Robert Elsmere
'I can only judge by what I see,' she said demurely. 'Every Oxford man
always behaves as if he were the cream of the universe. Oh! I don't mean
to be rude,' she cried, losing for a moment her defiant control over
herself, as though afraid of having gone too far. 'I am not the least
disrespectful, really. When you and Robert talk, Catherine and I feel
quite as humble as we ought.'
The words were hardly out before she could have bitten the tongue that
spoke them. He had made her feel her indiscretions of Sunday night as
she deserved to feel them, and now after three minutes conversation she
was on the verge of fresh ones. Would she never grow up, never behave
like other girls? That word _humble_! It seemed to burn her memory.
Before he could possibly answer she barred the way by a question as
short and dry as possible--
'What are you going to London for?'
'For many reasons,' he said, shrugging his shoulders. 'I have told no
one yet--not even Elsmere. And indeed I go back to my rooms for a while
from here. But as soon as Term begins I become a Londoner.'
They had reached the gate at the bottom of the garden, and were leaning
against it. She was disturbed, conscious, lightly flushed. It struck her
as another _gaucherie_ on her part that she should have questioned him
as to his plans. What did his life matter to her?
He was looking away from her, studying the half-ruined, degraded manor
house spread out below them. Then suddenly he turned--
'If I could imagine for a moment it would interest you to hear my
reasons for leaving Oxford, I could not flatter myself you would see
any sense in them. I _know_ that Robert will think them moonshine; nay,
more, that they will give him pain.'
He smiled sadly. The tone of gentleness, the sudden breach in the man's
melancholy reserve affected the girl beside him for the second time,
precisely as they had affected her the first time. The result of
twenty-four hours' resentful meditation turned out to be precisely
_nil_. Her breath came fast, her proud look melted, and his quick sense
caught the change in an instant.
'Are you tired of Oxford?' the poor child asked him, almost shyly.
'Mortally!' he said, still smiling. 'And what is more important still,
Oxford is tired of me. I have been lecturing there for ten years. They
have had more than enough of me.'
'Oh! but Robert said----' began Rose impetuously, then stopped, crimson,
remembering many things Robert had said.
'That I helped him over a few stiles?' returned Langham calmly. 'Yes,
there was a time when I was capable of that--there was a time when I
could teach, and teach with pleasure.' He paused. Rose could have
scourged herself for the tremor she felt creeping over her. Why should
it be to her so new and strange a thing that _a man_, especially a man
of these years and this calibre, should confide in her, should speak to
her intimately of himself? After all, she said to herself angrily, with
a terrified sense of importance, she was a child no longer, though her
mother and sisters would treat her as one. 'When we were chatting the
other night,' he went on, turning to her again as he stood leaning on
the gate, 'do you know what it was struck me most?'
His tone had in it the most delicate, the most friendly deference. But
Rose flushed furiously.
'That girls are very ready to talk about themselves, I imagine,' she
said scornfully.
'Not at all! Not for a moment! No, but it seemed to me so pathetic, so
strange that anybody should wish for anything so much as you wished for
the musician's life.'
'And you never wish for anything?' she cried.
'When Elsmere was at college,' he said, smiling, 'I believe I wished he
should get a first class. This year I have certainly wished to say
good-bye to St. Anselm's, and to turn my back for good and all on my
men. I can't remember that I have wished for anything else for six
years.'
She looked at him perplexed. Was his manner merely languid, or was it
from him that the emotion she felt invading herself first started? She
tried to shake it off.
'And _I_ am just a bundle of wants,' she said, half-mockingly.
'Generally speaking I am in the condition of being ready to barter all I
have for some folly or other--one in the morning, another in the
afternoon. What have you to say to such people, Mr. Langham?'
Her eyes challenged him magnificently, mostly out of sheer nervousness.
But the face they rested on seemed suddenly to turn to stone before her.
The life died out of it. It grew still and rigid.
'Nothing,' he said quietly. 'Between them and me there is a great gulf
fixed. I watch them pass, and I say to myself: "There are _the
living_--that is how they look, how they speak! Realise once for all
that you have nothing to do with them. Life is theirs--belongs to
_them_. You are already outside it. Go your way, and be a spectre among
the active and the happy no longer."'
He leant his back against the gate. Did he see her? Was he conscious of
her at all in this rare impulse of speech which had suddenly overtaken
one of the most withdrawn and silent of human beings? All her airs
dropped off her; a kind of fright seized her; and involuntarily she laid
her hand on his arm.
'Don't--don't--Mr. Langham! Oh, don't say such things! Why should you be
so unhappy? Why should you talk so? Can no one do anything? Why do you
live so much alone? Is there no one you care about?'
He turned. What a vision! His artistic sense absorbed it in an
instant--the beautiful tremulous lip, the drawn white brow. For a moment
he drank in the pity, the emotion, of those eyes. Then a movement of
such self-scorn as even he had never felt swept through him. He gently
moved away; her hand dropped.
'Miss Leyburn,' he said, gazing at her, his olive face singularly pale,
'don't waste your pity on me, for Heaven's sake. Some madness made me
behave as I did just now. Years ago the same sort of idiocy betrayed me
to your brother; never before or since. I ask your pardon, humbly,' and
his tone seemed to scorch her, 'that this second fit of ranting should
have seized me in your presence.'
But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone too far. He
stopped and looked at her--piteously, the features quivering. It was as
though the man's whole nature had for the moment broken up, become
disorganised. She could not bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to
have been laid bare to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he
caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary
scene--to both a kind of lifetime.
Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort.
'That was _adorable_ of you,' he said with a long breath. 'But I stole
it--I despise myself. Why should you pity me? What is there to pity me
for? My troubles, such as I have, are my own making--every one.'
And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The tears of
excitement were in her eyes.
'Won't you let me be your friend?' she said, trembling, with a kind of
reproach. 'I thought--the other night--we were to be friends. Won't you
tell me----'
'More of yourself?' her eyes said, but her voice failed her. And as for
him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circumstance, of
individual character, seemed to drop from her. He forgot the difference
of years; he saw her no longer as she was--a girl hardly out of the
schoolroom, vain, ambitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude
romantic sense he was wantonly playing; she was to him pure beauty, pure
woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold critical instinct which had
been for years draining his life of all its natural energies was
powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never been sweet
before.
So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, of his
cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of happiness and
success at college, of his first attempts to make himself a power among
younger men, of the gradual dismal failure of all his efforts, the dying
down of desire and ambition. From the general narrative there stood out
little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and
masterly--of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his
Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a
special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to
see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father'; of
his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it;
and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an
undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine
heights, of something cold, impotent and baffling in himself, which was
to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human
affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the axe
to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after
friendship--which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a
skeleton at the feast: and the persistence through it all of a kind of
hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more
powerless to satisfy: all these Langham put into words with an
extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was something in him
which found a kind of pleasure in the long analysis, which took pains
that it should be infinitely well done.
Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of literature she
would have realised that she was witnessing a masterly dissection of one
of those many morbid growths of which our nineteenth century psychology
is full. But she was anything but literary, and she could not analyse
her excitement. The man's physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity
of what he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect
her. And through it all there was the strange girlish pride that this
should have befallen _her_; a first crude intoxicating sense of the
power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a desperate
anxiety to be equal to the occasion, to play her part well.
'So you see,' said Langham at last, with a great effort (to do him
justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of conversation; 'all
these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the most unfit man in the
world for a college tutor. The undergraduates regard me as a
shilly-shallying pedant. On my part,' he added drily, 'I am not slow to
retaliate. Every term I live I find the young man a less interesting
animal. I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham.
Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.'
And for one curious instant he looked out over the village, his
fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of
which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent,
longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing what cue
to take.
'And then--' he went on presently (but was the strange being speaking to
her?)--'so long as I stay there, worrying those about me, and eating my
own heart out, I am cut off from the only life that might be mine, that
I might find the strength to live.'
The words were low and deliberate. After his moment of passionate
speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began to feel strangely
remote from him.
'Do you mean the life of the student?' she asked him after a pause,
timidly.
Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her.
'Of the dreamer, rather.'
And as her eyes still questioned, as he was still moved by the spell of
her responsiveness, he let the new wave of feeling break in words.
Vaguely at first, and then with a growing flame and force, he fell to
describing to her what the life of thought may be to the thinker, and
those marvellous moments which belong to that life when the mind which