Robert Elsmere
'... I know,' cried Eugenie de Netteville at last, standing at bay
before him, her hands locked before her, her white lips quivering, when
her cup of shame was full, and her one impulse left was to strike the
man who had humiliated her--'I know that you and your puritanical wife
are miserable--_miserable_. What is the use of denying facts that all
the world can see, that you have taken pains,' and she laid a fierce
deliberate emphasis on each word, 'all the world shall see? There--let
your wife's ignorance and bigotry, and your own obvious relation to her,
be my excuse, if I wanted any; but,' and she shrugged her white
shoulders passionately, 'I want _none_! I am not responsible to your
petty codes. Nature and feeling are enough for me. I saw you wanting
sympathy and affection----'
'My wife!' cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. And then,
his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he made a stern step
forward.
'Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget that you
are a woman and I a man, and that in some way I cannot understand my own
blindness and folly----'
'Must have led to this most undesirable scene,' she said with mocking
suddenness, throwing herself, however, effectually in his way. Then a
change came over her, and erect, ghastly white, with frowning brow and
shaking limbs, a baffled and smarting woman from whom every restraint
had fallen away, let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness
which he could not have cut short without actual violence.
He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when what seemed to
him an outbreak of mania should have spent itself. But suddenly he
caught Catherine's name coupled with some contemptuous epithet or other,
and his self-control failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to
her and took her wrists in a grip of iron.
'You shall not,' he said, beside himself, 'you shall not! What have I
done--what has she done--that you should allow yourself such words? My
poor wife!'
A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked
it back. It was desecration that _her_ name should be mentioned in that
room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his
eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.
'Thank God,' he said slowly, 'thank God for yourself and me that I
_love_ my wife! I am not worthy of her--doubly unworthy, since it has
been possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was
ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and
dishonour her! But worthy or not---- No!--no matter! Madame de
Netteville, let me go, and forget that such a person exists.'
She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the
face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude
with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realised what
she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between
herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding
him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she waved
her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, passed her,
and the door shut.
* * * * *
For nearly an hour afterwards Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly
through the darkness and silence of the park.
The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling in
the grip of dark implacable things, upheld by a single thread above that
moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual life
sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man realises
within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all
things hideous and vile. '_Save for the grace of God_,' he says to
himself, shuddering, 'save only for the grace of God----'
Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he had
just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a stinging
self-reproach--all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to
others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of love
and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human
creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason
against both?
Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all
the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of
effort--a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been
cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to
maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?
All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment
in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential
action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been
pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made
mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain
to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.
One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning--to keep his
wife's love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral
lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame!
Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside
interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to
have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no
matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the
more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded
deep on the rock of personal love and duty?
Oh! let him go back to her!--wrestle with her, open his heart again, try
new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of _her_ trial has
been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible
to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature;
he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene
he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of
remorseful love.
* * * * *
So he sped homewards at last through the noise of Oxford Street, seeing,
hearing nothing. He opened his own door, and let himself into the dim,
silent house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment
of his life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs
and softly turned the handle of her room.
Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide open.
The free loosely-growing branches of the plane trees made a dark,
delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air came
to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the
window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and
walked towards him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that
something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused breathless,
expectant.
She came to him. She linked her cold trembling fingers round his neck.
'Robert, I have been waiting so long--it was so late! I thought'--and
she choked down a sob--'perhaps something has happened to him, we are
separated for ever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr.
Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so
hard! I have broken my vow. I don't deserve it; but--_Robert!_----'
She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which
fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little
of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of
woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of
her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband's arms.
He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He
led her to her chair, and, kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the
emotion of both would let him, to make her realise what was in his _own_
heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her.
Without a mention of Madame de Netteville's name, indeed! _That_ horror
she should never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed
his poignant sense of something half-jeopardised and wholly recovered;
it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it
as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making
force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would
hear nothing of his self-blame--nothing. She put her hand across his
lips.
'I have seen things as they are, Robert,' she said very simply; 'while I
have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flaxman left me. You
were right--I _would_ not understand. And, in a sense, I shall never
understand. I cannot change,' and her voice broke into piteousness. 'My
Lord is my Lord always; but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say what you
will! _That_ is what has been hidden from me; that is what my trouble
has taught me; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words. _It is
the spirit that quickeneth._ I should never have felt it so, but for
this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering in strange places,
through strange thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I have
dared to think He had but one, the one I knew. I have dared'--and she
faltered--'to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh! I lay there so long in
the dark downstairs, seeing you by that bed; I heard your voice, I crept
to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was--He was! Leave me that
comfort! What are you saying? Wrong--you? Unkind? Your wife knows
nothing of it. Oh, did you think when you came in just now before dinner
that I didn't care, that I had a heart of stone? Did you think I had
broken my solemn promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell? So I have,
a hundred times over. I made it in ignorance; I had not counted the
cost--how could I? It was all so new, so strange. I dare not make it
again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. But oh! take me
back into your life! Hold me there! Remind me always of this night;
convict me out of my own mouth! But I _will_ learn my lesson; I will
learn to hear the two voices, the voice that speaks to you and the voice
that speaks to me--I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been
appointed me.'
Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back in her
chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish touch over his
hair.
'But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. Words are
nothing.'
Strange ending to a day of torture! As she towered above him in the
dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of nature all dissolved,
lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, he thought of the man who
passed through the place of sin, and the place of expiation, and saw at
last the rosy light creeping along the East, caught the white moving
figures, and that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air,
which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of
those 'shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.' For
eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant.
Dante knew it when he talked of '_quella que imparadisa la mia mente_.'
Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands,
whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of
personality are beaten down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit.
CHAPTER XLIV
The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we
have followed for so long was over and done with. Henceforward to the
end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as of old.
But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert than on
Catherine. Afterwards she gradually came to feel, running all through