Robert Elsmere
The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months since
Langham's disappearance. During that time Rose Leyburn had been, to
Flaxman's mind, enchantingly dependent on him. He had played his part so
well, and the beautiful high-spirited child had suited herself so
naively to his acting! Evidently she had said to herself that his age,
his former marriage, his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness
to her and her sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make
him her friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other male
friend. And when once the situation had been so defined in her mind, how
the girl's true self had come out!--what delightful moments that
intimacy had contained for him!
He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading some Browning to
her and Helen, in Helen's crowded belittered drawing-room, which seemed
all piano and photographs and lilies of the valley. He never could
exactly trace the connection between the passage he had been reading and
what happened. Probably it was merely Browning's poignant passionate
note that had affected her. In spite of all her proud bright reserve,
both he and Helen often felt through these weeks that just below this
surface there was a heart which quivered at the least touch.
He finished the lines and laid down the book. Lady Helen heard her
three-year-old boy crying upstairs, and ran up to see what was the
matter. He and Rose were left alone in the scented fire-lit room. And a
jet of flame suddenly showed him the girl's face turned away, convulsed
with a momentary struggle for self-control. She raised a hand an instant
to her eyes, not dreaming evidently that she could be seen in the
dimness; and her gloves dropped from her lap.
He moved forward, stooped on one knee, and as she held out her hand for
the gloves, he kissed the hand very gently, detaining it afterwards as a
brother might. There was not a thought of himself in his mind. Simply he
could not bear that so bright a creature should ever be sorry. It seemed
to him intolerable, against the nature of things. If he could have
procured for her at that moment a coerced and transformed Langham, a
Langham fitted to make her happy, he could almost have done it; and,
short of such radical consolation, the very least he could do was to go
on his knee to her, and comfort her in tender brotherly fashion.
She did not say anything; she let her hand stay a moment, and then she
got up, put on her veil, left a quiet message for Lady Helen, and
departed. But as he put her into a hansom her whole manner to him was
full of a shy shrinking sweetness. And when Rose was shy and shrinking
she was adorable.
Well, and now he had never again gone nearly so far as to kiss her hand,
and yet because of an indiscreet moment everything was changed between
them; she had turned resentful stand-off, nay, as nearly rude as a girl
under the restraints of modern manners can manage to be. He almost
laughed as he recalled Helen's report of her interview with Rose that
morning, in which she had tried to persuade a young person outrageously
on her dignity to keep an engagement she had herself spontaneously made.
'I am very sorry, Lady Helen,' Rose had said, her slim figure drawn up
so stiffly that the small Lady Helen felt herself totally effaced beside
her. 'But I had rather not leave London this week. I think I will stay
with mamma and Agnes.'
And nothing Lady Helen could say moved her, or modified her formula of
refusal.
'What _have_ you been doing, Hugh?' his sister asked him, half dismayed,
half provoked.
Flaxman shrugged his shoulders and vowed he had been doing nothing. But,
in truth, he knew very well that the day before he had overstepped the
line. There had been a little scene between them, a quick passage of
speech, a rash look and gesture on his part, which had been quite
unpremeditated, but which had nevertheless transformed their relation.
Rose had flushed up, had said a few incoherent words, which he had
understood to be words of reproach, had left Lady Helen's as quickly as
possible, and next morning his Greenlaws party had fallen through.
'Check, certainly,' said Flaxman to himself ruefully, as he pondered
these circumstances--'not mate, I hope, if one can but find out how not
to be a fool in future.'
And over his solitary fire he meditated far into the night.
Next day, at half-past seven in the evening, he entered Lady Charlotte's
drawing-room, gayer, brisker, more alert than ever.
Rose started visibly at the sight of him, and shot a quick glance at the
unblushing Lady Charlotte.
'I thought you were at Greenlaws,' she could not help saying to him, as
she coldly offered him her hand. _Why_ had Lady Charlotte never told her
he was to escort them? Her irritation rose anew.
'What can one do,' he said lightly, 'if Elsmere will fix such a
performance for Easter Eve? My party was at its last gasp too; it only
wanted a telegram to Helen to give it its _coup de grace_.'
Rose flushed up, but he turned on his heel at once, and began to banter
his aunt on the housekeeper's bonnet and veil in which she had a little
too obviously disguised herself.
And certainly, in the drive to the East End, Rose had no reason to
complain of importunity on his part. Most of the way he was deep in talk
with Lady Charlotte as to a certain loan exhibition in the East End, to
which he and a good many of his friends were sending pictures;
apparently his time and thoughts were entirely occupied with it. Rose,
leaning back silent in her corner, was presently seized with a little
shock of surprise that there should be so many interests and relations
in his life of which she knew nothing. He was talking now as the man of
possessions and influence. She saw a glimpse of him as he was in his
public aspect, and the kindness, the disinterestedness, the quiet sense,
and the humour of his talk insensibly affected her as she sat listening.
The mental image of him which had been dominant in her mind altered a
little. Nay, she grew a little hot over it. She asked herself scornfully
whether she were not as ready as any bread-and-butter miss of her
acquaintance to imagine every man she knew in love with her.
Very likely he had meant what he said quite differently, and she--oh!
humiliation--had flown into a passion with him for no reasonable cause.
Supposing he _had_ meant, two days ago, that if they were to go on being
friends she must let him be her lover too, it would of course have been
unpardonable. How _could_ she let any one talk to her of love
yet--especially Mr. Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure, what
had happened to her? He must despise her to have imagined it. His
outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulant resentment.
Were all men self-seeking? Did all men think women shallow and fickle?
Could a man and a woman never be honestly and simply friends? If he
_had_ made love to her, he could not possibly--and there was the sting
of it--feel towards her maiden dignity that romantic respect which she
herself cherished towards it. For it was incredible that any
delicate-minded girl should go through such a crisis as she had gone
through, and then fall calmly into another lover's arms a few weeks
later as though nothing had happened.
How we all attitudinise to ourselves! The whole of life often seems one
long dramatic performance, in which one half of us is for ever posing to
the other half.
But had he really made love to her?--had he meant what she had assumed
him to mean? The girl lost herself in a torment of memory and
conjecture, and meanwhile Mr. Flaxman sat opposite, talking away, and
looking certainly as little love-sick as any man can well look. As the
lamps flashed into the carriage her attention was often caught by his
profile and finely-balanced head, by the hand lying on his knee, or the
little gestures, full of life and freedom, with which he met some raid
of Lady Charlotte's on his opinions, or opened a corresponding one on
hers. There was certainly power in the man, a bright human sort of
power, which inevitably attracted her. And that he was good too she had
special grounds for knowing.
But what an aristocrat he was after all! What an over-prosperous
exclusive set he belonged to! She lashed herself into anger as the other
two chatted and sparred, with all these names of wealthy cousins and
relations, with their parks and their pedigrees and their pictures! The
aunt and nephew were debating how they could best bleed the family, in
its various branches, of the art treasures belonging to it for the
benefit of the East-Enders; therefore the names were inevitable. But
Rose curled her delicate lip over them. And was it the best breeding,
she wondered, to leave a third person so ostentatiously outside the
conversation?
'Miss Leyburn, why are you coughing?' said Lady Charlotte suddenly.
'There is a great draught,' said Rose, shivering a little.
'So there is!' cried Lady Charlotte. 'Why, we have got both the windows
open. Hugh, draw up Miss Leyburn's.'
He moved over to her and drew it up.
'I thought you liked a tornado,' he said to her, smiling. 'Will you have
a shawl?--there is one behind me.'
'No, thank you,' she replied rather stiffly, and he was
silent--retaining his place opposite to her, however.
'Have we reached Mr. Elsmere's part of the world yet?' asked Lady
Charlotte, looking out.
'Yes, we are not far off--the river is to our right. We shall pass St.
Wilfrid's soon.'
The coachman turned into a street where an open-air market was going
on. The roadway and pavements were swarming; the carriage could barely
pick its way through the masses of human beings. Flaming gas-jets threw
it all into strong satanic light and shade. At the corner of a dingy
alley Rose could see a fight going on; the begrimed ragged children,
regardless of the April rain, swooped backwards and forwards under the
very hoofs of the horses, or flattened their noses against the windows
whenever the horses were forced into a walk.
The young girl-figure in gray, with the gray feathered hat, seemed
specially to excite their notice. The glare of the street brought out
the lines of the face, the gold of the hair. The Arabs outside made
loutishly flattering remarks once or twice, and Rose, colouring, drew
back as far as she could into the carriage. Mr. Flaxman seemed not to
hear; his aunt, with that obtrusive thirst for information which is so
fashionable now among all women of position, was cross-questioning him
as to the trades and population of the district, and he was drily
responding. In reality his mind was full of a whirl of feeling, of a
wild longing to break down a futile barrier and trample on a baffling
resistance, to take that beautiful tameless creature in strong coercing
arms, scold her, crush her, love her! Why does she make happiness so
difficult? What right has she to hold devotion so cheap? He too grows
angry. 'She was _not_ in love with that spectral creature,' the inner
self declares with energy--'I will vow she never was. But she is like
all the rest--a slave to the merest forms and trappings of sentiment.
Because he _ought_ to have loved her, and didn't, because she _fancied_
she loved him, and didn't, my love is to be an offence to her!
Monstrous--unjust!'
Suddenly they sped past St. Wilfrid's, resplendent with lights, the
jewelled windows of the choir rising above the squalid walls and roofs
into the rainy darkness, as the mystical chapel of the Graal, with its
'torches glimmering fair,' flashed out of the mountain storm and
solitude on to Galahad's seeking eyes.
Rose bent forward involuntarily. 'What angel singing!' she said,
dropping the window again to listen to the retreating sounds, her