Robert Elsmere
last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his children's names. They
brought them in, but his hands had to be guided to them. A few minutes
after it seemed to me that he was really gone, though he still breathed.
The doctor was certain there would be no more consciousness. We stayed
nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other relations,
and we left him. Oh, it is over now!'
Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London garden.
Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of Elsmere's pale,
silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How could she receive such a
story in such a way?
The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly.
'Good-night, Catherine--he has told you?'
He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully looking at her, the
face full of signs of what he had gone through.
'Yes, it was terrible!' she said, with an effort.
His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and went away.
When he was gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leant against the open
French window, looking keenly down on his companion. A new idea had
stirred in him.
And presently, after more talk of the incident of the afternoon, and
when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped gradually into the
subject of his own experiences in North R---- during the last six
months. He assumed all through that she knew as much as there was to be
known of Elsmere's work, and that she was as much interested as the
normal wife is in her husband's doings. His tact, his delicacy, never
failed him for a moment. But he spoke of his own impressions, of matters
within his personal knowledge. And since the Easter sermon he had been
much on Elsmere's track; he had been filled with curiosity about him.
Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in long folds
about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed on her lap. Sometimes
she gave him a startled look, sometimes she shaded her eyes, while her
other hand played silently with her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching her
closely, however little he might seem to do so, was struck by her
austere and delicate beauty as he had never been before.
She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without
resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger. He
went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any excitement,
in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now and then,
expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and not always
favourably. But gradually the whole picture emerged, began to live
before them. At last he hurriedly looked at his watch.
'What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you.'
'You have not had dinner!' she said, looking up at him with a sudden
nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his impression
of her.
'No matter. I will get some at home. Good-night!'
When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought
to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterwards in the drawing-room,
where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she
mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by
the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her,
threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on
the chair.
The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere
weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with God.
It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known--greater even than
that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.
CHAPTER XLIII
Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening
for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less
as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic
interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened,
pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly
relaxed within him as he sped westwards by the recurrent memory of that
miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying
face.
In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small number of people
assembled. M. de Querouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman
of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than
ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord
Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill
for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of 'a
beastly set of tenants'; Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private secretary with
a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a general air of
superlativeness which demanded and secured attention; a famous
journalist, whose smiling self-repressive look assured you that he
carried with him the secrets of several empires; and one Sir John
Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man with a limp--an
ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted in London as an
amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of
society as he was popular with the other.
'Purely for talk, you see, not for show!' said Madame de Netteville to
Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood waiting
for the commencement of dinner.
'I shall hardly do my part,' he said with a little sigh. 'I have just
come from a very different scene.'
She looked at him with inquiring eyes.
'A terrible accident in the East End,' he said briefly. 'We won't talk
of it. I only mention it to propitiate you beforehand. Those things are
not forgotten at once.'
She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart,
physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle consideration for
him at dinner. M. de Querouelle was made to talk. His hostess wound him
up and set him going, tune after tune. He played them all, and, by dint
of long practice, to perfection, in the French way. A visit of his youth
to the island grave of Chateaubriand; his early memories, as a poetical
aspirant, of the magnificent flatteries by which Victor Hugo made
himself the god of young romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in
the days of _L'Avenir_; his memories of Lamennais's sombre figure, of
Maurice de Guerin's feverish ethereal charm; his account of the
opposition _salons_ under the Empire--they had all been elaborated in
the course of years, till every word fitted and each point led to the
next with the 'inevitableness' of true art. Robert, at first silent and
_distrait_, found it impossible after a while not to listen with
interest. He admired the skill, too, of Madame de Netteville's second in
the duet, the finish, the alternate sparkle and melancholy of it; and at
last he too was drawn in, and found himself listened to with great
benevolence by the Frenchman, who had been informed about him, and
regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of English
religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addlestone, who had won a
European reputation for wisdom by a great scantiness of speech in
society, coupled with the look of Minerva's owl, attached himself to
them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr.
Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party at the other end.
'Are you still in your old quarters, Lady Aubrey?' asked Sir John
Headlam, turning his old roguish face upon her. 'That house of Nell
Gwynne's, wasn't it, in Meade Street?'
'Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then they
made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten years. There
is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and wants to live in it.
I could have left a train of gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so
cross!'
'Ah--"Reculer pour mieux _faire_ sauter!"' said Sir John, mincing out
his pun as though he loved it.
'Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, 'but you have way
to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner,
that positively----'
'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the _Societe de
Londres_,' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen
an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear Lady Aubrey, it was simply
because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been
neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but
one we met, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the
dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the
way, have you read the _Princesse de----_?'
He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.
'I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a
rapier-glance at him, 'but if I had, I should say precisely the same.
Lord Rupert, will you kindly keep Sir John in order?'
Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion
characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern
gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual
spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably assumed that
all 'the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in
adorning his person.' Not at all! The _tenue_ of a dandy was never more
cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of
a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality
going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top
rungs.
It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum
of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own
conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the
other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a
while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of
a personal skirmish, the whole scene--the dainty oval room, the lights,
the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the
tapestried walls--would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a
dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream
never has.
The hard self-confidence of these people--did it belong to the same
world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone
on him that afternoon from Charles Richards's begrimed and blood-stained
face? '_Blessed are the poor in spirit_,' he said to himself once with
an inward groan. 'Why am I here? Why am I not at home with Catherine?'
But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had never seen her so
womanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate social skill. As she
talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of literature, or politics, or
famous folk, flashing her beautiful eyes from one to the other, Sir John
Headlam would, every now and then, turn his odd puckered face
observantly towards the farther end of the table.
'By Jove!' he said afterwards to Wharncliffe as they walked away from
the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more _roles_
than Desforets!' Sir John and his hostess were very old friends.
Upstairs smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining in.
M. de Querouelle, having talked the best of his _repertoire_ at dinner,
was now inclined for amusement, and had discovered that Lady Aubrey
could amuse him, and was, moreover, _une belle personne_. Madame de
Netteville was obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men
stood chatting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious of a
complete failure of social energy, began to look at his watch. Instantly
Madame de Netteville glided up to him.
'Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know how my
affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come into my little
writing-room.' And she led him into a tiny panelled room at the far end