Robert Elsmere
has divorced itself from desire and sense sees spread out before it the
vast realms of knowledge, and feels itself close to the secret springs
and sources of being. And as he spoke, his language took an ampler turn,
the element of smallness which attaches to all mere personal complaint
vanished, his words flowed, became eloquent, inspired, till the
bewildered child beside him, warm through and through as she was with
youth and passion, felt for an instant by sheer fascinated sympathy the
cold spell, the ineffable prestige, of the thinker's voluntary death in
life.
But only for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill smote her to
the heart.
'You make me shiver,' she cried, interrupting him. 'Have those strange
things--I don't understand them--made you happy? Can they make any one
happy? Oh no, no! Happiness is to be got from living, seeing,
experiencing, making friends, enjoying nature! Look at the world, Mr.
Langham!' she said, with bright cheeks, half smiling at her own
magniloquence, her hand waving over the view before them. 'What has it
done that you should hate it so? If you can't put up with people you
might love nature. I--I can't be content with nature, because I want
some life first. Up in Whindale there is too much nature, not enough
life. But if I had got through life--if it had disappointed me--then I
should love nature. I keep saying to the mountains at home: "Not _now_,
not _now_; I want something else, but afterwards if I can't get it, or
if I get too much of it, why then I will love you, live with you. You
are my second string, my reserve. You--and art--and poetry."'
'But everything depends on feeling,' he said softly, but lightly, as
though to keep the conversation from slipping back into those vague
depths it had emerged from; 'and if one has forgotten how to feel--if
when one sees or hears something beautiful that used to stir one, one
can only say "I remember it moved me once!"--if feeling dies, like life,
like physical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man!'
She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism.
'Oh, I cannot imagine it!' she cried. 'I shall feel to my last hour.'
Then, after a pause, in another tone, 'But, Mr. Langham, you say music
excites you, Wagner excites you?'
'Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,' he
admitted, smiling.
'Well then,' and she looked at him persuasively, 'why not give yourself
up to music? It is so easy--so little trouble to one's self--it just
takes you and carries you away.'
Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious--probably through
these admonitions of hers--that the situation had absurdity in it.
'It is not my _metier_,' he said hastily. 'The self that enjoys music is
an outer self, and can only bear with it for a short time. No, Miss
Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the college will sing a _Te Deum_, I
shall settle down in London, I shall keep a big book going, and cheat
the years after all, I suppose, as well as most people.'
'And you will know, you will remember,' she said faltering, reddening,
her womanliness forcing the words out of her, 'that you have friends:
Robert--my sister--all of us?'
He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their eyes met each
was struck once more with the personal beauty of the other. His eyes
shone--their black depths seemed all tenderness.
'I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,' he said
slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself swept
off her feet into a world of tragic mysterious emotion. She all but put
her hand into his again, asking him childishly to hope, to be consoled.
But the maidenly impulse restrained her, and once more he leant on the
gate, burying his face in his hands.
Suddenly he felt himself utterly tired, relaxed. Strong nervous reaction
set in. What had all this scene, this tragedy, been about? And then in
another instant was that sense of the ridiculous again clamouring to be
heard. He--the man of thirty-five--confessing himself, making a tragic
scene, playing Manfred or Cain to this adorable half-fledged creature,
whom he had known five days! Supposing Elsmere had been there to
hear--Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh! As he leant over the gate he
found himself quivering with impatience to be away--by himself--out of
reach--the critic in him making the most bitter remorseless mock of all
these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But for
the life of him he could not find a word to say--a move to make. He
stood hesitating, _gauche_, as usual.
'Do you know, Mr. Langham,' said Rose lightly, by his side, 'that there
is no time at all left for _you_ to give _me_ good advice in? That is an
obligation still hanging over you. I don't mean to release you from it,
but if I don't go in now and finish the covering of those library books,
the youth of Murewell will be left without any literature till Heaven
knows when!'
He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into common
mundanity.
'Hang literature--hang the parish library!' he said with a laugh as he
moved after her. Yet his real inner feeling towards that parish library
was one of infinite friendliness.
'Hear these men of letters!' she said scornfully. But she was happy;
there was a glow on her cheek.
A bramble caught her dress; she stopped and laid her white hand to it,
but in vain. He knelt in an instant, and between them they wrenched it
away, but not till those soft slim fingers had several times felt the
neighbourhood of his brown ones, and till there had flown through and
through him once more, as she stooped over him, the consciousness that
she was young, that she was beautiful, that she had pitied him so
sweetly, that they were alone.
'Rose!'
It was Catherine calling--Catherine, who stood at the end of the
grass-path, with eyes all indignation and alarm.
Langham rose quickly from the ground.
He felt as though the gods had saved him--or damned him--which?
CHAPTER XVII
Murewell Rectory during the next forty-eight hours was the scene of much
that might have been of interest to a psychologist gifted with the power
of divining his neighbours.
In the first place Catherine's terrors were all alive again Robert had
never seen her so moved since those days of storm and stress before
their engagement.
'I cannot bear it!' she said to Robert at night in their room. 'I cannot
bear it! I hear it always in my ears: "What hast thou done with thy
sister?" Oh, Robert, don't mind, dear, though he is your friend. My
father would have shrunk from him with horror--_An alien from the
household of faith! An enemy to the Cross of Christ!_'
She flung out the words with low intense emphasis and frowning brow,
standing rigid by the window, her hands locked behind her. Robert stood
by her much perplexed, feeling himself a good deal of a culprit, but
inwardly conscious that he knew a great deal more about Langham than she
did.
'My dear wifie,' he said to her, 'I am certain Langham has no intention
of marrying.'
'Then more shame for him,' cried Catherine, flushing. 'They could not
have looked more conscious, Robert, when I found them together, if he
had just proposed.'
'What, in five days?' said Robert, more than half inclined to banter his
wife. Then he fell into meditation as Catherine made no answer. 'I
believe with men of that sort,' he said at last, 'relations to women are
never more than half-real--always more or less literature--acting.
Langham is tasting an experience, to be bottled up for future use.'
It need hardly be said, however, that Catherine got small consolation
out of this point of view. It seemed to her Robert did not take the
matter quite rightly.
'After all, darling,' he said at last, kissing her, 'you can act dragon
splendidly; you have already--so can I. And you really cannot make me
believe in anything very tragic in a week.'
But Catherine was conscious that she had already played the dragon hard,
to very little purpose. In the forty hours that intervened between the
scene in the garden and the squire's dinner-party, Robert was always
wanting to carry off Langham, Catherine was always asking Rose's help in
some household business or other. In vain. Langham said to himself
calmly, this time, that Elsmere and his wife were making a foolish
mistake in supposing that his friendship with Miss Leyburn was anything
to be alarmed about, that they would soon be amply convinced of it
themselves, and meanwhile he should take his own way. And as for Rose,
they had no sooner turned back all three from the house to the garden
than she had divined everything in Catherine's mind, and set herself
against her sister with a wilful force in which many a past irritation
found expression.
How Catherine hated the music of that week! It seemed to her she never
opened the drawing-room door but she saw Langham at the piano, his head
with its crown of glossy, curling black hair, and his eyes lit with
unwonted gleams of laughter and sympathy, turned towards Rose, who was
either chatting wildly to him, mimicking the airs of some professional,
or taking off the ways of some famous teacher; or else, which was worse,
playing with all her soul, flooding the house with sound--now as soft
and delicate as first love, now as full and grand as storm waves on an
angry coast. And the sister going with compressed lip to her work-table
would recognise sorely that never had the girl looked so handsome, and
never had the lightnings of a wayward genius played so finely about her.
As to Langham, it may well be believed that after the scene in the
garden he had rated, satirised, examined himself in the most approved
introspective style. One half of him declared that scene to have been
the heights of melodramatic absurdity; the other thought of it with a
thrill of tender gratitude towards the young pitiful creature who had
evoked it. After all, why, because he was alone in the world and must
remain so, should he feel bound to refuse this one gift of the gods, the
delicate passing gift of a girl's--a child's friendship? As for her, the
man's very real, though wholly morbid, modesty scouted the notion of
love on her side. _He_ was a likely person for a beauty on the threshold
of life and success to fall in love with; but she meant to be kind to
him, and he smiled a little inward indulgent smile over her very evident
compassion, her very evident intention of reforming him, reconciling him
to life. And, finally, he was incapable of any further resistance. He
had gone too far with her. Let her do what she would with him, dear
child, with the sharp tongue and the soft heart, and the touch of genius
and brilliancy which made her future so interesting! He called his age
and his disillusions to the rescue; he posed to himself as stooping to
her in some sort of elder-brotherly fashion; and if every now and then
some disturbing memory of that strange scene between them would come to
make his present role less plausible, or some whim of hers made it
difficult to play, why then at bottom there was always the consciousness
that sixty hours, or thereabouts, would see him safely settled in that
morning train to London. Throughout it is probable that that morning
train occupied the saving background of his thoughts.
The two days passed by, and the squire's dinner-party arrived. About
seven on the Thursday evening a party of four might have been seen
hurrying across the park--Langham and Catherine in front, Elsmere and
Rose behind. Catherine had arranged it so, and Langham, who understood
perfectly that his friendship with her young sister was not at all to
Mrs. Elsmere's taste, and who had by now taken as much of a dislike to