Robert Elsmere
enchantment, the surrounding scene, the faces, the lights, were blotted
out from him. He forgot his anger, he forgot everything but her and this
thing she was to do. He had her in his grasp--he was the man, the
master--and what enchanting readiness to yield in the swaying pliant
form! In the distance far away gleamed the statue of Hope, a child on
tiptoe, one outstretched arm just visible from where he stood.
There was a moment's silent expectation. Every eye was riveted on the
two figures--on the dark handsome man--on the blindfolded girl.
At last Rose began to move gently forward. It was a strange wavering
motion. The breath came quickly through her slightly parted lips; her
bright colour was ebbing. She was conscious of nothing but the grasp in
which her hand was held--otherwise her mind seemed a blank. Her state
during the next few seconds was not unlike the state of some one under
the partial influence of an anaesthetic; a benumbing grip was laid on all
her faculties; and she knew nothing of how she moved or where she was
going.
Suddenly the trance cleared away. It might have lasted half an hour or
five seconds, for all she knew. But she was standing beside a small
marble statue in the farthest drawing-room, and her lips had on them a
slight sense of chill, as though they had just been laid to something
cold.
She pulled off the handkerchief from her eyes. Above her was Langham's
face, a marvellous glow and animation in every line of it.
'Have I done it?' she asked in a tremulous whisper.
For the moment her self-control was gone. She was still bewildered.
He nodded, smiling.
'I am so glad,' she said, still in the same quick whisper, gazing at
him. There was the most adorable _abandon_ in her whole look and
attitude. He could but just restrain himself from taking her in his
arms, and for one bright flashing instant each saw nothing but the
other.
The heavy curtain which had partially hidden the door of the little
old-fashioned powder-closet as they approached it, and through which
they had swept without heeding, was drawn back with a rattle.
'She has done it! Hurrah!' cried Mr. Flaxman. 'What a rush that last
was, Miss Leyburn! You left us all behind.'
Rose turned to him, still dazed, drawing her hand across her eyes. A
rush? She had known nothing about it!
Mr. Flaxman turned and walked back, apparently to report to his aunt,
who, with Lady Helen, had been watching the experiment from the main
drawing-room. His face was a curious mixture of gravity and the keenest
excitement. The gravity was mostly sharp compunction. He had satisfied a
passionate curiosity, but in the doing of it he had outraged certain
instincts of breeding and refinement which were now revenging
themselves.
'Did she do it exactly?' said Lady Helen eagerly.
'Exactly,' he said, standing still.
Lady Charlotte looked at him significantly. But he would not see her
look.
'Lady Charlotte, where is my sister?' said Rose, coming up from the back
room, looking now nearly as white as her dress.
It appeared that Agnes had just been carried off by a lady who lived on
Campden Hill close to the Leyburns, and who had been obliged to go at
the beginning of the last experiment. Agnes, torn between her interest
in what was going on and her desire to get back to her mother, had at
last hurriedly accepted this Mrs. Sherwood's offer of a seat in her
carriage, imagining that her sister would want to stay a good deal
later, and relying on Lady Charlotte's promise that she should be safely
put into a hansom.
'I must go,' said Rose, putting her hand to her head. 'How tiring this
is! How long did it take, Mr. Flaxman?'
'Exactly three minutes,' he said, his gaze fixed upon her with an
expression that only Lady Helen noticed.
'So little! Good-night, Lady Charlotte!' and giving her hand first to
her hostess then to Mr. Flaxman's bewildered sister, she moved away into
the crowd.
'Hugh, of course you are going down with her?' exclaimed Lady Charlotte
under her breath. 'You must. I promised to see her safely off the
premises.'
He stood immovable. Lady Helen with a reproachful look made a step
forward, but he caught her arm.
'Don't spoil sport,' he said, in a tone which, amid the hum of
discussion caused by the experiment, was heard only by his aunt and
sister.
They looked at him--the one amazed, the other grimly observant--and
caught a slight significant motion of the head towards Langham's distant
figure.
Langham came up and made his farewells. As he turned his back, Lady
Helen's large astonished eyes followed him to the door.
'Oh, Hugh!' was all she could say as they came back to her brother.
'Never mind, Nellie,' he whispered, touched by the bewildered sympathy
of her look; 'I will tell you all about it to-morrow. I have not been
behaving well, and am not particularly pleased with myself. But for her
it is all right. Poor, pretty little thing!'
And he walked away into the thick of the conversation.
Downstairs the hall was already full of people waiting for their
carriages. Langham, hurrying down, saw Rose coming out of the
cloak-room, muffled up in brown furs, a pale child-like fatigue in her
looks which set his heart beating faster than ever.
'Miss Leyburn, how are you going home?'
'Will you ask for a hansom, please?'
'Take my arm,' he said, and she clung to him through the crush till they
reached the door.
Nothing but private carriages were in sight. The street seemed blocked,
a noisy tumult of horses and footmen and shouting men with lanterns.
Which of them suggested, 'Shall we walk a few steps?' At any rate, here
they were, out in the wind and the darkness, every step carrying them
farther away from that moving patch of noise and light behind.
'We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,' he said. 'Are you warm?'
'Perfectly.'
A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the colour was coming back.
She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well
shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.
Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was
being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the
glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they
passed within the power of the lamps, each saw with noonday distinctness
every line and feature in the other's face. They swept on--the night,
with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world
about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind
them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen's voices;
before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight.
London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this
wandering of theirs.
A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could
close it again, an arm was flung around her. She could not speak or
move, she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry
wind, and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.
'Oh, stay there!' a voice said close to her ear. 'Rest there--pale tired
child--pale tired little child!'
That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing
and protecting her from the cold--not kissing her--till at length she
looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.
'Are you sure at last?' she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the
far depths of her own thought to his.
'Sure!' he said, his expression changing. 'What can I be sure of? I am
sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor,
insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be
miserably throwing yourself away!'
She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about
him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm,
holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.
'Do you know,' he repeated--a tone of intense melancholy replacing the
tone of passion,--'how little I have to give you?'
'I know,' she answered, her face turned shyly away from him, her words
coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. 'I
know that--that--you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that----'
'Oh, hush,' he said, and his voice was full of pain. 'You know so
little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself,
till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or
be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain
selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell,
though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from
you. There is something paralysing in me, which is always forbidding me
to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical
disability--the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort.
Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony?
Oh, impossible!' he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him.
'You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright
and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It
is a crime--an infamy--that I should be speaking to you like this!'
Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling
and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.
'No, no,' she said wistfully; 'not if you love me.'
He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which
the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by
the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of
circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very passion
beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the
self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her
love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.
'You will not say you love me!' she cried, with hurrying breath. 'But I
know--I know--you do.'
Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from
him--'At least, if you don't, I am very--very--unhappy.'
The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself
saved, like Faust,--saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment's
impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to
hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest
shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.
CHAPTER XXXVI
Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. She would not
let him take her any farther.
'I will say nothing,' she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing
hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, 'till I see you again.
To-morrow?'
'To-morrow morning,' he said, waving his hand to her, and in another
instant he was facing the north wind alone.
He walked on fast towards Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached
his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where
the fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his
large reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay
littered on the floor.
He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung
shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to
him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that
walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long
passed--incredible almost.
And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a
hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft
confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent,
insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful
man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his