Robert Elsmere
arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love.
Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but
fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal
note also that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.
So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which
life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt
the torturing thrill of passion--he has evoked such an answer as all
men might envy him,--and fresh from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty, the
strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her
response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of
gratitude and tenderness; the next--is nothing what it promises to
be?--and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost
some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where
its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?
The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over
the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate
the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent
upper room. Nothing caught Langham's ear. He was absorbed in the
dialogue which was to decide his life.
Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of
himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.
'But I love her!--I love her! A little courage--a little effort--and I
too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere
contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me
back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not
forced her love--it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it,
if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope
thrown to him?'
To which the pale spectre self said scornfully--
'_Courage_ and _effort_ may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary.
They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two
others--_habit_ and _character_. Slave as you are of habit, of the
character you have woven for yourself out of years of deliberate
living--what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can
recreate! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden,
but for God's sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you
with theirs!'
'But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so
warm a heart! Poor child--poor child! I have played on her pity. I have
won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face--oh
monstrous--oh inhuman!' and the cold drops stood on his forehead.
But the other self was inexorable. 'You have acted as you were bound to
act--as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true
human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the
critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What
in God's name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such
ambitions? You are poor--you must go back to Oxford--you must take up
the work your soul loathes--grow more soured, more embittered--maintain
a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted,
and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even
that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from
the world! Think of the little house--the children--the money
difficulties--she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,--you
incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull
rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck--submit--refuse that
long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time.
_Kismet--Kismet!_'
And spread out before Langham's shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal
Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in
the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures,
two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with cold
and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.
The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, a cold and
bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and
terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of
manhood, had been alike powerless to save.
The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table
and wrote.
Then for hours afterwards he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of
fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection.
It was a base thing which he had done--it was also a strange thing
psychologically; and at intervals he tried to understand it, to track it
to its causes.
At nine o'clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a
commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him
with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.
On his way back he passed a gunsmith's, and stood looking fascinated at
the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes
gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the
bounds of tragedy--become farcical even.
'I should only stand a month--arguing--with my finger on the trigger.'
In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of
him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He
gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging
books and boxes about as though he were packing.
A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27,
looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The
ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through the
fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was
clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose's mood answered to
that of Nature.
Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs.
Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two, was
in a chair by the fire reading some letters forwarded to her from
Bedford Square.
He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an
expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview
with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself
happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of
her behaviour to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how
unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh
blow! 'But afterwards, when she has got over it,--when she knows that it
makes me happy,--that nothing else would make me happy,--then she will
be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again,
from the beginning. I won't be angry or hard over it--poor Cathie!'
And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for
what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light
catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly
towards her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady
Charlotte's house the night before had been a very different matter from
the royally attended leave-takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which
generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her
head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. 'I have
never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.'
But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself.
So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is
dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by
the clamour, will take up very much the same line.
What matter! The girl's spirit seemed to rise against all the world.
There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a
jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to
overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been
expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with
a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the
artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.
Besides--success! To make a man hope and love, and live again--_that_
shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling,
her heart very soft.
Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage
to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterwards the
dining-room door opened.
'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.
Rose took it--glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush--a
surreptitious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a wandering letter
from Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and
opened it.
Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and details as some
famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered
field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other
inmate in it, struck her.
'Rose,' she said, looking up, 'was that some one brought you a note?'
The girl turned with a start--a letter fell to the ground. She made a
faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.
'Rose--darling!' cried Catherine, springing up, 'are you ill?'
Rose looked at her with a perfectly colourless fixed face, made a feeble
negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front
of her, let her head fall upon them.
Catherine stood over her aghast. 'My darling--what is it? Come and lie
down--take this water.'
She put some close to her sister's hand, but Rose pushed it away. 'Don't
talk to me,' she said with difficulty.
Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek
resting against her sister's shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What
could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the
letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once
recognised Langham's handwriting. But before she could combine any
rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered
herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister's arm.
'I was startled,' she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 'Last
night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him--I expected him here this
morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me
that--he made a mistake--and he is very sorry! So am I! It is
so--so--bewildering!'
She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with
cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The elder
sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her, pressed the slim
irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips
quivering.
'That he should _dare_!' she cried. 'Rose--my poor little Rose.'
'Don't blame him!' said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while
Catherine fell into the armchair again. 'It doesn't seem to count, from
you--you have always been so ready to blame him!'
Her brow contracted; she looked frowning into the fire, her still
colourless mouth working painfully.
Catherine was cut to the heart. 'Oh, Rose!' she said, holding out her
hands, 'I will blame no one, dear. I seem hard--but I love you so. Oh,
tell me--you would have told me everything once!'
There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless
right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched palms. But she made
no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell towards
Catherine.
'Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him--he kissed me--I could
kill myself and him.'
Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour
that followed--the little familiar morning sounds in and about the
house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells