Robert Elsmere
his views of life, a note sterner, deeper, maturer than any present
there before. The reasons for it were unknown to her, though sometimes
her own tender, ignorant remorse supplied them. But they were hidden
deep in Elsmere's memory.
A few days afterwards he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had
left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her
again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He saw
things as they were--without morbidness. But a certain boyish
carelessness of mood he never afterwards quite recovered. Men and women
of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and more
tragic--moral truths more awful--to him. It was the penalty of a
highly-strung nature set with exclusive intensity towards certain
spiritual ends.
On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman which
had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied Elsmere to his Sunday
lecture. He tried a little, tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went,
shrinking and yet determined.
She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon of his in
Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brooding had been burnt
into her mind. The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the
high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched quick-eyed
artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved,
implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the
Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was
glad to be there.
Afterwards Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that 'any fool
could see he was getting done up,' insisted on taking the children's
class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised a
little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden
perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had
returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm
word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there
after all?
Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously coddled, and that
Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off to
the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward,
Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them
into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the
river; that, or his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into
Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart,
with flashes of her old sweet gaiety, as she had not talked for months.
Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final
restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life,
in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile,
the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this
afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them,
the trees were green for them!
* * * * *
He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to
him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It
seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that
there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it.
Every day some old St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and
with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left
Oxford he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which
he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man
of our time, Henry Grey's influence was not primarily an influence of
personal contact. His mere life, that he was there, on English soil,
within a measurable distance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments
one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no
longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to conduct,
every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds
a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales,
nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintly life
grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they have always
clung to each other, to the visible and the tangible; as the elders of
Miletus, though the Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set
their feet therein, 'sorrowing most of all that they should see his face
no more.'
The accounts grew worse--all friends shut out, no possibility of last
words--the whole of Oxford moved and sorrowing. Then at last, on a
Friday, came the dreaded expected letter: 'He is gone! He died early
this morning, without pain, conscious almost to the end. He mentioned
several friends by name, you among them, during the night. The funeral
is to be on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.'
Sad and memorable day! By an untoward chance it fell in Commemoration
week, and Robert found the familiar streets teeming with life and noise,
under a showery uncertain sky, which every now and then would send the
bevies of lightly-gowned maidens, with their mothers and attendant
squires, skurrying for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements
glistening. He walked up to St. Anselm's--found, as he expected, that
the first part of the service was to be in the chapel, the rest in the
cemetery, and then mounted the well-known staircase to Langham's rooms.
Langham was apparently in his bedroom. Lunch was on the table--the
familiar commons, the familiar toast-and-water. There, in a recess, were
the same splendid wall maps of Greece he had so often consulted after
lecture. There was the little case of coins, with the gold Alexanders he
had handled with so much covetous reverence at eighteen. Outside, the
irregular quadrangle with its dripping trees stretched before him; the
steps of the new Hall, now the shower was over, were crowded with gowned
figures. It might have been yesterday that he had stood in that room,
blushing with awkward pleasure under Mr. Grey's first salutation.
The bedroom door opened and Langham came in.
'Elsmere! But of course I expected you.'
His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was a flatness in
it, an absence of positive cordiality which was new to him in any
greeting of Langham's to himself, and had a chilling effect upon him.
The face, too, was changed. Tint and expression were both dulled; its
marble-like sharpness and finish had coarsened a little, and the figure,
which had never possessed the erectness of youth, had now the pinched
look and the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian.
'I did not write to you, Elsmere,' he said immediately, as though in
anticipation of what the other would be sure to say; 'I knew nothing but
what the bulletins said, and I was told that Cathcart wrote to you. It
is many years now since I have seen much of Grey. Sit down and have some
lunch. We have time, but not too much time.'
Robert took a few mouthfuls. Langham was difficult, talked
disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon painfully conscious that
the old sympathetic bond between them no longer existed. Presently,
Langham, as though with an effort to remember, asked after Catherine,
then inquired what he was doing in the way of writing, and neither of
them mentioned the name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat
spasmodically talking, in reality expectant. And at last the sound
present already in both minds made itself heard--the first long solitary
stroke of the chapel bell.
Robert covered his eyes.
'Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced us first?'
'I remember,' replied the other abruptly. Then, with a half-cynical,
half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he said, after a pause, 'What
a faculty of hero-worship you have always had, Elsmere!'
'Do you know anything of the end?' Robert asked him presently, as that
tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feeling beneath more
irresistibly to the surface.
'No, I never asked!' cried Langham, with sudden harsh animation. 'What
purpose could be served? Death should be avoided by the living. We have
no business with it. Do what we will, we cannot rehearse our own parts.
And the sight of other men's performances helps us no more than the
sight of a great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do for us is to
imperil the little nerve, break through the little calm, we have left.'
Elsmere's hand dropped, and he turned round to him with a flashing
smile.
'Ah--I know it now--you loved him still.'
Langham, who was standing, looked down on him sombrely, yet more
indulgently.
'How much you always made of feeling,' he said after a little pause, 'in
a world where, according to me, our chief object should be not to feel!'
Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another minute the two
made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, where the rain was
sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden voice of the bell rolled, from
pause to pause, above the gowned figures, spreading thence in wide waves
of mourning sound over Oxford.
The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic dream. The
lines of undergraduate faces, the provost's white head, the voice of the
chaplain reading, the full male unison of the voices replying--how they
carried him back to the day when as a lad from school he had sat on one
of the chancel benches beside his mother, listening for the first time
to the subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the
provost's preaching! Just opposite to where he sat now with Langham,
Grey had sat that first afternoon; the freshman's curious eyes had been
drawn again and again to the dark massive head, the face with its look
of reposeful force, of righteous strength. During the lesson from
Corinthians, Elsmere's thoughts were irrelevantly busy with all sorts of
mundane memories of the dead. What was especially present to him was a
series of Liberal election meetings in which Grey had taken a warm part,
and in which he himself had helped just before he took Orders. A hundred
odd, incongruous details came back to Robert now with poignant force.
Grey had been to him at one time primarily the professor, the
philosopher, the representative of all that was best in the life of the
University; now, fresh from his own grapple with London and its life,
what moved him most was the memory of the citizen, the friend and
brother of common man, the thinker who had never shirked action in the
name of thought, for whom conduct had been from beginning to end the
first reality.
The procession through the streets afterwards, which conveyed the body
of this great son of modern Oxford to its last resting-place in the
citizens' cemetery on the western side of the town, will not soon be
forgotten, even in a place which forgets notoriously soon. All the
University was there, all the town was there. Side by side with men
honourably dear to England, who had carried with them into one or other
of the great English careers the memory of the teacher, were men who had
known from day to day the cheery modest helper in a hundred local
causes; side by side with the youth of Alma Mater went the poor of
Oxford; tradesmen and artisans followed or accompanied the group of
gowned and venerable figures, representing the Heads of Houses and the
Professors, or mingled with the slowly pacing crowd of Masters; while
along the route groups of visitors and merrymakers, young men in
flannels or girls in light dresses, stood with suddenly grave faces here
and there, caught by the general wave of mourning, and wondering what
such a spectacle might mean.
Robert, losing sight of Langham as they left the chapel, found his arm
grasped by young Cathcart, his correspondent. The man was a junior