Robert Elsmere
acknowledgment in his look and gesture. But in reality a pang ran
through the fiery soul. It was 'the personal estimate,' after all, that
was shaping their future and his and the idealist was up in arms for his
idea, sublimely jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its
power and place.
A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the possible
outlines of a possible organisation, and as to the observances which
might be devised to mark its religious character. As it flowed on the
atmosphere grew more and more electric. A new passion, though still
timid and awestruck, seemed to shine from the looks of the men standing
or sitting round the central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under
the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy about him; and when
Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon him an almost
awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future.
He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he sank into a
chair and fainted. He was probably not unconscious very long, but after
he had struggled back to his senses, and was lying stretched on the sofa
among the books with which it was littered, the solitary candle in the
big room throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression
overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of death.
How was it he had come to feel so ill? Suddenly, as he looked back over
the preceding weeks, the physical weakness and disturbance which had
marked them, and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed
as possible, took shape, spectre-like, in his mind.
And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against weakness and
disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, his head in his hands.
'Rest--strength,' he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, 'for
the work's sake!'
He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine till the
morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to take him and the
babe off without delay to the Norman coast, vowing that he would lounge
and idle for six whole weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks,
she gradually got from him the story of the night before. As he told it,
his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual
drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her.
The contrast, however, between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through
him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart
within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one sensitive
dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed
by a strange and desolate sense of her comparatively small share in this
ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as
though he were no longer hers--as though a craving hungry world, whose
needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her,
claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind
and delicate frame.
As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take them in
whether for protest or sympathy. She could think only of where to go,
what doctor to consult, how she could persuade him to stay away long
enough.
There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere announced that
he must go off for a while. He so announced it that everybody who heard
him understood that his temporary withdrawal was to be the mere
preparation for a great effort--the vigil before the tourney; and the
eager friendliness with which he was met sent him off in good heart.
* * * * *
Three or four days later he, Catherine and Mary were at Petites Dalles,
a little place on the Norman coast, near Fecamp, with which he had first
made acquaintance years before, when he was at Oxford.
Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered
'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was
fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock,
Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy
silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a
blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into
a quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they
would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of
the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for
the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who
wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and
pluck of the two-year-old English _bebe_. By eleven the heat out of
doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back--father and mother
and trailing child--past the hotels on the _plage_, along the irregular
village lane, to the little house where they had established
themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French _bonne_ to look after them;
would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the _dejeuner_ waiting
for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating
from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual
warfare. Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be
tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep,
till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated
one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of
mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless
_salon_, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only
luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but
quite another _comedie humaine_ unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in
the contriving optimist mind.
Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it
could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College
de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist or two, and a
sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among
them, _more suo_, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the
most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through
many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new
acquaintances.
But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and
mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which
was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed
to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy
country lay all round them--the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of
white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees
which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On
the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even
for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half
tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their
own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the
patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze,
there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them
poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded
happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.
One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little
dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard
the purring sound of the night-jar, and immediately after the bird
itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they
caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.
Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears
dropped on to her cheeks.
'Did you hear it, Robert?'
He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her
always smote him to the heart.
'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if
you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for
myself, but----'
For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?--of
youth, of hope, of memory?
Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-coloured
waves, while he held her hand close and tenderly. No--she was not
unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone for ever out of that early joy. Her
life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things.
It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter
self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her
husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had
conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her
present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married
life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy
of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there
was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment
from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the
epoch-making fact of our day. 'Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher,
'is sin, and implies it': and while he speaks, the saint in the
unbeliever gently smiles down his argument, and suddenly, in the rebel
of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.
CHAPTER XLVII
Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose's summer, indeed, was
much varied by visits to country houses--many of them belonging to
friends and acquaintances of the Flaxman family--by concerts, and the
demands of several new and exciting artistic friendships. But she was
seldom loth to come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled
house. Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed by any
consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as intolerable to her
as in past days.
The girl was not herself; there was visible in her not only that general
softening and deepening of character which had been the consequence of
her trouble in the spring, but a painful _ennui_ she could hardly
disguise, a longing for she knew not what. She was beginning to take the
homage paid to her gift and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was
in no sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision,
curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when
she came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long
walks, breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to their
austerest solitudes alone, as though haunted by that profound saying of
Obermann, 'Man is not made for enjoyment only--_la tristesse fait aussi
partie de ses vastes besoins_.'
What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonely moments, especially
in those moments among the high fells, beside some little tarn or
streamlet, while the sheets of mist swept by her, or the great clouds
dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of
Langham--of that first thrill of passion which had passed through her,
delusive and abortive, like one of those first thrills of spring which
bring out the buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her
again 'a moral east wind was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought
of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her
heartstrings. But was it really she, really this very Rose, who had
rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast? She felt a sort
of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She must surely be
a poor creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and have
left so little trace behind?
And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised to the blind
friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far afield. Little vignettes
of London would come and go on the inner retina; smiles and sighs would
follow one another.
'_How kind he was that time! how amusing this!_'