Robert Elsmere
irritation. He expected a blushing _fiancee_, in a fool's paradise,
asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a
decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him.
And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some
double-edged congratulations.
Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale tired girl,
who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and
said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.
His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way
up to her, and was her watchful unobtrusive guardian for the rest of the
afternoon.
He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient
conjecture.
'As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had
an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he
did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot--and if he did,
_a fortiori_, for clearly she is _miserable_. But what a brave child!
How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that _I_ saw
nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!'
Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and
by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had
left London.
Gone! But not without a crisis--that was evident. During the din of
preparations for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings which
it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the house of some other
connection of his--for the concert was the work of his friends, and
given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel--he had
many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft indefinable
change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of
sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost
her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been so
marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did
everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was
to his fancy absent and _distraite_, pursuing through the tumult of
which she was often the central figure some inner meditations of which
neither he nor any one else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over
the girl's light self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of
experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she
was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.
Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very near the
truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received
his own conjectures amused himself.
'To think,' he said to himself once with a long breath, 'that that
creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without
any one of the kickings due to him!'
Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude
towards this same 'creature,' towards the man who had released a prize
he had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. _Free_
again--to be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.
His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly
at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions
carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state
of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask
of her friends was not to be made to feel.
He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady
Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh's behalf,
Lady Helen had been dumfoundered by the sudden emergence of Langham at
Lady Charlotte's party for their common discomfiture. Who was the
man?--why, what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of
giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love,
and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was
probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen
made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a
whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected,
that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf
allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for
him which at the moment he could not play for himself.
So in the cheeriest daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother
and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked
Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to
Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally,
to Mrs. Pierson's disgust, became the girls' chief chaperon in a
fast-filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend
or amuse his sister's _proteges_--always there, but never in the way. He
was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all
the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a
bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone towards her which made his
companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced
Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose's health, a few
unexplained stares and 'humphs' and grunts, a few irrelevant
disquisitions on her nephew's merits of head and heart, were all she was
able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething with a mass of
sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant to give
expression--anger with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous
as to prefer some one else to Hugh; anger with Hugh for his persistent
disregard of her advice and the duke's feelings; and a burning desire to
know the precise why and wherefore of Langham's disappearance. She was
too lofty to become Rose's aunt without a struggle, but she was not too
lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs.
* * * * *
But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited most by
Rose's shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming over, restless under
her own smart, would fall to watching the trial of the woman and the
wife, and would often perforce forget herself and her smaller woes in
the pity of it. She stayed in Bedford Square once for a week, and then
for the first time she realised the profound change which had passed
over the Elsmeres' life. As much tenderness, between husband and wife as
ever--perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though from an
instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from each other and
from the world. But Robert went his way, Catherine hers. Their spheres
of work lay far apart; their interests were diverging fast; and though
Robert at any rate was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh
invading silences were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the
number of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in the
East End under Murray Edwardes's auspices. He was already known to
certain circles as a seceder from the Church who was likely to become
both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the _Nineteenth
Century_, on disputed points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made
their mark, and several of the veterans of philosophical debate had
already taken friendly and flattering notice of the new writer.
Meanwhile Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon's Sunday school, and
attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert's energies
became, the more she suffered, and the more the small daily
opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could hardly bear to
hear him talk about his work, and she never opened the number of the
_Nineteenth Century_ which contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to
ask her to read them.
Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appearance in R----,
with a cordiality and a helpfulness of the most self-effacing kind.
Robert had begun with assuring his new friend that he saw no chance, at
any rate for the present, of his formally joining the Unitarians.
'I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet! And I own I look
rather for a combination from many sides than for the development of any
now existing sect. But supposing,' he added, smiling, 'supposing I do in
time set up a congregation and a service of my own, is there really room
for you and me? Should I not be infringing on a work I respect a great
deal too much for anything of the sort?'
Edwardes laughed the notion to scorn.
The parish, as a whole, contained 20,000 persons. The existing churches,
which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid's, were miserably attended,
provided accommodation at the outside for 3000. His own chapel held 400,
and was about half full.
'You and I may drop our lives here,' he said, his pleasant friendliness
darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy which London work seems
to develop even in the most buoyant of men, 'and only a few hundred
persons, at the most, be ever the wiser. Begin with us--then make your
own circle.'
And he forthwith carried off his visitor to the point from which, as it
seemed to him, Elsmere's work might start, viz. a lecture-room half a
mile from his own chapel, where two helpers of his had just established
an independent venture.
Murray Edwardes had at the time an interesting and miscellaneous staff
of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to religious opinions, but in
general the men who volunteered under him--civil servants, a young
doctor, a briefless barrister or two--were men who had drifted from
received beliefs, and found a pleasure and freedom in working for and
with him they could hardly have found elsewhere. The two who had planted
their outpost in what seemed to them a particularly promising corner of
the district were men of whom Edwardes knew personally little. 'I have
really not much concern with what they do,' he explained to Elsmere,
'except that they get a small share of our funds. But I know they want
help, and if they will take you in, I think you will make something of
it.'
After a tramp through the muddy winter streets, they came upon a new
block of warehouses, in the lower windows of which some bills announced
a night-school for boys and men. Here, to judge from the commotion round
the doors, a lively scene was going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs
were hammering at the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the
keyhole. Inside, as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, by dint of good
humour and strong shoulders, had succeeded in shoving their way through
and shutting the door behind them, they found a still more animated
performance in progress. The schoolroom was in almost total darkness;
the pupils, some twenty in number, were racing about, like so many
shadowy demons, pelting each other and their teachers with the 'dips'
which, as the buildings were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been
provided to light them through their three R's. In the middle stood the
two philanthropists they were in search of, freely bedaubed with tallow,
one employed in boxing a boy's ears, the other in saving a huge
inkbottle whereon some enterprising spirit had just laid hands by way of
varying the rebel ammunition. Murray Edwardes, who was in his element,
went to the rescue at once, helped by Robert. The boy-minister, as he
looked, had been, in fact, 'bow' of the Cambridge eight, and possessed
muscles which men twice his size might have envied. In three minutes he
had put a couple of ringleaders into the street by the scruff of the
neck, relit a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest of the
rioters in hand. Elsmere backed him ably, and in a very short time they
had cleared the premises.
Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off into a shout
of laughter.