Robert Elsmere
Fellow who had attached himself to Grey during the two preceding years
with especial devotion. Robert had only a slight knowledge of him, but
there was something in his voice and grip which made him feel at once
infinitely more at home with him at this moment than he had felt with
the old friend of his undergraduate years.
They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain came on again, and
the long black crowd stretched before them was lashed by the driving
gusts. As they went along, Cathcart told him all he wanted to know.
'The night before the end he was perfectly calm and conscious. I told
you he mentioned your name among the friends to whom he sent his
good-bye. He thought for everybody. For all those of his house he left
the most minute and tender directions. He forgot nothing. And all with
such extraordinary simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a
journey! In the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a North-country woman
whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was much attached,
was sitting with him. I was there too. She was a beautiful old figure in
her white cap and kerchief, and it seemed to please him to lie and look
at her. "It'll not be for long, Henry," she said to him once. "I'm
seventy-seven this spring. I shall come to you soon." He made no reply,
and his silence seemed to disturb her. I don't fancy she had known much
of his mind of late years. "You'll not be doubting the Lord's goodness,
Henry?" she said to him, with the tears in her eyes. "No," he said, "no,
never. Only it seems to be His Will, we should be certain of
nothing--_but Himself_! I ask no more." I shall never forget the accent
of those words: they were the breath of his inmost life. If ever man was
_Gottbetrunken_ it was he--and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be
true, beyond what the intellect could grasp!'
Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The rain beat down
on the black concourse of mourners. But there were blue spaces in the
drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light played at intervals over the
Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and over the butter-cupped river meadows,
where the lush hay-grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his
left, the provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was
reading the rest of the service.
As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. 'My friend, my
master,' cried the yearning filial heart, 'oh, give me something of
yourself to take back into life, something to brace me through this
darkness of our ignorance, something to keep hope alive as you kept it
to the end!'
And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a last message,
words which years before he had found marked in a little book of
Meditations borrowed from Grey's table--words long treasured and often
repeated--
'Amid a world of forgetfulness and decay, in the sight of his own
shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the tomb, he alone who
has found his soul in losing it, who in singleness of mind _has lived in
order to love and understand_, will find that the God who is near to him
as his own conscience has a face of light and love!'
Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the triumphant
outbursts of the Christian service.
'Man's hope,' he thought, 'has grown humbler than this. It keeps now a
more modest mien in the presence of the Eternal Mystery; but is it in
truth less real, less sustaining? Let Grey's trust answer for me.'
He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid street
outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round for Langham.
Instead, he found Cathcart, who had just come up with him.
'Is Langham behind?' he asked. 'I want a word with him before I go.'
'Is he here?' asked the other with a change of expression.
'But of course! He was in the chapel. How could you----'
'I thought he would probably go away,' said Cathcart with some
bitterness. 'Grey made many efforts to get him to come and see him
before he became so desperately ill. Langham came once. Grey never asked
for him again.'
'It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,' said Robert troubled;
'his dread of being forced to take a line, to face anything certain and
irrevocable. I understand. He could not say good-bye to a friend to save
his life. There is no shirking that! One must either do it or leave it!'
Cathcart shrugged his shoulders, and drew a masterly little picture of
Langham's life in college. He had succeeded by the most adroit devices
in completely isolating himself both from the older and the younger men.
'He attends college-meeting sometimes, and contributes a sarcasm or two
on the cramming system of the college. He takes a constitutional to
Summertown every day on the least frequented side of the road, that he
may avoid being spoken to. And as to his ways of living, he and I happen
to have the same scout--old Dobson, you remember? And if I would let
him, he would tell me tales by the hour. He is the only man in the
University who knows anything about it. I gather from what he says that
Langham is becoming a complete valetudinarian. Everything must go
exactly by rule--his food, his work, the management of his clothes--and
any little _contretemps_ makes him ill. But the comedy is to watch him
when there is anything going on in the place that he thinks may lead to
a canvass and to any attempt to influence him for a vote. On these
occasions he goes off with automatic regularity to an hotel at West
Malvern, and only reappears when the _Times_ tells him the thing is done
with.'
Both laughed. Then Robert sighed. Weaknesses of Langham's sort may be
amusing enough to the contemptuous and unconcerned outsider. But the
general result of them, whether for the man himself or those whom he
affects, is tragic, not comic; and Elsmere had good reason for knowing
it.
Later, after a long talk with the provost, and meetings with various
other old friends, he walked down to the station, under a sky clear from
rain, and through a town gay with festal preparations. Not a sign now,
in these crowded, bustling streets, of that melancholy pageant of the
afternoon. The heroic memory had flashed for a moment like something
vivid and gleaming in the sight of all, understanding and ignorant. Now
it lay committed to a few faithful hearts, there to become one seed
among many of a new religious life in England.
On the platform Robert found himself nervously accosted by a tall
shabbily-dressed man.
'Elsmere, have you forgotten me?'
He turned and recognised a man whom he had last seen as a St. Anselm's
undergraduate--one MacNiell, a handsome rowdy young Irishman, supposed
to be clever, and decidedly popular in the college. As he stood looking
at him, puzzled by the difference between the old impression and the
new, suddenly the man's story flashed across him; he remembered some
disgraceful escapade--an expulsion.
'You came for the funeral, of course?' said the other, his face flushing
consciously.
'Yes--and you too?'
The man turned away, and something in his silence led Robert to stroll
on beside him to the open end of the platform.
'I have lost my only friend,' MacNiell said at last hoarsely. 'He took
me up when my own father would have nothing to say to me. He found me
work; he wrote to me; for years he stood between me and perdition. I am
just going out to a post in New Zealand he got for me, and next week
before I sail--I--I--am to be married--and he was to be there. He was so
pleased--he had seen her.'
It was one story out of a hundred like it, as Robert knew very well.
They talked for a few minutes, then the train loomed in the distance.
'He saved you,' said Robert, holding out his hand, 'and at a dark moment
in my own life I owed him everything. There is nothing we can do for him
in return but--to remember him! Write to me, if you can or will, from
New Zealand, for his sake.'
A few seconds later the train sped past the bare little cemetery, which
lay just beyond the line. Robert bent forward. In the pale yellow glow
of the evening he could distinguish the grave, the mound of gravel, the
planks, and some figures moving beside it. He strained his eyes till he
could see no more, his heart full of veneration, of memory, of prayer.
In himself life seemed so restless and combative. Surely he, more than
others, had need of the lofty lessons of death!
CHAPTER XLV
In the weeks which followed--weeks often of mental and physical
depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by the influence of
an overworked state he could not be got to admit--Elsmere owed much to
Hugh Flaxman's cheery sympathetic temper, and became more attached to
him than ever, and more ready than ever, should the fates deem it so, to
welcome him as a brother-in-law. However, the fates for the moment
seemed to have borrowed a leaf from Langham's book, and did not
apparently know their own minds. It says volumes for Hugh Flaxman's
general capacities as a human being that at this period he should have
had any attention to give to a friend, his position as a lover was so
dubious and difficult.
After the evening at the Workmen's Club, and as a result of further
meditation, he had greatly developed the tactics first adopted on that
occasion. He had beaten a masterly retreat, and Rose Leyburn was
troubled with him no more.
The result was that a certain brilliant young person was soon sharply
conscious of a sudden drop in the pleasures of living. Mr. Flaxman had
been the Leyburns' most constant and entertaining visitor. During the
whole of May he paid one formal call in Lerwick Gardens, and was then
entertained _tete-a-tete_ by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose's intense subsequent
annoyance, who knew perfectly well that her mother was incapable of
chattering about anything but her daughters.
He still sent flowers, but they came from his head gardener, addressed
to Mrs. Leyburn. Agnes put them in water; and Rose never gave them a
look. Rose went to Lady Helen's because Lady Helen made her, and was
much too engaging a creature to be rebuffed; but, however merry and
protracted the teas in those scented rooms might be, Mr. Flaxman's step
on the stairs, and Mr. Flaxman's hand on the curtain over the door, till
now the feature in the entertainment most to be counted on, were,
generally speaking, conspicuously absent.
He and the Leyburns met, of course; for their list of common friends was
now considerable; but Agnes, reporting matters to Catherine, could only
say that each of these occasions left Rose more irritable, and more
inclined to say biting things as to the foolish ways in which society
takes its pleasures.
Rose certainly was irritable, and at times, Agnes thought, depressed.
But as usual she was unapproachable about her own affairs, and the state
of her mind could only be somewhat dolefully gathered from the fact that
she was much less unwilling to go back to Burwood this summer than had
ever been known before.
Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman left certain other people in no doubt as to his
intentions.
'My dear aunt,' he said calmly to Lady Charlotte, 'I mean to marry Miss
Leyburn if I can at any time persuade her to have me. So much you may
take as fixed, and it will be quite waste of breath on your part to
quote dukes to me. But the other factor in the problem is by no means
fixed. Miss Leyburn won't have me at present, and as for the future I
have most salutary qualms.'
'Hugh!' interrupted Lady Charlotte angrily, 'as if you hadn't had the
mothers of London at your feet for years!'
Lady Charlotte was in a most variable frame of mind; one day hoping
devoutly that the Langham affair might prove lasting enough in its
effects to tire Hugh out; the next, outraged that a silly girl should