have melted the heart of a stone. Flaxman replied recklessly that any decent fellow in the neighborhood was welcome to shoot his birds–a reply which almost brought upon him the resignation of the outraged keeper by return of post. Lady Charlotte wrote and remonstrated with him for neglecting a landowner’s duties, inquiring at the same time what he meant to do with regard to ‘that young lady.’ To which Flaxman replied calmly that he had just come back from the Lakes, where he had done, not indeed all that he meant to do, but still something. Miss Leyburn and he were not engaged, but he was on probation for six months, and found London the best place for getting through it.
‘So far,’ he said, ‘I am getting on well, and developing an amount of energy, especially in the matter of correspondence, which alone ought to commend the arrangement to the relations of an idle man. But we must be left “to dream our dream unto ourselves alone.” One word from anybody belonging to me to anybody belonging to her on the subject, and—-. But threats are puerile. _For the present_, dear Aunt,
I am, your devoted Nephew HUGH FLAXMAN.
‘_On probation!_’
Flaxman chuckled as he sent off the letter.
He stayed because he was too restless to be anywhere else, and because he loved the Elsmeres for Rose’s sake and his own. He thought moreover that a cool-headed friend with an eye for something else in the world than religious reform might be useful just then to Elsmere, and he was determined at the same time to see what the reformer meant to be at.
In the first place, Robert’s attention was directed to getting possession of the whole block of buildings, in which the existing school and lecture-rooms took up only the lowest floor. This was a matter of some difficulty, for the floors above were employed in warehousing goods belonging to various minor import trades, and were hold on tenures of different lengths. However, by dint of some money and much skill, the requisite clearances were effected during September and part of October. By the end of that month all but the top floor, the tenant of which refused to be dislodged, fell into Elsmere’s hands.
Meanwhile at a meeting held every Sunday after lecture–a meeting composed mainly of artisans of the district, but including also Robert’s helpers from the West, and a small sprinkling of persons interested in the man and his work from all parts–the details of ‘The New Brotherhood of Christ’ were being hammered out. Catherine was generally present, sitting a little apart, with a look which Flaxman, who now knew her well, was always trying to decipher afresh–a sort of sweet aloofness, as though the spirit behind it saw down the vistas of the future, ends and solutions which gave it courage to endure the present. Murray Edwardes too was always there. It often struck Flaxman afterward that in Robert’s attitude toward Edwardes at this time, in his constant desire to bring him forward, to associate him with himself as much as possible in the government and formation of the infant society, there was a half-conscious prescience of a truth that as yet none knew, not even the tender wife, the watchful friend.
The meetings were of extraordinary interest. The men, the great majority of whom had been disciplined and moulded for months by contact with Elsmere’s teaching and Elsmere’s thought, showed a responsiveness, a receptivity, even a power of initiation which often struck Flaxman with wonder. Were these the men he had seen in the Club-hall on the night of Robert’s address–sour, stolid, brutalized, hostile to all things in heaven and earth?
‘And we go on prating that the age of saints is over, the, role of the individual lessening day by day! Fool! go and be a saint, go and give yourself to ideas; go and _live_ the life hid with Christ in God, and see,’–so would run the quick comment of the observer.
But incessant as was the reciprocity, the interchange and play of feeling between Robert and the wide following growing up around him, it was plain to Flaxman that although he never moved a step without carrying his world with him, he was never at the mercy of his world. Nothing was ever really left to chance. Through all these strange debates, which began rawly and clumsily enough, and grew every week more and more absorbing to all concerned, Flaxman was convinced that hardly any rule or formula of the new society was ultimately adopted which had not been for long in Robert’s mind–thought out and brought into final shape, perhaps, on the Petites Dalles sands. It was an unobtrusive art, his art of government, but a most effective one.
At any moment, as Flaxman often felt, at any rate in the early meetings, the discussions as to the religious practices which were to bind together the new association might have passed the line, and become puerile or grotesque. At any moment the jarring characters and ambitions of the men Elsmere had to deal with might have dispersed that delicate atmosphere of moral sympathy and passion in which the whole new birth seemed to have been conceived, and upon the maintenance of which its fruition and development depended. But as soon as Elsmere appeared, difficulties vanished, enthusiasm sprang up again. The rules of the new society came simply and naturally into being, steeped and halloed, as it were, from the beginning, in the passion and genius of one great heart. The fastidious critical instinct in Flaxman was silenced no less than the sour, half-educated analysis of such a man as Lestrange.
In the same way all personal jars seemed to melt away beside him. There were some painful things connected with the new departure. Wardlaw, for instance, a conscientious Comtist refusing stoutly to admit anything more than ‘an unknowable reality behind phenomena,’ was distressed and affronted by the strongly religious bent Elsmere was giving to the work he had begun. Lestrange, who was a man of great though raw ability, who almost always spoke at the meetings, and whom Robert was bent on attaching to the society, had times when the things he was half inclined to worship one day he was much more inclined to burn the next in the sight of all men, and when the smallest failure of temper on Robert’s part might have entailed a disagreeable scene, and the possible formation of a harassing left wing.
But Robert’s manner to Wardlaw was that of a grateful younger brother. It was clear that the Comtist could not formally join the Brotherhood. But all the share and influence that could be secured him in the practical working of it, was secured him. And what was more, Robert succeeded in infusing his own delicacy, his own compunctions on the subject into the men and youths who had profited in the past by Wardlaw’s rough self-devotion. So that if, through much that went on now, he could only be a spectator, at least he was not allowed to feel himself an alien or forgotten.
As to Lestrange, against a man who was as ready to laugh as to preach, and into whose ardent soul nature had infused a saving sense of the whimsical in life and character, cynicism and vanity seemed to have no case. Robert’s quick temper had been wonderfully disciplined by life since his Oxford days. He had now very little of that stiff-neckedness, so fatal to the average reformer, which makes a man insist on all or nothing from his followers. He took what each man had to give. Nay, he made it almost seem as though the grudging support of Lestrange, or the critical half-patronizing approval of the young barrister from the West who came down to listen to him, and made a favor of teaching in his night-school, were as precious to him as was the wholehearted, the self-abandoning veneration, which the majority of those about him had begun to show toward the man in whom, as Charles Richards said, they had ‘seen God.’
At last by the middle of November the whole great building, with the exception of the top floor, was cleared and ready for use. Robert felt the same joy in it, in it’s clean paint, the half-filled shelves in the library, the pictures standing against the walls ready to be hung, the rolls of bright-colored matting ready to be laid down, as he had felt in the Murewell Institute. He and Flaxman, helped by a voluntary army of men, worked at it from morning till night. Only Catherine could ever persuade him to remember that he was not yet physically himself.
Then came the day when the building was formally opened, when the gilt letters over the door, ‘The New Brotherhood of Christ,’ shone out into the dingy street, and when the first enrolment of names in the book of the Brotherhood took place.
For two hours a continuous stream of human beings surrounded the little table beside which Elsmere stood, inscribing their names, and receiving from him the silver badge, bearing the head of Christ, which was to be the outward and conspicuous sign of membership. Men came of all sorts: the intelligent well-paid artisan, the pallid clerk or small accountant, stalwart warehouse men, huge carters and dray-men, the boy attached to each by the laws of the profession often straggling lumpishly behind his master. Women were there: wives who came because their lords came, or because Mr. Elsmere had been ‘that good’ to them that anything they could do to oblige him ‘they would, and welcome;’ prim pupil-teachers, holding themselves with straight superior shoulders; children, who came trooping in, grinned up into Robert’s face and retreated again with red cheeks, the silver badge tight clasped in hands which not even much scrubbing could make passable.
Flaxman stood and watched it from the side. It was an extraordinary scene: the crowd, the slight figure on the platform, the two great inscriptions, which represented the only ‘articles’ of the new faith, gleaming from the freshly colored walls:–
‘_In thee, O Eternal, have I put my trust!_’ ‘_This do in remembrance of Me:_’–
–the recesses on either side of the hall lined with white marble, and destined, the one to hold the names of the living members of the Brotherhood; the other to commemorate those who had passed away (empty this last save for the one poor name of ‘Charles Richards’); the copies of Giotto’s Paduan Virtues–Faith, Fortitude, Charity, and the like-which broke the long wall at intervals. The cynic in the onlooker tried to assert itself against the feeling with which the air seemed overcharged in vain.
Whatever comes of it, Flaxman said to himself with strong, involuntary conviction, ‘whether he fails or no, the spirit that is moving here is the same spirit that spread the Church, the spirit that sent out Benedictine and Franciscan into the world, that fired the children of Luther, or Calvin, or George Fox; the spirit of devotion, through a man, to an idea; through one much-loved, much-trusted soul to some eternal verity, newly caught, newly conceived, behind it. There is no approaching the idea for the masses except through the human life; there is no lasting power for the man except as the slave of the idea!’
A week later he wrote to his aunt as follows. He could not write to her of Rose, he did hot care to write of himself, and he knew that Elsmere’s Club address had left a mark even on her restless and overcrowded mind. Moreover he himself was absorbed.
‘We are in the full stream of religion–making. I watch it with a fascination you at a distance cannot possibly understand, even when my judgement demurs, and my intelligence protests that the thing cannot live without Elsmere, and that Elsmere’s life is a frail one. After the ceremony of enrolment which I described to you yesterday the Council of the New Brotherhood was chosen by popular election, and Elsmere gave an address. Two-thirds of the council, I should think, are workingmen, the rest of the upper class; Elsmere, of course, President.’
‘Since then the first religious service under the new constitution has been held. The service is extremely simple, and the basis of the whole is “new bottles for the new wine.” The opening prayer is recited by everybody present standing. It is rather an act of adoration and faith than a prayer, properly so called. It represents, in fact, the placing of the soul in the presence of God. The mortal turns to the eternal; the ignorant and imperfect look away from themselves to the knowledge and perfection of the All-Holy. It is Elsmere’s drawing up, I imagine–at any rate it is essentially modern, expressing the modern spirit, answering to modern need, as I imagine the first Christian prayers expressed the spirit and answered to the need of an earlier day.’
‘Then follows some passage from the life of Christ. Elsmere reads it and expounds it, in the first place, as a lecturer might expound a passage of Tacitus, historically and critically. His explanation of miracle, his efforts to make his audience realize the germs of miraculous belief which each mass carries with him in the constitution and inherited furniture of his mind, are some of the most ingenious–perhaps the most convincing–I have ever heard. My heart and my head have never been very much at one, as you know, on this matter of the marvelous element in religion.
‘But then when the critic has done, the poet and the believer begins. Whether he has got hold of the true Christ is another matter; but that the Christ he preaches moves the human heart as much as–and in the case of the London artisan, more than–the current orthodox presentation of him, I begin to have ocular demonstration.
‘I was present, for instance, at his children’s Sunday class the other day. He had brought them up to the story of the Crucifixion, reading from the Revised Version, and amplifying wherever the sense required it. Suddenly a little girl laid her head on the desk before her, and with choking sobs implored him not to go on. The whole class seemed ready to do the same. The pure human pity of the story–the contrast between the innocence and the pain of the sufferer–seemed to be more than they could bear. And there was no comforting sense of a jugglery by which the suffering was not real after all, and the sufferer not man but God.
‘He took one of them upon his knee and tried to console them. But there is something piercingly penetrating and austere even in the consolations of this new faith. He did but remind the children of the burden of gratitude laid upon them. “Would you let him stiffer so much in vain? His suffering has made you and me happier and better to-day, at this moment, than we could have been without Jesus. You will understand how, and why, more clearly when you grow up. Let us in return keep him in our hearts always, and obey his words! It is all you can do for his sake, just as all you could do for a mother who died would be to follow her wishes and sacredly keep her memory.”
‘That was about the gist of it. It was a strange little scene, wonderfully suggestive and pathetic.
‘But a few more words about the Sunday service. After the address came a hymn. There are only seven hymns in the little service book, gathered out of the finest we have. It is supposed that in a short time they will become so familiar to the members of the Brotherhood that they will be sung readily by heart. The singing of them in the public service alternates with an equal number of Psalms. And both Psalms and hymns are meant to be recited or sung constantly in the homes of the members, and to become part of the every-day life of the Brotherhood. They have been most carefully chosen, and a sort of ritual importance has been attached to them from the beginning. Each day in the week has its particular hymn or Psalm.
‘Then the whole wound up with another short prayer, also repeated standing, a commendation of the individual, the Brotherhood, the nation, the world, to God. The phrases of it are terse and grand. One can see at once that it has laid hold of the popular sense, the popular memory. The Lord’s Prayer followed. Then, after a silent pause of “recollection,” Elsmere dismissed them.
‘”_Go in peace, in the love of God, and in the memory of His servant, Jesus_.”
‘I looked, carefully at the men as they were tramping out. Some of them were among the Secularist speakers you and I heard at the club in April. In my wonder, I thought of a saying of Vinet’s: “_C’est pour la religion que le peuple a le plus de talent; c’est en religion qu’il montre le plus d’esprit._”
In a later letter he wrote:—-
‘I have not yet described to you what is perhaps the most characteristic, the most binding practice of the New Brotherhood. It is that which has raised most angry comment, cries of “profanity,” “wanton insult,” and whatnot. I came upon it yesterday in an interesting Way. I was working with Elsmere at the arrangement of the library, which is now becoming a most fascinating place, under the management of a librarian chosen from the neighborhood, when he asked me to go and take a message to a carpenter who has been giving us voluntary help in the evening, after his day’s work. He thought that as it was the dinner hour, and the man worked in the dock close by, I might find him at home. I went off to the model lodging-house where I was told to look for him, mounted the common stairs, and knocked at his door. Nobody seemed to hear me, and as the door was ajar I pushed it open.
‘Inside was a curious sight. The table was spread with the mid-day meal, a few bloaters, some potatoes, and bread. Round the table stood four children, the eldest about fourteen, and the youngest six or seven. At one end of it stood the carpenter himself in his working apron, a brawny Saxon, bowed a little by his trade. Before him was a plate of bread, and his horny hands were resting on it. The street was noisy; they had not heard my knock; and as I pushed open the door there was an old coat hanging over the corner of it which concealed me.
‘Something in the attitudes of all concerned reminded me, kept me where I was, silent.
‘The father lifted his right hand.
‘The Master said, “This do in remembrance of Me!”
‘The children stooped for a moment in silence, then the youngest said slowly, in a little softened cockney voice that touched me extraordinarily,–
‘”_Jesus, we remember Thee always!_”
‘It was the appointed response. As she spoke I recollected the child perfectly at Elsmere’s class. I also remembered that she had no mother; that her mother had died of cancer in June, visited and comforted to the end by Elsmere and his wife.
‘Well, the great question of course remains–is there a sufficient strength of _feeling_ and _conviction_ behind these things? If so, after all, everything was new once, and Christianity was but modified Judaism.’
December 22.
‘I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. In Elgood Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. But it will be a new sort of Christmas. We shall hear very little, it seems, of angels and shepherds, and a great deal of the humble childhood of a little Jewish boy whose genius grown to maturity transformed the Western world. To see Elsmere, with his boys and girls about him, trying to make them feel themselves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make them understand something of the lessons that child must have learnt, the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that must have come to him, is a spectacle of which I will not miss more than I can help. Don’t imagine, however, that I am converted exactly!–but only that I am more interested and stimulated than I have been for years. And don’t expect me for Christmas. I shall stay here.’
New Year’s Day.
‘I am writing from the library of the New Brotherhood. The amount of activity, social, educational, religious, of which this great building promises to be the centre is already astonishing. Everything, of course, including the constitution of the infant society, is as yet purely tentative and experimental. But for a scheme so young, things are falling into working order with wonderful rapidity. Each department is worked by committees under the central council. Elsmere, of course, is _ex-officio_ chairman of a large proportion; Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a few other fellows, “run” the rest for the present. But each committee contains workingmen; and it is the object of everybody concerned to make the workman element more and more real and efficient. What with the “tax”, on the members which was fixed by a general meeting, and the contributions from outside, the society already commands a fair income. But Elsmere is anxious not to attempt too much at once, and will go slowly and train his workers.
‘Music, it seems, is going to be a great feature in the future. I have my own projects as to this part of the business, which, however, I forbid you to guess at.
‘By the rules of the Brotherhood, every member is bound to some work in connection with it during the year, but little or much, as he or she is able. And every meeting, every undertaking of whatever kind, opens with the special “word” or formula of the society, “This do in remembrance of me.”‘
January 6.
‘Besides the Sunday lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on Saturday evenings at “The History of the Moral Life in Man.” It is a remarkable course, and very largely attended by people of all sorts. He tries to make it an exposition of the principles of the new movement, of ‘”that continuous and leading only revelation of God in life and nature,”‘ which is in reality the basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters that are pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They show an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind which are surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not surprised–says he always expected it–and that there are thousands who only want a rallying-point.
‘His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the passion and energy of the nature–never has our generation seen anything to equal it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it all seriously, and don’t know what to make of him or myself.
‘_She_, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with him day after day, and works away. She no more believes in his ideas, I think, than she ever did; but all her antagonism is gone. In the midst of the stir about him her face often haunts me. It has changed lately; she is no longer a young woman, but so refined, so spiritual!
‘But he is ailing and fragile. _There_ is the one cloud on a scene that fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.
CHAPTER L.
One cold Sunday afternoon, in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a Dr. Edmondson, an able young physician, just set up for himself as a consultant, who had only lately attached himself to Elsmere, and was now helping him with eagerness to organize a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman exchanged a few words on Elsmere’s lecture, and then the doctor said abruptly,–
‘I don’t like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been hoarse like that?’
‘More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself, and talks of clergyman’s throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once in the country.’
‘Clergyman’s throat?’ Edmondson shook his bead dubiously. ‘It may be. I wish he would let me overhaul him.’
‘I wish he would!’ said Flaxman devoutly. ‘I will see what I can do. I will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.’
Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. And as they entered the study, she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite passion gleaming in her face.
‘You did not explain Him! You never will!’
He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his faced changed, blanched before her–he seemed to gasp for breath–she was only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine’s look would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste calamity and grief to the very dregs.
‘Robert, to-morrow you will see a doctor?’ she implored him when at last he was safely in bed–white, but smiling.
He nodded.
‘Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,’ he said, in a voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.
Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by ill luck, with the morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the Squire, but about the Squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to Murewell. The Squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing Elsmere any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was from old Meyrick. ‘The Squire has had another bad attack, and is _much_ weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you. If you can, come to-morrow.’
‘_His mind is clear again!_’ Horrified by the words and by the images they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently appeared down stairs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for the morning, was going through some household business.
‘I _must_ go, I _must_ go!’ he said as he handed her the letter. Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!’
Catherine looked at him in despair.
‘Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr. Edmondson.’
‘Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good.’ She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions, but it was useless–His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt it a calling impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and Robert drove off to Waterloo.
Out of the form of London it was a mild, sunny winter’s day. Robert breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year and a half since he had traveled it. He forgot his weakness, the exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day and was going back to Catherine!
At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.
‘Take me to the corner of the Murewell Lane, Tom. Then you may drive on my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.’
The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a hallucination–his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so easy and swift to-day?
By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and Murewell, Robert’s spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighborhood, and he jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a boy.
‘Go on, Tom; see if I’m not there as soon as you.’
‘Looks most uncommon bad,’ the man muttered to himself as his horse shambled off. ‘Seems as spry as a lark all the same.’
Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered with timid, half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth’s bareness everywhere–curling mists–blue, points of distant hill–a gray luminous depth of sky.
The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old anguish he stood and blessed God!–not for any personal happiness, but simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of common living a revelation.
Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up the lane leading to the Vicarage. One look! he might not be able to leave the Squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal! Besides, how could the boys have free access except of that ground-floor room? And all that pretty stretch of grass under the acacia had been cut up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to Catherine.
He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In that upper room he had lain through that agonized night of crisis! the dawn-twittering of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not lie in the wet any longer–thank God! Was there time just to run down to Irwin’s cottage, to have a look at the Institute?
He had been standing on the further side of the road from the rectory that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor’s ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath. The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a drowning thing. When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered, drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black–the sun seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds of children’s voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart–or was it all, sight and sound alike, mirage and delirium?
With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man of seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank down, still gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars near the gate. After a while the attack passed off and he found himself able to walk on. But the joy, the leaping pulse of half an hour ago were gone from his veins. Was that the river–the house? He looked at them with dull eyes. All the light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the familiar things.
However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will and nature had reasserted themselves, and he knew where he was and what he had to do.
Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.
‘Why, sir! _Mr._ Elsmere!’
The butler’s voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding at once into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of the old Rector.
Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the dining-room and give him some wine before announcing him. Vincent ministered to him with a long face, pressing all the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon him in turn. The Squire was much better, he declared, had been carried down to the library.
‘But, lor, sir, there ain’t much to be said for your looks neither–seems as if London didn’t suit you, sir.’
Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his throat, and had overtired himself by walking over the common. Then, recognizing from a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror hanging by, that something of his natural color had returned to him, he rose and bade Vincent announce him.
‘And Mrs. Darcy?’ he asked, as they stopped out into the hall again.
‘Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she’s very well,’ said the man, but, as it seemed to Robert with something of an embarrassed air.
He followed Vincent down the long passage–haunted by old memories, by the old sickening sense of mental anguish–to the curtained door. Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir of feet, and a voice, but at first he saw nothing. The room was very much darkened. Then Meyrick emerged into distinctness.
‘Squire, here is Mr. Elsmere! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I’m sure we’re very much obliged to you for meeting the Squire’s wishes so promptly. You’ll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but mendin–oh yes, mending, sir–no doubt of it.’
Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand was advanced to him out of the gloom.
‘That’ll do, Meyrick. You won’t be wanted till the evening.’
The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden sense of relief. After all, the Squire was still capable of trampling on Meyrick.
In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and the two men were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to the dim light. Out of it, the Squire’s face gleamed almost as whitely as the tortured marble of the Medusa just above their heads.
‘It’s some inflammation in the eyes,’ the Squire explained briefly, ‘that’s made Meyrick set up all this d—-d business of blinds and shutters. I don’t mean to stand it much longer. The eyes are better, and I prefer to see my way out of the world, if possible.’
‘But you are recovering?’ Robert said, laying his hand affectionately on the old man’s knee.
‘I have added to my knowledge,’ said the Squire dryly, ‘Like Heine, I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth. And I am not in bed, which I was last week. For Heaven’s sake don’t ask questions. If there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the subject of the human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you so hoarse for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of “the people,” who wouldn’t even subscribe to bury you? Have you been working up the Apocrypha as I recommended you last time we met?’
Robert smiled.
The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the sarcastic gleam of the eyes.
‘For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things with neither of which you had much sympathy in old days–holiday-making and “slumming.”‘
‘Oh’ I remember,’ interrupted the Squire hastily. ‘I was low last week, and read the Church papers by way of a counter-irritant. You have been starting a new religion, I see. A new religion! _Humph!_’
‘You are hardly the man to deny,’ he said, undisturbed, ‘that the old ones _laissent a desirer_.’
‘Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you should go and set up a brand-new one–an ugly anachronism besides?’ retorted the Squire. ‘However, you and I have no common ground–never had. I say _know_, you say _feel_. Where is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?’
‘I have not seen her for six months,’ Robert replied, with equal abruptness.
The Squire laughed a little under his breath.
‘What did you think of her?’
‘Very much what you told me to think–intellectually,’ replied Robert, facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.
‘Well, I certainly never told you to think anything–_morally_,’ said the Squire. ‘The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see there?’
The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere went through with it, the Squire watching him for a while with an expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.
But while Robert was answering a question, he was aware of a subtle change in the Squire’s attitude-a relaxation of his own sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness. The Squire’s head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and defenselessness.
Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so much to him.
Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the Donatello figures and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken–they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so–a river lost in the sands!
Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping Squire.
‘A bad sign! a bad sign!’ he said, and shook his head mournfully.
After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical _malaise_ than had ever yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up to her with a warm greeting.
‘Are you going in to the Squire? Let us go together.’
She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into the room behind her, a curious film, so it seemed to him, darkening her small gray eyes.
‘The Squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen my white mice? Oh, they are such darlings! Only, one of them is ill, and they won’t let me have the doctor.’
Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She stood in the middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger to a large cage of white mice which stood in the window. The room seemed full besides of other creatures. Robert stood rooted, looking at the tiny withered figure in the black dress, its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in lace with a perplexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver. Suddenly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent, strong-looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head toward Mrs. Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing the mice with the weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, and went out sick at heart. The careful exquisite beauty of the great hall struck him as something mocking and anti-human.
No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. In the evening the Squire talked much at intervals, but in another key. He insisted on a certain amount of light, and, leaning on Robert’s arm, went feebly round the bookshelves. He took out one of the volumes of the Fathers that Newman had given him.
‘When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rubbish,’ he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, ‘and of the other hours I maundered away in services and self-examination! Thank Heaven, however, the germ of revolt and sanity was always there. And when once I got to it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick.’
Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the shrunken Squire.
‘Oh, not one _you_ have any chance of learning, my good friend,’ said the other aggressively. ‘And after all it’s simple. _Go to your grave with your eyes open_–that’s all. But men don’t learn it, somehow. Newman was incapable–so are you. All the religions are nothing but so many vulgar anaesthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse.’
‘Do yon want me to contradict you?’ said Robert, smiling; ‘I am quite ready.’
The Squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his chair again, he said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau in the window, ‘The book is all there–both parts, first and second. Publish it if you please. If not, throw it into the fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has done its work; it has helped me through half a century of living.’
‘It shall be to me a sacred trust,’ said Elsmere with emotion. ‘Of course, if you don’t publish it, I shall publish it.’
‘As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more rational to tell me about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood of yours.’
Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The words would not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the middle that strange creeping sleep overtook the Squire again.
Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been coming in and out throughout the evening, eyeing Elsmere, now that there was more light on the scene, with almost as much anxiety and misgiving as the Squire, was summoned. The Squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a male attendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a finger to the performance. They took him up the library stairs, through the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which had been his father’s, and so into his own. By the time they set him down he was quite aware and conscious again.
‘It can’t be said that I follow my own precepts,’ he said to Robert grimly as they put him down. ‘Not much of the open eye about this. I shall sleep myself into the unknown as sweetly as any Saint in the calendar.’
Robert was going when the Squire called him back.
‘You’ll stay to-morrow, Elsmere?’
‘Of course, if you wish it.’
The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently.
‘Why did you ever go?’
‘As I told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else for an honest man to do.’
The Squire turned round with a frown.
‘What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get me out of this.’
By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches of the park; the trees shone silvery in the cold light, their black shadows cast along the grass. Robert found himself quartered in the Stuart room, where James II had slept, and where the tartan hangings of the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by way of distracting his thoughts a little from the Squire, and that other tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took from his coat-pocket a French _Anthologie_ which had been Catherine’s birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.
Then he slept profoundly–the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange noises in his ears.
A cry ‘Help!’ resounded through the wide empty galleries.
He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the Squire’s room.
The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the Squire, ran up.
‘My God, sir!’ he said, deadly white, ‘another attack!’
The Squire’s room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.
They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger. Those old bloodshot eyes–those wrinkled hands on the throat of the doctor–horrible!
They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the Squire’s room. Then Robert and Benson got the Squire back by main force. The whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron. Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them they got it swallowed.
But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have had time to work, the Squire shrank together like a puppet of which the threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors’ hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.
Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, emphasizing, as though in mockery, the long straight back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage. But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.
‘The last–the last!’ he said, choked, the tears falling down his lined cheeks on to the Squire’s hand. ‘He can never rally from this. And I was fool enough to think yesterday I had pulled him through!’
Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief; then he looked up at Robert.
‘He wouldn’t have Benson to-night. I slept in the next room with the door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him moving. I was up in an instant, and found him standing by that door, peering through, bare-footed, a wind like ice coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. “_My father_,” he said–“_my father_–he went that way–what do _you_ want here? Keep back!” I threw myself on him; he had something sharp which scratched me on the temple; I got that away from him, but it was his hands’–and the old man shuddered. ‘I thought they would have done for me before anyone could hear, and that then he would kill himself as his father did.’
Again be hung over the figure on the bed–his own withered hand stroking that of the Squire with a yearning affection.
‘When was the last attack?’ asked Robert sadly.
‘A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere, he suffered. And he’s been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no one to please him with his food–to put his cushions right–to coax him up a bit, and that,–and his poor sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course he would stand to it, he liked to be alone. But I’ll never believe men are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a wife or a child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir, when you went away. Not that he’d say a word, but he moped. His books didn’t seem to please him, nor anything else. I’ve just broke my heart over him this last year.’
There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round with the shapes of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken effect. The Squire’s countenance was no longer convulsed. The great brow was calm; a more than common dignity and peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert bent over him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away; the dying scholar and thinker lay before him.
‘Will he rally?’ he asked, under his breath.
Meyrick shook his head.
‘I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. The heart is failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, Mr. Elsmere, you go–go and sleep. Benson and I’ll watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir. I’m used to a rough-and-tumble life. But you go. If there’s a change we’ll wake you.’
Elsmere bent down and kissed the Squire’s forehead tenderly, as a son might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.
It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew back the curtains, made up the fire, and wrapping himself in a fur coat which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.
As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in. The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness, suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth century tapestry which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the woodpath? Surely that was Catherine’s figure trailing–and that dome–strange! Was he still walking in Grey’s funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking sadly down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under life from the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight of which men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder, and he looks shuddering into it.
Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink: on the other side was Grey and the Squire. But he felt no pang of separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harbored image and expectation alike with perfect calm.
Then the fever-spell broke,–the brain cleared,–and he was terribly himself again. Whence came it–this fresh, inexorable consciousness? He tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought, to God’s love and Catherine’s. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one hand, the fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!
‘_My God! my God! no time, no future!_’
In his misery, he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed with ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an instant, beyond the bridge, in the unearthly blue?
And quietly,–heavily,–like an irrevocable sentence, there came, breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words that he had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside his hand–words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though by accident, the most traginc of all human cries–
‘_Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees_.’
He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but their own.
‘_Quittez,–quittez,–le long espoir et les vastes pensees!_’
CHAPTER LI.
There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast was no long time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in all else.
The day after Elsmere’s return from Murewell, where he left the Squire still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached Bedford Square a few hours after Robert’s arrival), Edmondson came up to see him and examine him. He discovered tubercular disease of the larynx, which begins with slight hoarseness and weariness, and develops into one of the most rapid forms of phthisis. In his opinion it had been originally set up by the effects of that chill at Petites Dalles acting upon a constitution never strong, and at that moment peculiarly susceptible to mischief. And of course the speaking and preaching of the last four months had done enormous harm.
It was with great outward composure that Elsmere received his _arret de mort_ at the hands of the young doctor, who announced the result of his examination with a hesitating lip and a voice which struggled in vain to preserve its professional calm. He knew too much of medicine himself to be deceived by Edmondson’s optimist remarks as to the possible effect of a warm climate like Algiers on his condition. He sat down, resting his head on his hands a moment; then wringing Edmondson’s hand, he went out feebly to find his Wife.
Catherine had been waiting in the dining-room, her whole soul one dry, tense misery. She stood looking out of the window, taking curious heed of a Jewish wedding that was going on in the Square, of the preposterous bouquets of the coachman and the gaping circle of errand-boys. How pinched the bride looked in the north wind!
When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come in–her young husband, to whom she had been married not yet four years–with that indescribable look in the eyes which seemed to divine and confirm all those terrors which had been shaking her during her agonized waiting, there followed a moment between them which words cannot render. When it ended–that half-articulate convulsion of love and anguish–she found herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on her breast, his hand clasping hers.
‘Do you wish me to go, Catherine?’ he asked her gently, ‘–to Algiers?’
Her eyes implored for her.
‘Then I will,’ he said, but with a long sigh. ‘It will only prolong it two months,’ he thought; ‘and does one not owe it to the people for whom one has tried to live, to make a brave end among them? Ah, no! no! those two months are hers!’
So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary preparations be made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could not wring hers by staying.
After his interview wit Robert, and his further interview with Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommendations and directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed to make the true state of the case more ghastly plain to the wife than ever, Edmondson went off to Flaxman.
Flaxman heard his news with horror.
‘A _bad_ case, you say–advanced?’
‘A bad case!’ Edmondson repeated gloomily. ‘He has been fighting against it too long under that absurd delusion of clergyman’s throat. If only men would not insist upon being their own doctors! And, of course, that going down to Murewell the other day was madness. I shall go with him to Algiers, and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, that career, cut short! This is a queer sort of world!’
When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the afternoon, he went like a man going himself to execution. In the hall he met Catherine.
‘You have seen Dr. Edmondson?’ she asked, pale and still, except for a little nervous quivering of the lip.
He stooped and kissed her hand.
‘Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come after if you will have me. The climate may do wonders.’
She looked at him with the most heart-rending of smiles.
‘Will you go in to Robert? He is in the study.’
He went, in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up on the sofa, apparently reading.
‘Don’t–don’t old fellow,’ he said affectionately, as Flaxman almost broke down. ‘It comes to all of us sooner or later. Whenever it comes we think it too soon. I believe I have been sure of it for some time. We are such strange creatures! It has been so present to me lately that life was too good to last. You remember the sort of feeling one used to have as a child about some treat in the distance–that it was too much joy–that something was sure to come between you and it? Well, in a sense, I have had my joy the first fruits of it at least.’
But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish mouth contract, and knew that under all these brave words there was a heart which hungered.
‘How strange!’ Robert went on reflectively; ‘yesterday I was travelling, walking like other men, a member of society. To-day I am an invalid; in the true sense, a man no longer. The world has done with me; a barrier. I shall never recross has sprung up between me and it.–Flaxman, to-night is the story-telling. Will you read to them? I have the book here prepared–some scenes from David Copperfield. And you will fell them?’
A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he forget the scene. Some ominous rumor had spread, and the New Brotherhood was besieged. Impossible to give the reading. A hall full of strained up-turned faces listened to Flaxman’s announcement, and to Elsmere’s messages of cheer and exhortation, and then a wild wave of grief spread through the place. The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each other’s eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, all feeling themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When Elsmere heard the news of it, he turned on his face, and asked even Catherine to leave him for a while.
The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood had just become the subject of an animated discussion in the press, and London was touched by the news of its young founder’s breakdown. Catherine found herself besieged by offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill above Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resident on the spot was to take all trouble off their hands; they were to find servants ready for them, and every comfort.
Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness with a self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to Flaxman that her heart was broken–that half of her, in feeling, was already on the other side of this horror which stared them all in the face. Was it his perception of it which stirred Robert after a while to a greater hopefulness of speech, a constant bright dwelling on the flowery sunshine for which they were about to exchange the fog and cold of London? The momentary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than his first quiet resignation.
He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters! in which the feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery under-current through all the sad brotherly record of the invalid’s doings and prospects. There was deep trouble in Long Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and hysterical, and wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote in distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing her own inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only be an extra burden on the Elsmeres if the journey were achieved. Rose wrote asking to be allowed to go with them to Algiers; and after a little consultation it was so arranged, Mrs. Leyburn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself writing, to stay where she was.
The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert sent for Murray Edwardes. They were closeted together for nearly an hour. Edwardes came out with the look of one who has been lifted into ‘heavenly places.’
‘I thank God,’ he said to Catherine, with deep emotion, ‘that I ever knew him. I pray that I may be found worthy to carry out my pledges to him.’
When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gazing into the fire with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up to her with a smile.
‘Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to the work. If necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it on. But we hope it will be possible to work them together. What a brick he is! What a blessed chance it was that took me to that breakfast party at Flaxman’s!’
The rest of the time before departure he spent almost entirely in consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It was terrible how rapidly worse he seemed to grow directly the situation had declared itself, and the determination _not_ to be ill had been perforce overthrown. But his struggle against breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms of his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day of all, by his own persistent wish, a certain number of members of the Brotherhood came to say good-by to him. They came in one by one, Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, from the height of his sixty years of tough weather-beaten manhood, looked down on Robert with a fatherly concern.
‘Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it’s a fine place yur gawin’ tu, they say. Ye’ll do weel there, sir–ye’ll do weel. And as for the wark, sir, we’ll keep it oop-we’ll not lot the Deil mak’ hay o’ it, if we knaws it–the auld leer!’ he added with a phraseology which did more honor to the Calvinism of his blood than the philosophy of his training.
Lestrange came in, with a pale sharp face, and said little in his ten minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed curiosity and excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his feverish eyes toward _le grand secret_. ‘You, who preached to us that consciousness, and God, and the soul are the only realities–are you so sure of it now you are dying, as you were in health? Are your courage, your certainty, what they were?’ These were the sort of questions that seemed to underlie the man’s spoken words.
There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best to put aside his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his help in the past, and implored him to stand by the young society and Mr. Edwardes.
‘I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one man matter? One soldier falls, another presses forward.’
The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush passing over him.
‘We can’t stand without you!’ he said abruptly, then, seeing Robert’s look of distress, he seemed to cast about for something reassuring to say, but could find nothing. Robert at last held out his hand with a smile, and he went. He left Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible depression. In reality there was no man who worked harder at the New Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. He worked under perpetual protest from the _frondeur_ within him, but something stung him on–on–till a habit had been formed which promises to be the joy and salvation of his later life. Was it the haunting memory of that thin figure–the hand clinging to the chair–the white appealing look?
Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the consequences. She herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, comforting the sobbing creatures afterward with a calmness born of her own despair. Robson, in the last stage himself, sent him a grimly characteristic message. ‘I shall solve the riddle, sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days. For the first time in my life, I shall know what you are still guessing at. May the blessing of one who never blessed thing or creature before he saw you go with you!’
After it all Robert sank on the sofa with a groan.
‘No more!’ he said hoarsely-‘no more! Now for air-the sea! To-mmorow, wife, to-morrow! _Cras ingens iterabimus sequor_. Ah me! I leave _my_ new Salamis behind!’
But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham and Newcome.
‘I will spare Langham the sight of me,’ he said, smiling sadly. ‘And I will spare myself the sight of Newcome–I could not bear it, I think! But I must say good-by–for I love them both.’
Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it. ‘Gone, sir, two hours ago,’ said the house-maid, and the priest turned away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the passionate heart bore the burden of that ‘too late,’ believing that even at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.
Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In any other circumstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four hours he could press no claim of his own.
When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood watching, the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky. Catherine caught her look and attitude, and could have cried aloud in her own gnawing pain.
Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival. Their journey had gone well; even the odious passage from Marseilles had been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was luxurious, the weather good.
‘I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul’s cottage,’ wrote Edmondson, ‘Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June–when an English June behaves itself. Elsmere’s room overlooks the Bay, the great plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds. His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers, raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he were unlike the common sons of men–as though to _him_ it might be possible to subdue even this fell disease.’
Elsmere himself wrote–
‘”I had not heard the half”-Flaxman! An enchanted land–air, sun, warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis–everything that feeds the outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth of sunlit air between us and the curve of the Bay, is for the moment heaven! One’s soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous blue of the morning. I am better–I breathe again.’
‘Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, and has been adopted by sixty nuns who inhabit the convent over the way, and sell us the most delicious butter and cream. Imagine, if she were a trifle older, her mother would hardly view the proceedings of those dear berosaried women with so much equanimity.’
‘As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and receives more than an editor of the “Times.” I have the strongest views, as you know, as to the vanity of letter-writing. There was a time when you shared them, but there are circumstances and conjunctures, alas! in which no man can be sure of his friend or his friend’s principles. Kind friend, good fellow, go often to Elgood Street. Tell me everything about everybody. It is possible, after all, that I may live to come back to them.’
But a week later, alas! the letters fell into a very different strain. The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp and rainy, the natives of course declaring that such gloom and storm in January had never been known before. Edmondson wrote in discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch of cold, had been confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter was full of medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that in spite of the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the disease was attacking constantly fresh tissue. ‘He is very depressed too,’ said Edmondson; ‘I have never seen him so yet. He sits and looks at us in the evening sometimes with eyes that wring one’s heart. It is as though, after having for a moment allowed himself to hope, he found it a doubly hard task to submit.’
Ah, that depression! It was the last eclipse through which a radiant soul was called to pass; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigor, showed itself now in all its stern nakedness–sat down, as it were, eye to eye with Elsmere–immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to withdraw him so pitifully from their yearning grasp! In these dark days he would sit crouching over the wood-fire in the little _salon_, or lie drawn to the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as Edmondson said, ‘wrung the heart.’
‘But in reality, under the husband’s depression, and under the wife’s inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree. Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we know, ever since that passionate submission of the wife which had thrown her morally at her husband’s feet, there had lingered at the bottom of her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man of science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends before hand that he is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in herself or in him, that Catherine’s unconquerable faith had been patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own; or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light, the light of the Crucified, shine through.
Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert’s serenity Catherine’s poor last effort would have been much feebler, briefer, more hesitating. But when she saw him plunged for a short space in mortal discouragement in a sombreness that as the days went on had its points and crests of feverish irritation, her anguished pity came to the help of her creed. Robert felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being urging, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and ways, in her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious books and prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her maintaining at night beside him, he felt a persistent attack which nearly–in his weakness–overthrew him.
For ‘reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves.’ Some of the greatest and most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before the last farewell. And the simpler Christian faith has still to create around it those venerable associations and habits which buttress individual feebleness and diminish the individual effort.
One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert stretched out his hand for his wife and found her kneeling beside him. The dim mingled light showed him her face vaguely–her clasped hands, her eyes. He looked at her in silence, she at him–there seemed to be a strange sheen as of battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him.
‘Catherine,’ he said to her in a feeble intense whisper, ‘would you leave me without comfort, without help, at the end?’
‘Oh, my beloved!’ she cited, under her breath, throwing her arms round him, ‘if you would but stretch out your hand to the true comfort–the true help–the Lamb of God sacrificed for us!’
He stroked her hair tenderly.
‘My weariness might yield–my true best self never. I know whom I have believed. Oh, my darling, be content. Your misery, your prayers hold me back from God–from that truth and that trust which can alone be honestly mine. Submit, my wife! Leave me in God’s hands.’
She raised her head. His eyes were bright with fever, his lips trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself again, with a quiet burst of tears, and all indescribable self abasement. They had had their last struggle, and once more he had conquered! Afterward the cloud lifted from him. Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her often as though he lay already on the breast of God; even her, wifely love grew timid and awestruck.
Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was like a scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more than it’s father has allowed it to know. At the same time, it was plain to those about him that the only realities to him in a world of shadows were God–love–the soul.
One day he suddenly caught Catherine’s hands, drew her face to him, and studied it with his, glowing and hollow eyes, as though he would draw it into his soul.
‘He made it,’ he said hoarsely, as he let her go–‘this love–this yearning. And in life He only makes us yearn that He may satisfy. He cannot lead us to the end and disappoint the craving He himself set in us. No, no–could you–Could I–do it? And He, the source of love, of justice—-‘
Flaxman arrived a few days afterward. Edmondson had started for London the night before, leaving Elsmere better again, able to drive and even walk a little, and well looked after by a local doctor of ability. As Flaxman, tramping up behind his carriage climbed the long hill to El Biar, he saw the whole marvellous place in a white light of beauty–the bay, the city, the mountains, olive-yard and orange-grove, drawn in pale tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a steep and narrow lane, he noticed a slight figure parasol standing–a parasol against the sun.
‘We thought You would like to be shown the short cut up the hill,’ said Rose’s voice–strangely demure and shy. ‘The man can drive round.’
A grip of the hand, a word to the driver, and they were alone in the high-walled lane which was really the old road up the hill before the French brought zigzags and civilization. She gave him news of Robert–better than he had expected. Under the influence of one of the natural reactions that wait on illness, the girl’s tone was cheerful, and Flaxman’s spirits rose. They talked of the splendor of the day, the discomforts of the steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing–of anything and everything but the hidden something which was responsible for the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occasional swift veiling of her own.
Then, at, an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool and brown into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke joyously through the gray cloud of olive-wood, where not a sight or sound was to be heard of all the busy life which hides and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his hands seizing hers.
‘How long?’ he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling back from his strong, well-made frame; ‘from August to February–how long?’
No more! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the moment death stood aside and love asserted itself. But this is no place to chronicle what it said.
And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, before the same misgiving, the same, shrinking, seized on the lovers themselves. They sped up the hill, they crept into the house far apart. It was agreed that neither of them should say word.
But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that sometimes goes with such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the position of things before he and Flaxman had been half an hour together. He took a boyish pleasure in making his friend confess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at once sent for Catherine and told her.
Catherine, coming out afterward, met Flaxman in the little tiled hall. How she had aged and blanched! She stood a moment opposite to him, in her plain long dress with its white collar and cuffs, her face working a little.
‘We are so glad!’ she said, but almost with a sob-‘God bless you!’
And, wringing his hand, she passed away from him, hiding her eyes, but without a sound. When they met again she was quite self-contained and bright, talking much both with him and Rose about the future.
And one little word of Rose’s must be recorded here, for those who have followed her through these four years. It was at night, when Robert, with smiles, had driven them out of doors to look at the moon over the bay, from the terrace just beyond the windows. They had been sitting on the balustrade talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had lost her mocking ways; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman felt it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much.
When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little white suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder.
‘You won’t–you won’t ever be angry with me for making you wait like that? It was impertinent–it was like a child playing tricks!’
Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He was terribly emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals in the day; and it was clear that his nights were often one long struggle for breath. But his spirits were extraordinarily even, and his days occupied to a point Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep, down stairs at eleven, read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street) write his answers to them–those difficult scrawls are among the treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to itself some of the best life in England–then often fall asleep with fatigue. After food there would come a short drive, or, if the day was very warm, an hour or two of sitting outside, generally his best time for talking. He had a wheeled chair in which Flaxman would take him across to the convent garden–a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy–leaf and blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; underneath a revel of every imaginable flower–narcissus and anemones, geraniums and clematis; and all about, hedges of monthly roses, dark red and pale alternately, making a roseleaf carpet under their feet. Through the tree-trunks shone the white sun-warmed convent and far beyond were glimpses of downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea.
Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank in beauty and delight; talking, too, whenever it was possible to him, of all things in heaven and earth. Then when he came home, he would have out his books and fall to some old critical problem–his worn and scored Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then to call Flaxman’s attention to some fresh light on an obscure point–only to relinquish the effort again and again with an unfailing patience.
But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not keep his attention fixed to these things very long. Then it would be the turn of his favorite poets–Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most frequently. Flaxman would read the AEneid aloud to him, Robert following the passages he loved best in whisper, his hand resting the while in Catherine’s. And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie watching her while she played.
‘I have had a letter,’ he said to Flaxman one afternoon, ‘from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the “absurd and wasteful isolation” of the New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement in East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp letter; I could not help it. It was borne in on me to tell him that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our time what the law was to the early Christians. We _must_ make up our minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be cleared; then may come the rebuilding. Religion itself, the peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or playing the part assigned us.’
On another occasion, in the convent garden, he broke out with,–
‘I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which men become the slaves of some metaphysical word–_personality_, or _intelligence_, or what not! What meaning can they have as applied to God? Herbert Spencer is quite right. We no sooner attempt to define what we mean by a Personal God than we lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic. But why attempt it at all? I like that French saying, “_Quand on me demande ce que c’est que Dieu, je l’ignore; quand on ne me le demande pas, je le sais tres-bien!_” No, we cannot, realize Him in words–we can only live in Him, and die to Him!’
On another occasion, he said, speaking to Catherine of the Squire and of Meyrick’s account of his last year of life,–
‘How selfish one is, _always_–when one least thinks it! How could I have forgotten him so completely as I did during all that New Brotherhood time? Where, what is he now? Ah! if somewhere, somehow, one could—-‘
He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of his look finished it for him.
But the days passed on, and the voice grew rarer, the strength feebler. By the beginning of March all coming downstairs was over. He was entirely confined to his room, almost to his bed. Then there came a horrible week, when no narcotics took effect, when every night was a wrestle for life, which it seemed must be the last. They had a good nurse, but Flaxman and Catherine mostly shared the watching between them.
One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. Catherine was sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn world of sun which reminded her of the summer sunrises at Petites Dalles. She looked the shadow of herself. Spiritually, too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was no longer her own: she lived in him–in every look of those eyes–in every movement of that wasted frame.
As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unseeing gaze resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of hallucination took possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw the form of the Son of Man passing over the misty slope in front of her, that the dim majestic figure turned and beckoned. In her half-dream she fell on her knees. ‘Master!’ she cried in agony, ‘I cannot leave him! Call me not! My life is here. I have no heart–it beats in his.’
And the figure passed on, the beckoning hand dropping at its side. She followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed to her as though mind and body were alike incapable of moving–that she would not if she could. Then suddenly a sound from behind startled her. She turned, her trance shaken off in an instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed.
For a moment her lover, her husband, of the early day was before her–as she ran to him. But he did not see her.
An ecstasy of joy was on his face; the whole man bent forward listening.
‘_The child’s cry!–thank God! Oh! Meyrick–Catherine–thank God!_’
And she knew that he stood again on the stairs at Murewell in that September night which gave them their first born, and that he thanked God because her pain was over.
An instant’s strained looking, and, sinking back into her arms, he gave two or three gasping breaths, and died.
Five days later Flaxman and Rose brought Catherine home. It was supposed that she would return to her mother at Burwood. Instead, she settled down again in London, and not one of those whom Robert Elsmere had loved was forgotten by his widow. Every Sunday morning, with her child beside her, she worshipped in the old ways; every Sunday afternoon saw her black-veiled figure sitting motionless in a corner of the Elgood Street Hall. In the week she gave all her time and money to the various works of charity which he had started. But she held her peace. Many were grateful to her; some loved her; none understood her. She lived for one hope only; and the years passed all too slowly.
The New Brotherhood still exists, and grows. There are many who imagined that as it had been raised out of the earth by Elsmere’s genius, so it would sink with him. Not so! He would have fought the struggle to victory with surpassing force, with a brilliancy and rapidity none after him could rival. But the struggle was not his. His effort was but a fraction of the effort of the race. In that effort, and in the Divine force behind it, is our trust, as was his.
Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; And (they forgotten and unknown) Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown.
THE END