Robert Elsmere
ringing,--and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental
struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost
heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose--a sense of
shock, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation, and a strange
intervening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which
seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder
questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly
piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question
filling her own indignant heart, 'Does she love him?'
At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a
white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from
eyes that were dry and feverish.
'If I could only be angry--downright angry,' she said, more to herself
than Catherine, 'it would do one good.'
'Give others leave to be angry for you!' cried Catherine.
'Don't!' said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 'You don't
know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you
must--you misjudge him--you always have. No, no'--and she nervously
crushed the letter in her hand--'not yet. But you shall read it some
time--you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is
due to him, perhaps due to me too,' and a hot flush transfigured her
paleness for an instant. 'Oh, my head! Why does one's mind affect one's
body like this? It shall not--it is humiliating! "Miss Leyburn has been
jilted and cannot see visitors,"--that is the kind of thing. Catherine,
when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me
practise my last Raff--I am going. Good-bye.'
She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or
she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.
'Miserable!' she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, 'I must go and lie
down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine,
not a word to any one but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not
to speak to me! No, don't come--I will go alone.'
And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her
room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the
letter in her hand,--the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had
for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished
sentence pleaded with her--even in the first smart of her wrong--for
pardon, for compassion, as towards something maimed and paralysed from
birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over
her cheeks.
'I was not good enough--I was not good enough--God would not let me!'
And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper
crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what? _To
save?_
How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the
task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that
shakes her as she kneels and weeps, nor is it mere wounded woman's
pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she
is--more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive--he could not
have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of
character stir within her. She feels herself judged,--and with a
righteous judgment--issuing inexorably from the facts of life and
circumstance.
* * * * *
Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert, who had come
over early to see how the household fared.
Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonishment and
dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had gone out of his mind
for some time. He had been busy in his East End work. Catherine had been
silent. Over how many matters they would once have discussed with open
heart was she silent now?
'I ought to have been warned,' he said with quick decision, 'if you knew
this was going on. I am the only man among you, and I understand Langham
better than the rest of you. I might have looked after the poor child a
little.'
Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart the more.
However, what had she known? She had seen nothing unusual of late,
nothing to make her think a crisis was approaching. Nay, she had
flattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, whom she liked, was gaining ground.
Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be done. Could
anything be done?
'I must go and see him,' he said presently. 'Yes, dearest, I must.
Impossible the thing should be left so! I am his old friend,--almost her
guardian. You say she is in great trouble--why, it may shadow her whole
life! No--he must explain things to us--he is bound to--he shall. It may
be something comparatively trivial in the way after all--money or
prospects or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you
say? It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for
her--but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him----'
He turned to her--appealing, remonstrating. Catherine stood pale and
rigid. Incredible that he should think it right to intermeddle--to take
the smallest step towards reversing so plain a declaration of God's
will! She could not sympathise--she would not consent. Robert watched
her in painful indecision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to
her true reason for finding some comfort even in her sister's
trouble--that he seemed to her mindful only of the passing human misery,
indifferent to the eternal risk.
They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched up his hat.
'I must go,' he said in a low voice; 'it is right.'
And he went--stepping, however, with the best intentions in the world,
into a blunder.
Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had left her.
Then some one came into the room--some one with pale looks and flashing
eyes. It was Agnes.
'She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,' said the
girl--her whole, even, cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. 'What
are such creatures made for, Catherine--why do they exist?'
Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty morning streets to
Langham's lodgings. His mood was very hot by the time he reached his
destination, and he climbed the staircase to Langham's room in some
excitement. When he tried to open the door after the answer to his knock
bidding him enter, he found something barring the way. 'Wait a little,'
said the voice inside, 'I will move the case.'
With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. Seeing his
visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre astonishment. The room was
littered with books and packing-cases with which he had been busy.
'Come in,' he said, not offering to shake hands.
Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, stood
leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to him. Langham
paused opposite to him, his waving jet-black hair falling forward over
the marble pale face which had been Robert's young ideal of manly
beauty.
The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong is old
association that Robert's feeling towards his friend had always remained
in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate towards the don. His
sense of it now filled him with a curious awkwardness.
'I know why you are come,' said Langham slowly, after a scrutiny of his
visitor.
'I am here by a mere accident,' said the other, thinking perfect
frankness best. 'My wife was present when her sister received your
letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had gone up to ask after them
all, and came on to you,--of course on my own responsibility entirely!
Rose knows nothing of my coming--nothing of what I have to say.'
He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man before him.
Whatever he had done during the past twenty-four hours he had clearly
had the grace to suffer in the doing of it.
'You can have nothing to say!' said Langham, leaning against the
chimney piece and facing him with black, darkly-burning eyes. 'You know
me.'
Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the despair, all the
bitterness hidden under the languid student's exterior of every day,
had, as it were, risen to the surface. He stood at bay, against his
friend, against himself.
'No!' exclaimed Robert stoutly, 'I do not know you in the sense you
mean. I do not know you as the man who could beguile a girl on to a
confession of love, and then tell her that for you marriage was too
great a burden to be faced!'
Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. Robert
repented him a little. Langham's strange individuality always impressed
him against his will.
'I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,' he went on, 'though I
confess to being very hot! I came to try and find out--for myself only,
mind--whether what prevents you from following up what I understand
happened last night is really a matter of feeling, or a matter of
outward circumstance. If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling
for Rose is not what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion
about your conduct--but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you
have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply afraid of
yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities of practical
married life, I cannot help begging you to talk the matter over with me,
and let us face it together. Whether Rose would ever, under any
circumstances, get over the shock of this morning I have not the
remotest idea. But'--and he hesitated--'it seems the feeling you
appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well
what havoc a thing of this kind _may_ make in a girl's life. I don't say
it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not
hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I
am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to
take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!'
There was a moment's dead silence.
'You cannot pretend to believe,' said Langham at last, with the same
sombre self-containedness, 'that a marriage with me would be for your
sister-in-law's happiness?'
'I don't know what to believe!' cried Robert. 'No,' he added frankly,
'no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the
idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; _a priori_, I never
thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when a
thing is wholly in the air looks very different when a man has committed
himself and another, as you have done.'
Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from
his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.
'Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as you
please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even
greater fiend and weakling than you think me if, in cold blood, I could
let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust
myself--you may think of the statement as you like--I should make her
_miserable_. Last night I had not parted from her an hour before I was
utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are my masters. I
believe,' he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond
Robert, 'I could even grow to _hate_ what came between me and them!'
Was it the last word of the man's life? It struck Robert with a kind of
shiver.
'Pray heaven,' he said with a groan, getting up to go, 'you may not have
made her miserable already!'
'Did it hurt her so much?' asked Langham almost inaudibly, turning away,
Robert's tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in the
subtle brain tissue.
'I have not seen her,' said Robert abruptly; 'but when I came in I found