Robert Elsmere
required no planning to elude her. Her mind was like a stretch of wet
sand, on which all impressions are equally easy to make and equally
fugitive. He liked them all, she supposed, in spite of the comparative
scantiness of his later visits to Lerwick Gardens, or he would not have
come out of his way to see them. But as nobody suggested anything else
to her, her mind worked no further, and she was as easily beguiled after
his appearance as before it by the intricacies of some new knitting.
Things of course might have been different if Mrs. Thornburgh had
interfered again; but, as we know, poor Catherine's sorrows had raised a
whole odd host of misgivings in the mind of the vicar's wife. She
prowled nervously round Mrs. Leyburn, filled with contempt for her
placidity; but she did not attack her. She spent herself, indeed, on
Rose and Agnes, but long practice had made them adepts in the art of
baffling her; and when Mr. Flaxman went to tea at the vicarage in their
company, in spite of an absorbing desire to get at the truth, which
caused her to forget a new cap, and let fall a plate of tea-cakes, she
was obliged to confess crossly to the vicar afterwards that 'no one
could tell what a man like that was after. She supposed his manners were
very aristocratic, but for her part she liked plain people.'
On the last morning of Mr. Flaxman's stay in the valley he entered the
Burwood drive about eleven o'clock, and Rose came down the steps to meet
him. For a moment he flattered himself that her disturbed looks were due
to the nearness of their farewells.
'There is something wrong,' he said, softly detaining her hand a
moment--so much, at least, was in his right.
'Robert is ill. There has been an accident at Petites Dalles. He has
been in bed for a week. They hope to get home in a few days. Catherine
writes bravely, but she is evidently very low.'
Hugh Flaxman's face fell. Certain letters he had received from Elsmere
in July had lain heavy on his mind ever since, so pitiful was the
half-conscious revelation in them of an incessant physical struggle. An
accident! Elsmere was in no state for accidents. What miserable
ill-luck!
Rose read him Catherine's account. It appeared that on a certain stormy
day a swimmer had been observed in difficulties among the rocks skirting
the northern side of the Petites Dalles bay. The old _baigneur_ of the
place, owner of the still primitive _etablissement des bains_, without
stopping to strip, or even to take off his heavy boots, went out to the
man in danger with a plank. The man took the plank and was safe. Then to
the people watching, it became evident that the _baigneur_ himself was
in peril. He became unaccountably feeble in the water, and the cry rose
that he was sinking. Robert, who happened to be bathing near, ran off to
the spot, jumped in, and swam out. By this time the old man had drifted
some way. Robert succeeded, however, in bringing him in, and then, amid
an excited crowd, headed by the _baigneur's_ wailing family, they
carried the unconscious form on to the higher beach. Elsmere was certain
life was not extinct, and sent off for a doctor. Meanwhile no one seemed
to have any common sense, or any knowledge of how to proceed, but
himself. For two hours he stayed on the beach in his dripping
bathing-clothes, a cold wind blowing, trying every device known to him:
rubbing, hot bottles, artificial respiration. In vain. The man was too
old and too bloodless. Directly after the doctor arrived he breathed his
last, amid the wild and passionate grief of wife and children.
Robert, with a cloak flung about him, still stayed to talk to the
doctor, to carry one of the _baigneur's_ sobbing grandchildren to its
mother in the village. Then, at last, Catherine got hold of him, and he
submitted to be taken home, shivering, and deeply depressed by the
failure of his efforts. A violent gastric and lung chill declared itself
almost immediately, and for three days he had been anxiously ill.
Catherine, miserable, distrusting the local doctor, and not knowing how
to get hold of a better one, had never left him night or day. 'I had not
the heart to write even to you,' she wrote to her mother. 'I could think
of nothing but trying one thing after another. Now he has been in bed
eight days, and is much better. He talks of getting up to-morrow, and
declares he must go home next week. I have tried to persuade him to stay
here another fortnight, but the thought of his work distresses him so
much that I hardly dare urge it. I cannot say how I dread the journey.
He is not fit for it in any way.'
Rose folded up the letter, her face softened to a most womanly gravity.
Hugh Flaxman paused a moment outside the door, his hands on his sides,
considering.
'I shall not go on to Scotland,' he said; 'Mrs. Elsmere must not be
left. I will go off there at once.'
In Rose's soberly-sweet looks as he left her, Hugh Flaxman saw for an
instant, with the stirring of a joy as profound as it was delicate, not
the fanciful enchantress of the day before, but his wife that was to be.
And yet she held him to his bargain. All that his lips touched as he
said good-bye was the little bunch of yellow briar roses she gave him
from her belt.
Thirty hours later he was descending the long hill from Sassetot to
Petites Dalles. It was the 1st of September. A chilly west wind blew up
the dust before him and stirred the parched leafage of the valley. He
knocked at the door, of which the woodwork was all peeled and blistered
by the sun. Catherine herself opened it.
'This is kind--this is like yourself!' she said, after a first stare of
amazement, when he had explained himself. 'He is in there, much better.'
Robert looked up, stupefied, as Hugh Flaxman entered. But he sprang up
with his old brightness.
'Well, this _is_ friendship! What on earth brings you here, old fellow?
Why aren't you in the stubbles celebrating St. Partridge?'
Hugh Flaxman said what he had to say very shortly, but so as to make
Robert's eyes gleam, and to bring his thin hand with a sort of caressing
touch upon Flaxman's shoulder.
'I shan't try to thank you--Catherine can if she likes. How relieved she
will be about that bothering journey of ours! However, I am really ever
so much better. It was very sharp while it lasted; and the doctor no
great shakes. But there never was such a woman as my wife; she pulled me
through! And now then, sir, just kindly confess yourself a little more
plainly. What brought you and my sisters-in-law together? You need not
try and persuade _me_ that Long Whindale is the natural gate of the
Lakes, or the route intended by Heaven from London to Scotland, though I
have no doubt you tried that little fiction on them.'
Hugh Flaxman laughed, and sat down very deliberately.
'I am glad to see that illness has not robbed you of that perspicacity
for which you are so remarkable, Elsmere. Well, the day before yesterday
I asked your sister Rose to marry me. She----'
'Go on, man,' cried Robert, exasperated by his pause.
'I don't know how to put it,' said Flaxman calmly. 'For six months we
are to be rather more than friends, and a good deal less than _fiances_.
I am to be allowed to write to her. You may imagine how seductive it is
to one of the worst and laziest letter-writers in the three kingdoms
that his fortunes in love should be made to depend on his
correspondence. I may scold her _if_ she gives me occasion. And in six
months, as one says to a publisher, "the agreement will be open to
revision."'
Robert stared.
'And you are not engaged?'
'Not as I understand it,' replied Flaxman. 'Decidedly not!' he added
with energy, remembering that very platonic farewell.
Robert sat with his hands on his knees, ruminating.
'A fantastic thing, the modern young woman! Still I think I can
understand. There may have been more than mere caprice in it.'
His eye met his friend's significantly.
'I suppose so,' said Flaxman quietly. Not even for Robert's benefit was
he going to reveal any details of that scene on High Fell 'Never mind,
old fellow, I am content. And, indeed, _faute de mieux_, I should be
content with anything that brought me nearer to her, were it but by the
thousandth of an inch.'
Robert grasped his hand affectionately.
'Catherine,' he called through the door, 'never mind the supper; let it
burn. Flaxman brings news.'
Catherine listened to the story with amazement. Certainly her ways would
never have been as her sister's.
'Are we supposed to know?' she asked, very naturally.
'She never forbade me to tell,' said Flaxman smiling. 'I think, however,
if I were you, I should say nothing about it--yet. I told her it was
part of our bargain that _she_ should explain my letters to Mrs.
Leyburn. I gave her free leave to invent any fairy tale she pleased, but
it was to be _her_ invention, not mine.
Neither Robert nor Catherine were very well pleased. But there was
something reassuring as well as comic in the stoicism with which Flaxman
took his position. And clearly the matter must be left to manage itself.
Next morning the weather had improved. Robert, his hand on Flaxman's
arm, got down to the beach. Flaxman watched him critically, did not like
some of his symptoms, but thought on the whole he must be recovering at
the normal rate, considering how severe the attack had been.
'What do you think of him?' Catherine asked him next day, with all her
soul in her eyes. They had left Robert established in a sunny nook, and
were strolling on along the sands.
'I think you must get him home, call in a first-rate doctor, and keep
him quiet,' said Flaxman. 'He will be all right presently.'
'How _can_ we keep him quiet?' said Catherine, with a momentary despair
in her fine pale face. 'All day long and all night long he is thinking
of his work. It is like something fiery burning the heart out of him.'
Flaxman felt the truth of the remark during the four days of calm autumn
weather he spent with them before the return journey. Robert would talk
to him for hours, now on the sands, with the gray infinity of sea before
them, now pacing the bounds of their little room till fatigue made him
drop heavily into his long chair; and the burden of it all was the
religious future of the working-class. He described the scene in the
Club, and brought out the dreams swarming in his mind, presenting them
for Flaxman's criticism, and dealing with them himself, with that
startling mixture of acute common-sense and eloquent passion which had
always made him so effective as an initiator. Flaxman listened dubiously
at first, as he generally listened to Elsmere, and then was carried
away, not by the beliefs, but by the man. _He_ found his pleasure in
dallying with the magnificent _possibility_ of the Church; doubt with
him applied to all propositions, whether positive or negative; and he
had the dislike of the aristocrat and the cosmopolitan for the
provincialisms of religious dissent. Political dissent or social reform
was another matter. Since the Revolution, every generous child of the
century has been open to the fascination of political or social Utopias.
But religion! _What--what is truth?_ Why not let the old things alone?
However, it was through the social passion, once so real in him, and
still living, in spite of disillusion and self-mockery, that Robert
caught him, had in fact been slowly gaining possession of him all these
months.
'Well,' said Flaxman one day, 'suppose I grant you that Christianity of
the old sort shows strong signs of exhaustion, even in England, and in
spite of the Church expansion we hear so much about; and suppose I
believe with you that things will go badly without religion--what then?
Who can have a religion for the asking?'