Robert Elsmere
blue of the morning. I am better--I breathe again.
'Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, and has been
adopted by sixty nuns who inhabit the convent over the way, and sell us
the most delicious butter and cream. I imagine, if she were a trifle
older, her mother would hardly view the proceedings of these dear
berosaried women with so much equanimity.
'As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and receives more
than an editor of the _Times_. I have the strongest views, as you know,
as to the vanity of letter-writing. There was a time when you shared
them, but there are circumstances and conjunctures, alas! in which no
man can be sure of his friend or his friend's principles. Kind friend,
good fellow, go often to Elgood Street. Tell me everything about
everybody. It is possible, after all, that I may live to come back to
them.'
But a week later, alas! the letters fell into a very different strain.
The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp and rainy, the natives
of course declaring that such gloom and storm in January had never been
known before. Edmondson wrote in discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch
of cold, had been confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter was
full of medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that, in spite of
the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the disease was
attacking constantly fresh tissue. 'He is very depressed too,' said
Edmondson; 'I have never seen him so yet. He sits and looks at us in the
evening sometimes with eyes that wring one's heart. It is as though,
after having for a moment allowed himself to hope, he found it a doubly
hard task to submit.'
Ah, that depression! It was the last eclipse through which a radiant
soul was called to pass; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The
implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of
farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigour,
showed itself now in all its stern nakedness--sat down, as it were, eye
to eye with Elsmere--immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features
of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The
long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to withdraw
him so pitifully from their yearning grasp! In these dark days he would
sit crouching over the wood fire in the little _salon_, or lie drawn to
the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering
the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning
sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as
Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.'
But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the wife's
inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third
person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree.
Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we
know, ever since that passionate submission of the wife which had thrown
her morally at her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of
her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type
attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man of
science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain
intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends beforehand that he
is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical
collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the
veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that
the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special
clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in
herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been
patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would
wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own;
or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away
perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light,
the light of the Crucified, shine through.
Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert's serenity, Catherine's
poor last effort would have been much feebler, briefer, more hesitating.
But when she saw him plunged for a short space in mortal discouragement,
in a sombreness that as the days went on had its points and crests of
feverish irritation, her anguished pity came to the help of her creed.
Robert felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being
urging, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and ways, in
her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious books and
prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her maintaining at
night beside him, he felt a persistent attack which nearly--in his
weakness--overthrew him.
For 'reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves.' Some of the
greatest and most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful
longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before
the last farewell. And the simpler Christian faith has still to create
around it those venerable associations and habits which buttress
individual feebleness and diminish the individual effort.
One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert stretched out his
hand for his wife and found her kneeling beside him. The dim mingled
light showed him her face vaguely--her clasped hands, her eyes. He
looked at her in silence, she at him; there seemed to be a strange shock
as of battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him.
'Catherine,' he said to her in a feeble intense whisper, 'would you
leave me without comfort, without help, at the end?'
'Oh, my beloved!' she cried, under her breath, throwing her arms round
him, 'if you would but stretch out your hand to the true comfort--the
true help--the Lamb of God sacrificed for us!'
He stroked her hair tenderly.
'My weakness might yield--my true best self never. I know Whom I have
believed. Oh, my darling, be content. Your misery, your prayers hold me
back from God--from that truth and that trust which can alone be
honestly mine. Submit, my wife! Leave me in God's hands.'
She raised her head. His eyes were bright with fever, his lips
trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself again with a quiet
burst of tears, and an indescribable self-abasement. They had had their
last struggle, and once more he had conquered! Afterwards the cloud
lifted from him. Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her
often as though he lay already on the breast of God; even her wifely
love grew timid and awestruck.
Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was like a
scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more than its father
has allowed it to know. At the same time, it was plain to those about
him that the only realities to him in a world of shadows were
God--love--the soul.
One day he suddenly caught Catherine's hands, drew her face to him, and
studied it with his glowing and hollow eyes, as though he would draw it
into his soul.
'He made it,' he said hoarsely, as he let her go--'this love--this
yearning. And in life He only makes us yearn that He may satisfy. He
cannot lead us to the end and disappoint the craving He Himself set in
us. No, no--could you--could I--do it? And He, the source of love, or
justice----'
* * * * *
Flaxman arrived a few days afterwards. Edmondson had started for London
the night before, leaving Elsmere better again, able to drive and even
walk a little, and well looked after by a local doctor of ability. As
Flaxman, tramping up behind his carriage, climbed the long hill to El
Biar, he saw the whole marvellous place in a white light of beauty--the
bay, the city, the mountains, oliveyard and orange-grove, drawn in pale
tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a steep and narrow
lane, he noticed a slight figure standing--a parasol against the sun.
'We thought you would like to be shown the short cut up the hill,' said
Rose's voice, strangely demure and shy. 'The man can drive round.'
A grip of the hand, a word to the driver, and they were alone in the
high-walled lane, which was really the old road up the hill, before the
French brought zigzags and civilisation. She gave him news of
Robert--better than he had expected. Under the influence of one of the
natural reactions that wait on illness, the girl's tone was cheerful,
and Flaxman's spirits rose. They talked of the splendour of the day, the
discomforts of the steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing--of
anything and everything but the hidden something which was responsible
for the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occasional swift veiling of
her own.
Then, at an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool and brown
into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke joyously through the gray
cloud of olive-wood, where not a sight or sound was to be heard of all
the busy life which hides and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his
hands seizing hers.
'How long?' he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling back from his
strong, well-made frame; 'from August to February--how long?'
No more! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the moment death
stood aside and love asserted itself. But this is no place to chronicle
what it said.
And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, before the same
misgiving, the same shrinking, seized on the lovers themselves. They
sped up the hill, they crept into the house, far apart. It was agreed
that neither of them should say a word.
* * * * *
But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that sometimes goes with
such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the position of things before
he and Flaxman had been half an hour together. He took a boyish pleasure
in making his friend confess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at
once sent for Catherine and told her.
Catherine, coming out afterwards, met Flaxman in the little tiled hall.
How she had aged and blanched! She stood a moment opposite to him, in
her plain long dress with its white collar and cuffs, her face working a
little.
'We are so glad!' she said, but almost with a sob--'God bless you!'
And, wringing his hand, she passed away from him, hiding her eyes, but
without a sound. When they met again she was quite self-contained and
bright, talking much both with him and Rose about the future.
And one little word of Rose's must be recorded here, for those who have
followed her through these four years. It was at night, when Robert,
with smiles, had driven them out of doors to look at the moon over the
bay, from the terrace just beyond the windows. They had been sitting on
the balustrade talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had
lost her mocking ways; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman felt
it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much.
When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little white
suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder.
'You won't--you won't ever be angry with me for making you wait like
that? It was impertinent--it was like a child playing tricks!'
* * * * *
Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He was terribly
emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals in the day, and it was
clear that his nights were often one long struggle for breath. But his
spirits were extraordinarily even, and his days occupied to a point
Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven,
read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street),
write his answers to them--those difficult scrawls are among the