Robert Elsmere
combat, of the spiritual athlete, that hung about him.
'I don't know,' said Robert brightly, as he leant against the
mantelpiece looking curiously at his visitor. 'The squire is a man of
strong character, of vast learning. His library is one of the finest in
England, and it is at my service. I am not concerned with his opinions.'
'Ah, I see,' said Newcome in his driest voice, but sadly. 'You are one
of the people who believe in what you call tolerance--I remember.'
'Yes, that is an impeachment to which I plead guilty,' said Robert,
perhaps with equal dryness; 'and you--have your worries driven you to
throw tolerance overboard?'
Newcome bent forward quickly. Strange glow and intensity of the
fanatical eyes--strange beauty of the wasted persecuting lips!
'Tolerance!' he said with irritable vehemence--'tolerance! Simply
another name for betrayal, cowardice, desertion--nothing else. God,
Heaven, Salvation on the one side, the devil and hell on the other--and
one miserable life, one wretched sin-stained will, to win the battle
with; and in such a state of things _you_--' he drooped his voice,
throwing out every word with a scornful, sibilant emphasis--'_you_ would
have us behave as though our friends were our enemies and our enemies
our friends, as though eternal misery were a bagatelle and our faith a
mere alternative. _I stand for Christ_, and His foes are mine.'
'By which I suppose you mean,' said Robert quietly, 'that you would shut
your door on the writer of _The Idols of the Market-place_?'
'Certainly.'
And the priest rose, his whole attention concentrated on Robert, as
though some deeper-lying motive were suddenly brought into play than any
suggested by the conversation itself.
'Certainly. _Judge not_--so long as a man has not judged himself,--only
till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian's path is clear. We are
but soldiers under orders. What business have we to be truce-making on
our own account? The war is not ours, but God's!'
Robert's eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself in such a
quick passage of arms as all such natures as his delight in, when his
look travelled past the gaunt figure of the Ritualist vicar to his wife.
A sudden pang smote, silenced him. She was sitting with her face raised
to Newcome; and her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret passion of
sympathy. It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed,
the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, and
the colour flushed over all his young boyish face.
'To me,' he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed rather on her than on
Newcome, 'a clergyman has enough to do with those foes of Christ he
cannot choose but recognise. There is no making truce with vice or
cruelty. Why should we complicate our task and spend in needless
struggle the energies we might give to love and to our brother?'
His wife turned to him. There was trouble in her look, then a swift
lovely dawn of something indescribable. Newcome moved away with a
gesture that was half bitterness, half weariness.
'Wait, my friend,' he said slowly, 'till you have watched that man's
books eating the very heart out of a poor creature as I have. When you
have once seen Christ robbed of a soul that might have been His, by the
infidel of genius, you will loathe all this Laodicean cant of tolerance
as I do!'
There was an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyeglass on, was carefully
examining the make of a carved paper-knife lying near him. The strained
preoccupied mind of the High Churchman had never taken the smallest
account of his presence, of which Robert had been keenly, not to say
humorously, conscious throughout.
But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, and
addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common interest. Newcome, in a
kind of dream which seemed to have suddenly descended on him, stood near
them, his priestly cloak falling in long folds about him, his ascetic
face grave and rapt. Gradually, however, the talk of the two men
dissipated the mystical cloud about him. He began to listen, to catch
the savour of Langham's modes of speech, and of his languid indifferent
personality.
'I must go,' he said abruptly, after a minute or two, breaking in upon
the friends' conversation. 'I shall hardly get home before dark.'
He took a cold punctilious leave of Catherine, and a still colder and
slighter leave of Langham. Elsmere accompanied him to the gate.
On the way the older man suddenly caught him by the arm.
'Elsmere, let me--I am the elder by so many years--let me speak to you.
My heart goes out to you!'
And the eagle face softened; the harsh commanding presence became
enveloping, magnetic. Robert paused and looked down upon him, a quick
light of foresight in his eye. He felt what was coming.
And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from Newcome's
inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered passion of years against
certain 'dangerous tendencies' the elder priest discerned in the
younger, against the worship of intellect and science as such which
appeared in Elsmere's talk, in Elsmere's choice of friends. It was the
eternal cry of the mystic of all ages.
'Scholarship! learning!' Eyes and lips flashed into a vehement scorn.
'You allow them a value in themselves, apart from the Christian's test.
It is the modern canker, the modern curse! Thank God, my years in London
burnt it out of me! Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all
these curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to
worship? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal
sympathy? Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression!--a time
for trampling on the lusts of the mind no less than the lusts of the
body, a time when it is better to believe than to know, to pray than to
understand!'
Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together, Newcome's gaze of
fiery appeal fixed upon him.
'We are differently made, you and I,' said the young rector at last with
difficulty. 'Where you see temptation I see opportunity. I cannot
conceive of God as the Arch-plotter against His own creation!'
Newcome dropped his hold abruptly.
'A groundless optimism,' he said with harshness. 'On the track of the
soul from birth to death there are two sleuth-hounds--Sin and Satan.
Mankind for ever flies them, is for ever vanquished and devoured. I see
life always as a thread-like path between abysses along which man
_creeps_'--and his gesture illustrated the words--'with bleeding hands
and feet towards one--narrow--solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn to
the right hand or the left--"I will repay, saith the Lord!"'
Elsmere drew himself up suddenly; the words seemed to him a blasphemy.
Then something stayed the vehement answer on his lips. It was a sense of
profound intolerable pity. What a maimed life! what an indomitable soul!
Husbandhood, fatherhood, and all the sacred education that flows from
human joy for ever self-forbidden, and this grim creed for recompense!
He caught Newcome's hand with a kind of filial eagerness.
'You are a perpetual lesson to me,' he said, most gently. 'When the
world is too much with me, I think of you and am rebuked. God bless you!
But I know myself. If I could see life and God as you see them for one
hour, I should cease to be a Christian in the next!'
A flush of something like sombre resentment passed over Newcome's face.
There is a tyrannical element in all fanaticism, an element which makes
opposition a torment. He turned abruptly away, and Robert was left
alone.
It was a still clear evening, rich in the languid softness and balm
which mark the first approaches of autumn. Elsmere walked back to the
house, his head uplifted to the sky which lay beyond the cornfield, his
whole being wrought into a passionate protest--a passionate invocation
of all things beautiful and strong and free, a clinging to life and
nature as to something wronged and outraged.
Suddenly his wife stood beside him. She had come down to warn him that
it was late and that Langham had gone to dress; but she stood lingering
by his side after her message was given, and he made no movement to go
in. He turned to her, the exaltation gradually dying out of his face,
and at last he stooped and kissed her with a kind of timidity unlike
him. She clasped both hands on his arm and stood pressing towards him as
though to make amends--for she knew not what. Something--some sharp
momentary sense of difference, of antagonism, had hurt that inmost fibre
which is the conscience of true passion. She did the most generous, the
most ample penance for it as she stood there talking to him of
half-indifferent things, but with a magic, a significance of eye and
voice which seemed to take all the severity from her beauty and make her
womanhood itself.
* * * * *
At the evening meal Rose appeared in pale blue, and it seemed to
Langham, fresh from the absolute seclusion of college rooms in vacation,
that everything looked flat and stale beside her, beside the flash of
her white arms, the gleam of her hair, the confident grace of every
movement. He thought her much too self-conscious and self-satisfied; and
she certainly did not make herself agreeable to him; but for all that he
could hardly take his eyes off her; and it occurred to him once or twice
to envy Robert the easy childish friendliness she showed to him, and to
him alone of the party. The lack of real sympathy between her and
Catherine was evident to the stranger at once--what, indeed, could the
two have in common? He saw that Catherine was constantly on the point of
blaming, and Rose constantly on the point of rebelling. He caught the
wrinkling of Catherine's brow as Rose presently, in emulation apparently
of some acquaintances she had been making in London, let slip the names
of some of her male friends without the 'Mr.,' or launched into some
bolder affectation than usual of a comprehensive knowledge of London
society. The girl, in spite of all her beauty, and her fashion, and the
little studied details of her dress, was in reality so crude, so much of
a child under it all, that it made her audacities and assumptions the
more absurd, and he could see that Robert was vastly amused by them.
But Langham was not merely amused by her. She was too beautiful and too
full of character.
It astonished him to find himself afterwards edging over to the corner
where she sat with the rectory cat on her knee--an inferior animal, but
the best substitute for Chattie available. So it was, however; and once
in her neighbourhood he made another serious effort to get her to talk
to him. The Elsmeres had never seen him so conversational. He dropped
his paradoxical melancholy; he roared as gently as any sucking dove; and
Robert, catching from the pessimist of St. Anselm's, as the evening went
on, some hesitating commonplaces worthy of a bashful undergraduate on
the subject of the boats and Commemoration, had to beat a hasty retreat,
so greatly did the situation tickle his sense of humour.
But the tutor made his various ventures under a discouraging sense of
failure. What a capricious ambiguous creature it was, how fearless, how
disagreeably alive to all his own damaging peculiarities! Never had he
been so piqued for years, and as he floundered about trying to find some
common ground where he and she might be at ease, he was conscious
throughout of her mocking indifferent eyes, which seemed to be saying to
him all the time, 'You are not interesting--no, not a bit! You are
tiresome, and I see through you, but I must talk to you, I suppose,
_faute de mieux_.'
Long before the little party separated for the night Langham had given
it up, and had betaken himself to Catherine, reminding himself with some