Robert Elsmere
He turned and laid his arms on the chimneypiece, burying his head on
them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, looking down, saw Mary
peering up, her masses of dark hair streaming back from the straining
little face, the grave open mouth, and alarmed eyes.
'Fader, tiss! fader, tiss!' she said imperatively.
He lifted her up and covered the little brown cheeks with kisses. But
the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh dread--the like of
something he had often divined of late in Catherine. Was she actually
afraid now that he might feel himself bound in future to take her child
spiritually from her? The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him a
fresh anguish; it seemed a measure of the distance they had travelled
from that old perfect unity.
'She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and torturer,' he
said to himself with measureless pain, 'and who knows--who can answer
for himself? Oh, the puzzle of living!'
When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Catherine said
nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after a while she opened
his study door.
'Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next week, and let
me put out the pictures?'
It was the first time she had made any such offer. He sprang up with a
flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip of paper with a list. She
took it without looking at him. But he caught her in his arms, and for a
moment in that embrace the soreness of both hearts passed away.
* * * * *
But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this critical
occasion without auditors from his own immediate circle. On the evening
of Good Friday Flaxman had found his way to Bedford Square, and, as
Catherine was out, was shown into Elsmere's study.
'I have come,' he announced, 'to try and persuade you and Mrs. Elsmere
to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow. My Easter party has come to
grief, and it would be a real charity on your part to come and
resuscitate it. Do! You look abominably fagged, and as if some country
would do you good.'
'But I thought----' began Robert, taken aback.
'You thought,' repeated Flaxman coolly, 'that your two sisters-in-law
were going down there with Lady Helen, to meet some musical folk. Well,
they are not coming. Miss Leyburn thinks your mother-in-law not very
well to-day, and doesn't like to come. And your younger sister prefers
also to stay in town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But----' And
he shrugged his shoulders.
Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His sisters-in-law
were certainly inscrutable young women. This Easter party at Greenlaws,
Mr. Flaxman's country house, had been planned, he knew, for weeks. And
certainly nothing could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine
would have been warned.
'I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,' he said, with some
embarrassment.
'Of course they are,' replied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He stood
opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets.
'Will you have a confidence?' the bright eyes seemed to say. 'I am quite
ready. Claim it if you like.'
But Elsmere had no intention of claiming it. The position of all Rose's
kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had
the least knowledge of Rose's mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had she
lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman's absorption in
her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of an
ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his
wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated to
make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet.
Impossible for them, much as they liked him, to make any of the
advances!
No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to take the
responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took up his visitor's
invitation to themselves, and explained the engagement for Easter Eve,
which tied them to London.
'Whew!' said Hugh Flaxman, 'but that will be a shindy worth seeing. I
must come!'
'Nonsense!' said Robert, smiling. 'Go down to Greenlaws, and go to
church. That will be much more in your line.'
'As for church,' said Flaxman meditatively, 'if I put off my party
altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further advantage,
that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I can, with a blameless
impartiality, spend the following day in St. Andrew's, Well Street.
Yes! I telegraph to Helen--she knows my ways--and I come down to protect
you against an atheistical mob to-morrow night!'
Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. Flaxman's
Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence
of his youth had subsided, the man harboured and dallied with a dozen
contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere.
They were so now, just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which
could not be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence.
But Flaxman was determined.
'No,' he said; 'this one day we'll give--to heresy. Don't look so
forbidding! In the first place, you won't see me; in the next, if you
did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in
Sophocles--always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all
for the church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still
are, you will admit, that she is in the right of it. And if so, why
should I cut myself off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be
got outside her? But the next day--_vive_ Elsmere and the Revolution! If
only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually! But I never yet came
across a religious novelty that seemed to me to have a leg of logic to
stand on!'
He laid his hand on Robert's shoulder, his eyes twinkling with a sudden
energy. Robert made no answer. He stood erect, frowning a little, his
hands thrust far into the pockets of his light gray coat. He was in no
mood to disclose himself to Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with
extraordinary intensity on quite another sort of antagonist, with whom
the mind was continuously grappling.
'Ah, well--till to-morrow!' said Flaxman, with a smile, shook hands, and
went.
Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte's.
He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room alone, one on
either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was reading the latest political
biography with an apparent profundity of attention; Mr. Wynnstay was
lounging and caressing the cat. But both his aunt's absorption and Mr.
Wynnstay's nonchalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a
domestic breeze.
Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had come to propose that
she should accompany him the following evening to hear Elsmere lecture.
'I advise you to come,' he said. 'Elsmere will deliver his soul, and the
amount of soul he has to deliver in these dull days is astounding. A
dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I will go down beforehand and see
some one on the spot, in case there should be difficulties about getting
in. Perhaps Miss Leyburn, too, might like to hear her brother-in-law?'
'_Really_, Hugh,' cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, 'I think you might
take your snubbing with dignity. Her refusal this morning to go to
Greenlaws was brusqueness itself. To my mind that young person gives
herself airs!' And the Duke of Sedbergh's sister drew herself up with a
rustle of all her ample frame.
'Yes, I was snubbed,' said Flaxman, unperturbed; 'that, however, is no
reason why she shouldn't find it attractive to go to-morrow night.'
'And you will let her see that, just because you couldn't get hold of
her, you have given up your Easter party and left your sister in the
lurch?'
'I never had excessive notions of dignity,' he replied composedly. 'You
may make up any story you please. The real fact is that I want to hear
Elsmere.'
'You had better go, my dear!' said her husband sardonically. 'I cannot
imagine anything more piquant than an atheistic slum on Easter Eve.'
'Nor can I!' she replied, her combativeness rousing at once. 'Much
obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my housekeeper's dress, and be ready
to leave here at half-past seven.'
Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxman knew that she would be asked,
and let it alone.
'Will his wife be there?' asked Lady Charlotte.
'Who? Elsmere's? My dear aunt, when you happen to be the orthodox wife
of a rising heretic, your husband's opinions are not exactly the
spectacular performance they are to you and me. I should think it most
unlikely.'
'Oh, she persecutes him, does she?'
'She wouldn't be a woman if she didn't!' observed Mr. Wynnstay, _sotto
voce_. The small dark man was lost in a great armchair, his delicate
painter's hands playing with the fur of a huge Persian cat. Lady
Charlotte threw him an eagle glance, and he subsided--for the moment.
Flaxman, however, was perfectly right. There had been a breeze. It had
been just announced to the master of the house by his spouse that
certain Socialist celebrities--who might any day be expected to make
acquaintance with the police--were coming to dine at his table, to
finger his spoons, and mix their diatribes with his champagne, on the
following Tuesday. Overt rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew
perfectly well that when it came to the point he should smile more or
less affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon others of the same
sort before. But it had not yet come to the point, and his intermediate
state was explosive in the extreme.
Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Elsmeres. Dropping
his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a very delicate critical
analysis of Catherine Elsmere's temperament and position, as in the
course of several months his intimacy with her husband had revealed them
to him. He did it well, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The
situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet
tragic phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual
pleasure to draw it out in words.
Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew's crisp phrases, but
also gradually gaining a perception of the human reality behind this
word-play of Hugh's. That 'good heart' of hers was touched; the large
imperious face began to frown.
'Dear me!' she said, with a little sigh. 'Don't go on, Hugh! I suppose
it's because we all of us believe so little that the poor thing's point
of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, however,' she added,
regaining her usual role of magisterial common-sense, 'a woman, in my
opinion, ought to go with her husband in religious matters.'
'Provided, of course, she sets him at nought in all others,' put in Mr.
Wynnstay, rising and daintily depositing the cat. 'Many men, however, my
dear, might be willing to compromise it differently. Granted a certain
_modicum_ of worldly conformity, they would not be at all indisposed to
a conscience clause.'
He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged her shoulders
with a look at her nephew in which there was an irrepressible twinkle.
Mr. Flaxman neither heard nor saw. Life would have ceased to be worth
having long ago had he ever taken sides in the smallest degree in this
_menage_.
Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with himself and
his manoeuvres. Very likely it was quite unwise of him to have devised
another meeting between himself and Rose Leyburn so soon. Certainly she
had snubbed him--there could be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much
perplexity as to the reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting
his role and the whole lie of the situation, and if a man will be an
idiot he must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a move.