Robert Elsmere
By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the
night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches
of the park; the trees shone silverly in the cold light, their black
shadows cast along the grass. Robert found himself quartered in the
Stuart room, where James II. had slept, and where the tartan hangings of
the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls
and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal
preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by
way of distracting his thoughts a little from the squire, and that other
tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took
from his coat-pocket a French _Anthologie_ which had been Catherine's
birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.
Then he slept profoundly--the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found
himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange
noises in his ears.
A cry 'Help!' resounded through the wide empty galleries.
He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the
squire's room.
The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At
that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the squire, ran up.
'My God, sir!' he said, deadly white, 'another attack!'
The squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room
adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.
They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white
figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger.
Those old bloodshot eyes--those wrinkled hands on the throat of the
doctor--horrible!
They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the squire's
room. Then Robert and Benson got the squire back by main force. The
whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron.
Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will
mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson
managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them
they got it swallowed.
But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have had
time to work, the squire shrank together like a puppet of which the
threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors'
hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the
January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white
visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud
breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.
Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw
himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow
of him on the wall, emphasising, as though in mockery, the long straight
back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage.
But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever
spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.
'The last--the last!' he said, choked, the tears falling down his lined
cheeks on to the squire's hand. 'He can never rally from this. And I was
fool enough to think yesterday I had pulled him through!'
Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief; then he looked up at Robert.
'He wouldn't have Benson to-night. I slept in the next room with the
door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him moving. I was up in an instant,
and found him standing by that door, peering through, bare-footed, a
wind like ice coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. "_My
father_," he said--"_my father_--he went that way--what do _you_ want
here? Keep back!" I threw myself on him; he had something sharp which
scratched me on the temple; I got that away from him, but it was his
hands'--and the old man shuddered. 'I thought they would have done for
me before any one could hear, and that then he would kill himself as his
father did.'
Again he hung over the figure on the bed--his own withered hand stroking
that of the squire with a yearning affection.
'When was the last attack?' asked Robert sadly.
'A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere, he
suffered. And he's been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no one to please
him with his food--to put his cushions right--to coax him up a bit, and
that--and his poor sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course
he would stand to it he liked to be alone. But I'll never believe men
are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a
wife or a child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir,
when you went away. Not that he'd say a word, but he moped. His books
didn't seem to please him, nor anything else. I've just broke my heart
over him this last year.'
There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round with the shapes
of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken effect. The squire's
countenance was no longer convulsed. The great brow was calm; a more
than common dignity and peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert
bent over him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away: the dying scholar
and thinker lay before him.
'Will he rally?' he asked, under his breath.
Meyrick shook his head.
'I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. The heart is
failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, Mr. Elsmere, you
go--go and sleep. Benson and I'll watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir.
I'm used to a rough-and-tumble life. But you go. If there's a change
we'll wake you.'
Elsmere bent down and kissed the squire's forehead tenderly, as a son
might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept
away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that
sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.
It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew
back the curtains, made up the fire, and, wrapping himself in a fur coat
which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the
moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.
As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in.
The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness,
suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth-century tapestry
which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the wood-path? Surely
that was Catherine's figure, trailing--and that dome--strange! Was he
still walking in Grey's funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking
sadly down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under
life from the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight
of which men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder,
and he looks shuddering into it.
Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the
river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink; on
the other side were Grey and the squire. But he felt no pang of
separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join
them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harboured
image and expectation alike with perfect calm.
Then the fever-spell broke--the brain cleared--and he was terribly
himself again. Whence came it--this fresh inexorable consciousness? He
tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought,
to God's love and Catherine's. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one
hand, this fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every
nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of
his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the
poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!
'_My God! my God! no time, no future!_'
In his misery he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking
through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed with
ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with
hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an instant, beyond the bridge,
in the unearthly blue?
And quietly--heavily--like an irrevocable sentence, there came, breathed
to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words that he
had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside his
hand--words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though by
accident, the most tragic of all human cries--
'Quittez le long espoir, et les vastes pensees.'
He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing
for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but
their own.
'_Quittez--quittez--le long espoir et les vastes pensees!_'
CHAPTER LI
There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast was no long
time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in all else.
The day after Elsmere's return from Murewell, where he left the squire
still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached Bedford Square a
few hours after Robert's arrival), Edmondson came up to see him and
examine him. He discovered tubercular disease of the larynx, which
begins with slight hoarseness and weakness, and develops into one of the
most rapid forms of phthisis. In his opinion it had been originally set
up by the effects of the chill at Petites Dalles acting upon a
constitution never strong, and at that moment peculiarly susceptible to
mischief. And of course the speaking and preaching of the last four
months had done enormous harm.
It was with great outward composure that Elsmere received his _arret de
mort_ at the hands of the young doctor, who announced the result of his
examination with a hesitating lip and a voice which struggled in vain to
preserve its professional calm. He knew too much of medicine himself to
be deceived by Edmondson's optimist remarks as to the possible effect of
a warm climate like Algiers on his condition. He sat down, resting his
head on his hands a moment; then, wringing Edmondson's hand, he went out
feebly to find his wife.
Catherine had been waiting in the dining-room, her whole soul one dry
tense misery. She stood looking out of the window taking curious heed of
a Jewish wedding that was going on in the square, of the preposterous
bouquets of the coachman and the gaping circle of errand-boys. How
pinched the bride looked in the north wind!
When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come in--her young
husband, to whom she had been married not yet four years--with that
indescribable look in the eyes which seemed to divine and confirm all
those terrors which had been shaking her during her agonised waiting,
there followed a moment between them which words cannot render. When it
ended--that half-articulate convulsion of love and anguish--she found
herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on her breast, his hand
clasping hers.
'Do you wish me to go, Catherine?' he asked her gently,--'to Algiers?'
Her eyes implored for her.
'Then I will,' he said, but with a long sigh. 'It will only prolong it
two months,' he thought; 'and does one not owe it to the people for whom
one has tried to live, to make a brave end among them? Ah, no! no! those
two months are _hers_!'
So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary preparations be
made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could not wring hers by staying.
After his interview with Robert, and his further interview with
Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommendations and
directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed to make the true
state of the case more ghastly plain to the wife than ever, Edmondson
went off to Flaxman.
Flaxman heard his news with horror.
'A _bad_ case, you say--advanced?'
'A bad case!' Edmondson repeated gloomily. 'He has been fighting against
it too long under that absurd delusion of clergyman's throat. If only