Robert Elsmere
my wife--who has no light tears--weeping for her sister.'
His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too
pitiful and too intimate for speech.
Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.
'Good-bye!' said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having
got foolishly through a fool's errand. 'As I said to you before, what
Rose's feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she
would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And I
see that you will not talk to me--you will not take me into your
confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend.
And--and--are you going? What does this mean?'
He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.
'I am going back to Oxford,' said the other briefly. 'I cannot stay in
these rooms, in these streets.'
Robert was sore perplexed. What real--nay, what terrible suffering--in
the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself
wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly
unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over
human life.
'It is very hard,' he said hurriedly, moving nearer, 'that our old
friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You are
always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council
sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities?
Your own perceptions are all warped!'
Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and
one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.
'I will write to you, Elsmere,' he said, holding out his hand, 'speech
is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.'
Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.
But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the middle of the day
sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again
more feverishly than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose,
suffering and paling.
And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of
this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married
life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life
had been so long purely intellectual that this sudden strain of passion
and fierce practical interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his
mental balance.
He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last rehearsal at
Searle House. Afterwards her custom was to come back from St. James's
Park to High Street, Kensington, and walk up the hill to her own home.
He knew it, for on two occasions after these rehearsals he had been at
Lerwick Gardens, waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she
go this afternoon? A subtle instinct told him that she would.
* * * * *
It was nearly six o'clock that evening when Rose, stepping out from the
High Street station, crossed the main road and passed into the darkness
of one of the streets leading up the hill. She had forced herself to go,
and she would go alone. But as she toiled along she felt weary and
bruised all over. She carried with her a heart of lead--a sense of utter
soreness--a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only
thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent
memory of Mr. Flaxman's manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill?
She flushed hotly at the thought, and then realised again, with a sense
of childish comfort, the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in
shielding her from any unnecessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of the
hand with which he had put her into the cab that took her to the
Underground.
Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she saw a man
standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was Langham.
'You!' she cried, stopping.
He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway of a large
detached house not far off, which threw a certain illumination over him,
though it left her in shadow. He said nothing, but he held out both his
hands mutely. She fancied rather than saw the pale emotion of his look.
'What?' she said, after a pause. 'You think to-night is last night! You
and I have nothing to say to each other, Mr. Langham.'
'I have everything to say,' he answered, under his breath; 'I have
committed a crime--a villainy.'
'And it is not pleasant to you?' she said, quivering. 'I am sorry--I
cannot help you. But you are wrong--it was no crime--it was necessary
and profitable, like the doses of one's childhood! Oh! I might have
guessed you would do this; No, Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an
interesting decline. I have just played my _concerto_ very fairly. I
shall not disgrace myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at
peace--I have learnt several things to-day that have been salutary--very
salutary.'
She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him,--unresisting,
helplessly silent.
'Don't come any farther,' she said resolutely after a minute, turning to
face him. 'Let us be quits! I was a temptingly easy prey. I bear no
malice. And do not let me break your friendship with Robert; that began
before this foolish business--it should outlast it. Very likely _we_
shall be friends again, like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine
your wound is very deep, and----'
But no! Her lips closed; not even for pride's sake, and retort's sake,
will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first love.
She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see nothing among her
furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. The whole personality
seemed centred in the voice--the half-mocking vibrating voice. He took
her hand and dropped it instantly.
'You do not understand,' he said hopelessly--feeling as though every
phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally fatuous, equally
shameful. 'Thank heaven, you never will understand.'
'I think I do,' she said with a change of tone, and paused. He raised
his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. What _was_ the
expression in them? It was yearning--but not the yearning of passion.
'If things had been different--if one could change the self--if the past
were nobler!'--was that the cry of them? A painful humility--a boundless
pity--the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither measure
nor explain--these were some of the impressions which passed from her to
him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her transformed on the
farther side, with, as it were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature,
than had ever yet been hers.
He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for an instant to
his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and was gone.
He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his books, his
only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever tampered with any other?
'_It was not love--not love!_' he said to himself, with an accent of
infinite relief as he sank into his chair. '_Her_ smart will heal.'
BOOK VI
NEW OPENINGS
CHAPTER XXXVII
Ten days after Langham's return to Oxford Elsmere received a
characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to
be considered as still existing or at an end. The calm and even proud
melancholy of the letter showed a considerable subsidence of that state
of half-frenzied irritation and discomfort in which Elsmere had last
seen him. The writer, indeed, was clearly settling down into another
period of pessimistic quietism such as that which had followed upon his
first young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second
period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all the vital
forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, half-angry,
half-relenting, put down the letter, he felt the conviction that no
fresh influence from outside would ever again be allowed to penetrate
the solitude of Langham's life. In comparison with the man who had just
addressed him, the tutor of his undergraduate recollections was a
vigorous and sociable human being.
The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible affectionate letter
in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings of resentment, he
said, he could not realise, now that the crisis was past, that he cared
less about his old friend. 'As far as we two are concerned, let us
forget it all. I could hardly say this, you will easily imagine, if I
thought that you had done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife
and I agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to
her own surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no
doubt, before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal to her
past. But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send you our
opinion for what it is worth, believing that it will and must be welcome
to you.'
Rose, however, was not so long in admitting it. One marked result of
that new vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of that
February morning was a great softening towards Catherine. Whatever might
have been Catherine's intense relief when Robert returned from his
abortive mission, she never afterwards let a disparaging word towards
Langham escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy
itself, and Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, and
against the noisy world of flattery and excitement in which she had been
living, turned to Catherine as she had never done since she was a tiny
child. She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square
drawing-room, pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality
recovering, like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing
influence of thought and silence.
One day, when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine
by saying with one of her old odd smiles--
'Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of
hallucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a
fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great
astonishment, there is no bone broken!'
And she held herself back from Catherine's knee lest her sister should
attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow an
answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush
after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.
In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Langham had been a
kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had
crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and
longing, when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of
her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities.
His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very
strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl's
immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the
interval of angry resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it. As
to the months in London, they had been one long duel between herself and
him--a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncertainty,
but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large
proportion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory,
Langham's endangered habits and threatened individuality had asserted
themselves once for all. And from the whole long struggle--passion,
exultation, and crushing defeat--it often seemed to her that she had
gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character,
a soul!
It may be easily imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen
interest in Langham's disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle
House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's coming in a state of extraordinary