Robert Elsmere
* * * * *
'December 22.
'I believe I shall soon be as deep in this matter as Elsmere. In Elgood
Street great preparations are going on for Christmas. But it will be a
new sort of Christmas. We shall hear very little, it seems, of angels
and shepherds, and a great deal of the humble childhood of a little
Jewish boy whose genius grown to maturity transformed the Western world.
To see Elsmere, with his boys and girls about him, trying to make them
feel themselves the heirs and fellows of the Nazarene child, to make
them understand something of the lessons that child must have learnt,
the sights he must have seen, and the thoughts that must have come to
him, is a spectacle of which I will not miss more than I can help. Don't
imagine, however, that I am converted exactly!--but only that I am more
interested and stimulated than I have been for years. And don't expect
me for Christmas. I shall stay here.'
* * * * *
'New Year's Day.
'I am writing from the library of the New Brotherhood. The amount of
activity, social, educational, religious, of which this great building
promises to be the centre is already astonishing. Everything, of course
including the constitution of the infant society, is as yet purely
tentative and experimental. But for a scheme so young, things are
falling into working order with wonderful rapidity. Each department is
worked by committees under the central council. Elsmere, of course, is
_ex-officio_ chairman of a large proportion; Wardlaw, Mackay, I, and a
few other fellows "run" the rest for the present. But each committee
contains working-men; and it is the object of everybody concerned to
make the workman element more and more real and efficient. What with the
"tax" on the members which was fixed by a general meeting, and the
contributions from outside, the society already commands a fair income.
But Elsmere is anxious not to attempt too much at once, and will go
slowly and train his workers.
'Music, it seems, is to be a great feature in the future. I have my own
projects as to this part of the business, which, however, I forbid you
to guess at.
'By the rules of the Brotherhood, every member is bound to some work in
connection with it during the year, but little or much, as he or she is
able. And every meeting, every undertaking of whatever kind, opens with
the special "word" or formula of the society, "This do in remembrance of
Me."'
* * * * *
'January 6.
'Besides the Sunday lectures, Elsmere is pegging away on Saturday
evenings at "The History of the Moral Life in Man." It is a remarkable
course, and very largely attended by people of all sorts. He tries to
make it an exposition of the leading principles of the new movement, of
"that continuous and only revelation of God in life and nature," which
is in reality the basis of his whole thought. By the way, the letters
that are pouring in upon him from all parts are extraordinary. They show
an amount and degree of interest in ideas of the kind which are
surprising to a Laodicean like me. But he is not surprised--says he
always expected it--and that there are thousands who only want a
rallying-point.
'His personal effect, the love that is felt for him, the passion and
energy of the nature--never has our generation seen anything to equal
it. As you perceive, I am reduced to taking it all seriously, and don't
know what to make of him or myself.
'_She_, poor soul! is now always with him, comes down with him day after
day, and works away. She no more believes in his _ideas_, I think, than
she ever did; but all her antagonism is gone. In the midst of the stir
about him her face often haunts me. It has changed lately; she is no
longer a young woman, but so refined, so spiritual!
'But he is ailing and fragile. _There_ is the one cloud on a scene that
fills me with increasing wonder and reverence.'
CHAPTER L
One cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of
the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a young Dr. Edmondson, an able
young physician, just set up for himself as a consultant, who had only
lately attached himself to Elsmere, and was now helping him with
eagerness to organise a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman
exchanged a few words on Elsmere's lecture, and then the doctor said
abruptly,--
'I don't like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been hoarse like
that?'
'More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself,
and talks of clergyman's throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once
in the country.'
'Clergyman's throat?' Edmondson shook his head dubiously. 'It may be. I
wish he would let me overhaul him.'
'I wish he would!' said Flaxman devoutly. 'I will see what I can do. I
will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.'
Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. As they entered
the study she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite passion
gleaming in her face.
'You did not explain Him! You never will!'
He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his
face changed, blanched before her--he seemed to gasp for breath--she was
only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon
of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him
all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine's look
would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures
which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste
calamity and grief to the very dregs.
'Robert, to-morrow you _will_ see a doctor?' she implored him when at
last he was safely in bed--white, but smiling.
He nodded.
'Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,' he said, in a
voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.
Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed
to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by ill luck, with the
morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the squire, but
about the squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to
Murewell. The squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on
the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing Elsmere
any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had
absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent
to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was
from old Meyrick. 'The squire has had another bad attack, and is _much_
weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you.
If you can, come to-morrow.'
'_His mind is clear again!_' Horrified by the words and by the images
they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang
up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently
appeared downstairs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for
the morning, was going through some household business.
'I _must_ go, I _must_ go!' he said as he handed her the letter.
'Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!'
Catherine looked at him in despair.
'Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr.
Edmondson.'
'Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my
voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good.' She turned
away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions,
but it was useless. His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt
it a call impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and
Robert drove off to Waterloo.
Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter's day. Robert
breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every
landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year
and a half since he had travelled it. He forgot his weakness, the
exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed
him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day
and was going back to Catherine!
At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.
'Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then you may drive on
my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.'
The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of
the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared
at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a
hallucination--his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so
easy and swift to-day?
By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and
Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the
driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighbourhood, and he
jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a
boy.
'Go on, Tom; see if I am not there as soon as you.'
'Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself as his horse
shambled off. 'Seems as spry as a lark all the same.'
Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were
singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered
with timid half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so
beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he
was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession
to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of
the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or
reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth's
bareness everywhere--curling mists--blue points of distant hill--a gray
luminous depth of sky.
The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old
anguish he stood and blessed God!--not for any personal happiness, but
simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of
common living a revelation.
Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up
the lane leading to the vicarage. One look! he might not be able to
leave the squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just
inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked
child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the
brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing
with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal!
Besides, how could the boys have free access except to that ground-floor
room? And all that pretty stretch of grass under the acacia had been cut
up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer
with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to
Catherine.
He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this
realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his
undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In
that upper room he had lain through that agonised night of crisis; the
dawn-twitterings of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And
there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile
End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not
lie in the wet any longer--thank God! Was there time just to run down to
Irwin's cottage, to have a look at the Institute?
He had been standing on the farther side of the road from the rectory
that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor's
ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him
that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath.
The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a
drowning thing. When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered,