Robert Elsmere
men would not insist upon being their own doctors! And, of course, that
going down to Murewell the other day was madness. I shall go with him to
Algiers, and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, that
career, cut short! This is a queer sort of world!'
When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the afternoon, he went like
a man going himself to execution. In the hall he met Catherine.
'You have seen Dr. Edmondson?' she asked, pale and still, except for a
little nervous quivering of the lip.
He stooped and kissed her hand.
'Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come after if you will
have me. The climate may do wonders.'
She looked at him with the most heart-rending of smiles.
'Will you go in to Robert? He is in the study.'
He went, in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up on the sofa,
apparently reading.
'Don't--don't, old fellow,' he said affectionately, as Flaxman almost
broke down. 'It comes to all of us sooner or later. Whenever it comes we
think it too soon. I believe I have been sure of it for some time. We
are such strange creatures! It has been so present to me lately that
life was too good to last. You remember the sort of feeling one used to
have as a child about some treat in the distance--that it was too much
joy--that something was sure to come between you and it? Well, in a
sense, I have had my joy, the first-fruits of it at least.'
But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman
saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish mouth contract, and knew that
under all these brave words there was a heart which hungered.
'How strange!' Robert went on reflectively; 'yesterday I was travelling,
walking like other men, a member of society. To-day I am an invalid; in
the true sense, a man no longer. The world has done with me; a barrier I
shall never recross has sprung up between me and it.--Flaxman, to-night
is the story-telling. Will you read to them? I have the book here
prepared--some scenes from David Copperfield. And you will tell them?'
A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he forget the scene.
Some ominous rumour had spread, and the New Brotherhood was besieged.
Impossible to give the reading. A hall full of strained upturned faced
listened to Flaxman's announcement, and to Elsmere's messages of cheer
and exhortation, and then a wild wave of grief spread through the place.
The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each other's
eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, all feeling
themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When Elsmere heard the news
of it, he turned on his face, and asked even Catherine to leave him for
a while.
The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood had just become the
subject of an animated discussion in the press, and London was touched
by the news of its young founder's breakdown. Catherine found herself
besieged by offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded
her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill above
Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resident on the spot
was to take all trouble off their hands; they were to find servants
ready for them, and every comfort.
Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness, with a
self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to Flaxman that her
heart was broken--that half of her, in feeling, was already on the other
side of this horror which stared them all in the face. Was it his
perception of it which stirred Robert after a while to a greater
hopefulness of speech, a constant bright dwelling on the flowery
sunshine for which they were about to exchange the fog and cold of
London? The momentary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than
his first quiet resignation.
He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters! in which the
feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery under-current through
all the sad brotherly record of the invalid's doings and prospects.
There was deep trouble in Long Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and
hysterical, and wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote
in distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing her own
inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only be an extra burden
on the Elsmeres if the journey were achieved. Rose wrote asking to be
allowed to go with them to Algiers; and after a little consultation it
was so arranged, Mrs. Leyburn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself
writing, to stay where she was.
The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert sent for Murray
Edwardes. They were closeted together for nearly an hour. Edwardes came
out with the look of one who has been lifted into 'heavenly places.'
'I thank God,' he said to Catherine, with deep emotion, 'that I ever
knew him. I pray that I may be found worthy to carry out my pledges to
him.'
When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gazing into the fire
with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up to her with a smile.
'Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to the work. If
necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it on. But we hope it
will be possible to work them together. What a brick he is! What a
blessed chance it was that took me to that breakfast party at
Flaxman's!'
The rest of the time before departure he spent almost entirely in
consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It was terrible how rapidly
worse he seemed to grow directly the situation had declared itself, and
the determination _not_ to be ill had been perforce overthrown. But his
struggle against breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms
of his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day of all,
by his own persistent wish, a certain number of members of the
Brotherhood came to say good-bye to him. They came in one by one,
Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, from the height of his sixty years
of tough weather-beaten manhood, looked down on Robert with a fatherly
concern.
'Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it's a fine place yur gawin' tu, they say.
Ye'll do weel there, sir--ye'll do weel. And as for the wark, sir, we'll
keep it oop--we'll not let the Deil mak' hay o' it, if we knaws it--the
auld leer!' he added, with a phraseology which did more honour to the
Calvinism of his blood than the philosophy of his training.
Lestrange came in, with a pale sharp face, and said little in his ten
minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed curiosity and
excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his feverish eyes towards
_le grand secret_. 'You, who preached to us that consciousness, and God,
and the soul are the only realities--are you so sure of it now you are
dying, as you were in health? Are your courage, your certainty, what
they were?' These were the sort of questions that seemed to underlie the
man's spoken words.
There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best to put aside
his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his help in the past, and
implored him to stand by the young society and Mr. Edwardes.
'I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one man matter? One
soldier falls, another presses forward.'
The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush passing over him.
'We can't stand without you!' he said abruptly; then, seeing Robert's
look of distress, he seemed to cast about for something reassuring to
say, but could find nothing. Robert at last held out his hand with a
smile, and he went. He left Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible
depression. In reality there was no man who worked harder at the New
Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. He worked
under perpetual protest from the _frondeur_ within him, but something
stung him on--on--till a habit had been formed which promises to be the
joy and salvation of his later life. Was it the haunting memory of that
thin figure--the hand clinging to the chair--the white appealing look?
Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the consequences. She
herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, comforting the sobbing
creatures afterwards with a calmness born of her own despair. Robson, in
the last stage himself, sent him a grimly characteristic message. 'I
shall solve the riddle, sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days.
For the first time in my life, I shall know what you are still guessing
at. May the blessing of one who never blessed thing or creature before
he saw you go with you!'
After it all Robert sank on the sofa with a groan.
'No more!' he said hoarsely--'no more! Now for air--the sea! To-morrow,
wife, to-morrow! _Cras ingens iterabimus aequor._ Ah me! I leave _my_ new
Salamis behind!'
But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham and
Newcome.
'I will spare Langham the sight of me' he said, smiling sadly. 'And I
will spare myself the sight of Newcome--I could not bear it, I think!
But I must say good-bye--for I love them both.'
Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove
up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it.
'Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the housemaid, and the priest turned
away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the
passionate heart bore the burden of that 'too late,' believing that even
at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He
might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he
was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.
Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new
and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In
any other circumstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken
down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four
hours he could press no claim of his own.
When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood
watching the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky.
Catherine caught her look and attitude, and could have cried aloud in
her own gnawing pain.
Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival.
Their journey had gone well; even the odious passage from Marseilles had
been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was
luxurious, the weather good.
'I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' wrote
Edmondson. 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January
fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under
a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June--when an
English June behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the bay, the great
plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the
Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds.
His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers,
raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity
and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He
breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I
sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he
were unlike the common sons of men--as though to _him_ it might be
possible to subdue even this fell disease.'
Elsmere himself wrote--
'"I had not heard the half"--O Flaxman! An enchanted land--air, sun,
warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern
beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis--everything that feeds the
outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth
of sunlit air between us and the curve of the bay, is for the moment
heaven! One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous