Robert Elsmere
prescriptions, out of which Robert did sometimes manage to get one of
his old laughs. His sleeplessness, too, which had always been a
constitutional tendency, had become now so constant and wearing that
Catherine began to feel a nervous hatred of his book-work, and of those
long mornings at the Hall; a passionate wish to put an end to it, and
carry him away for a holiday.
But he would not hear of the holiday, and he could hardly bear any talk
of himself. And Catherine had been brought up in a school of feeling
which bade love be very scrupulous, very delicate, and which recognised
in the strongest way the right of every human soul to its own privacy,
its own reserves. That something definite troubled him she was certain.
What it was he clearly avoided telling her, and she could not hurt him
by impatience.
He would tell her soon--when it was right--she cried pitifully to
herself. Meantime both suffered, she not knowing why, clinging to each
other the while more passionately than ever.
One night, however, coming down in her dressing-gown into the study in
search of a _Christian Year_ she had left behind her, she found Robert
with papers strewn before him, his arms on the table and his head laid
down upon them. He looked up as she came in, and the expression of his
eyes drew her to him irresistibly.
'Were you asleep, Robert? Do come to bed!'
He sat up, and with a pathetic gesture held out his arms to her. She
came on to his knee, putting her white arms round his neck, while he
leant his head against her breast.
'Are you tired with all your walking to-day?' she said presently, a pang
at her heart.
'I am tired,' he said, 'but not with walking.'
'Does your book worry you? You shouldn't work so hard, Robert--you
shouldn't!'
He started.
'Don't talk of it. Don't let us talk or think at all, only feel!'
And he tightened his arms round her, happy once more for a moment in
this environment of a perfect love. There was silence for a few moments,
Catherine feeling more and more disturbed and anxious.
'Think of your mountains,' he said presently, his eyes still pressed
against her, 'of High Fell and the moonlight and the house where Mary
Backhouse died. Oh! Catherine, I see you still, and shall always see
you, as I saw you then, my angel of healing and of grace!'
'I too have been thinking of her to-night,' said Catherine softly, 'and
of the walk to Shanmoor. This evening in the garden it seemed to me as
though there were Westmoreland scents in the air! I was haunted by a
vision of bracken, and rocks, and sheep browsing up the fell slopes.'
'Oh for a breath of the wind on High Fell!' cried Robert,--it was so new
to her, the dear voice with this accent in it of yearning depression! 'I
want more of the spirit of the mountains, their serenity, their
strength. Say me that Duddon sonnet you used to say to me there, as you
said it to me that last Sunday before our wedding, when we walked up the
Shanmoor road to say good-bye to that blessed spot. Oh! how I sit and
think of it sometimes, when life seems to be going crookedly, that rock
on the fell-side where I found you, and caught you, and snared you, my
dove, for ever.'
And Catherine, whose mere voice was as balm to this man of many
impulses, repeated to him, softly in the midnight silence, those noble
lines in which Wordsworth has expressed, with the reserve and yet the
strength of the great poet, the loftiest yearning of the purest hearts--
'Enough, if something from our hand have power
To live and move, and serve the future hour,
And if, as towards the silent tomb we go,
Through love, through hope, and faith's transcendent dower,
We feel that we are greater than we know.'
'He has divined it all,' said Robert, drawing a long breath when she
stopped, which seemed to relax the fibres of the inner man, 'the fever
and the fret of human thought, the sense of littleness, of impotence, of
evanescence--and he has soothed it all!'
'Oh, not all, not all!' cried Catherine, her look kindling, and her rare
passion breaking through; 'how little in comparison!'
For her thoughts were with him of whom it was said, _'He needed not that
any one should bear witness concerning man, for he knew what was in
man_.' But Robert's only response was silence and a kind of quivering
sigh.
'Robert!' she cried, pressing her cheek against his temple, 'tell me, my
dear, dear husband, what it is troubles you. Something does--I am
certain--certain!'
'Catherine--wife--beloved!' he said to her, after another pause, in a
tone of strange tension she never forgot; 'generations of men and women
have known what it is to be led spiritually into the desert, into that
outer wilderness where even the Lord was "tempted." What am I that I
should claim to escape it? And you cannot come through it with me, my
darling--no, not even you! It is loneliness--it is solitariness
itself----' and he shuddered. 'But pray for me--pray that _He_ may be
with me, and that at the end there may be light!'
He pressed her to him convulsively, then gently released her. His solemn
eyes, fixed upon her as she stood there beside him, seemed to forbid
her to say a word more. She stooped; she laid her lips to his; it was a
meeting of soul with soul; then she went softly out, breaking the quiet
of the house by a stifled sob as she passed upstairs.
Oh! but at last she thought she understood him. She had not passed her
girlhood, side by side with a man of delicate fibre, of melancholy and
scrupulous temperament, and within hearing of all the natural interests
of a deeply religious mind, religious biography, religious psychology,
and--within certain sharply defined limits--religious speculation,
without being brought face to face with the black possibilities of
'doubts' and 'difficulties' as barriers in the Christian path. Has not
almost every Christian of illustrious excellence been tried and humbled
by them? Catherine, looking back upon her own youth, could remember
certain crises of religious melancholy, during which she had often
dropped off to sleep at night on a pillow wet with tears. They had
passed away quickly, and for ever. But she went back to them now,
straining her eyes through the darkness of her own past, recalling her
father's days of spiritual depression, and the few difficult words she
had sometimes heard from him as to those bitter times of religious
dryness and hopelessness, by which God chastens from time to time His
most faithful and heroic souls. A half-contempt awoke in her for the
unclouded serenity and confidence of her own inner life. If her own
spiritual experience had gone deeper, she told herself with the
strangest self-blame, she would have been able now to understand Robert
better--to help him more.
She thought as she lay awake after those painful moments in the study,
the tears welling up slowly in the darkness, of many things that had
puzzled her in the past. She remembered the book she had seen on his
table; her thoughts travelled over his months of intercourse with the
squire; and the memory of Mr. Newcome's attitude towards the man whom he
conceived to be his Lord's adversary, as contrasted with Robert's,
filled her with a shrinking pain she dared not analyse.
Still all through, her feeling towards her husband was in the main akin
to that of the English civilian at home towards English soldiers abroad,
suffering and dying that England may be great. _She_ had sheltered
herself all her life from those deadly forces of unbelief which exist in
English society, by a steady refusal to know what, however, any educated
university man must perforce know. But such a course of action was
impossible for Robert. He had been forced into the open, into the full
tide of the Lord's battle. The chances of that battle are many; and the
more courage the more risk of wounds and pain. But the great Captain
knows--the great Captain does not forget His own!
For never, never had she the smallest doubt as to the issue of this
sudden crisis in her husband's consciousness, even when she came nearest
to apprehending its nature. As well might she doubt the return of
daylight, as dream of any permanent eclipse descending upon the faith
which had shone through every detail of Robert's ardent impulsive life,
with all its struggles, all its failings, all its beauty, since she had
known him first. The dread did not even occur to her. In her agony of
pity and reverence she thought of him as passing through a trial, which
is specially the believer's trial--the chastening by which God proves
the soul He loves. Let her only love and trust in patience.
So that day by day as Robert's depression still continued, Catherine
surrounded him with the tenderest and wisest affection. Her quiet common
sense made itself heard, forbidding her to make too much of the change
in him, which might after all, she thought, be partly explained by the
mere physical results of his long strain of body and mind during the
Mile End epidemic. And for the rest she would not argue; she would not
inquire. She only prayed that she might so lead the Christian life
beside him, that the Lord's tenderness, the Lord's consolation, might
shine upon him through her. It had never been her wont to speak to him
much about his own influence, his own effect, in the parish. To the
austerer Christian considerations of this kind are forbidden: 'It is not
I, but Christ that worketh in me.' But now, whenever she came across any
striking trace of his power over the weak or the impure, the sick or the
sad, she would in some way make it known to him, offering it to him in
her delicate tenderness, as though it were a gift that the Father had
laid in her hand for him--a token that the Master was still indeed with
His servant, and that all was fundamentally well!
And so much, perhaps, the contact with his wife's faith, the power of
her love, wrought in Robert, that during these weeks and months he also
never lost his own certainty of emergence from the shadow which had
overtaken him. And, indeed, driven on from day to day as he was by an
imperious intellectual thirst which would be satisfied, the religion of
the heart, the imaginative emotional habit of years, that incessant
drama which the soul enacts with the Divine Powers to which it feels
itself committed, lived and persisted through it all. Feeling was
untouched. The heart was still passionately on the side of all its old
loves and adorations, still blindly trustful that in the end, by some
compromise as yet unseen, they would be restored to it intact.
Some time towards the end of July Robert was coming home from the Hall
before lunch, tired and worn, as the morning always left him, and
meditating some fresh sheets of the squire's proofs which had been in
his hands that morning. On the road crossing that to the rectory he
suddenly saw Reginald Newcome, thinner and whiter than ever, striding
along as fast as cassock and cloak would let him, his eyes on the
ground, and his wideawake drawn over them. He and Elsmere had scarcely
met for months, and Robert had lately made up his mind that Newcome was
distinctly less friendly, and wished to show it.
Elsmere had touched his arm before Newcome had perceived any one near
him. Then he drew back with a start.
'Elsmere, you here! I had an idea you were away for a holiday!'
'Oh dear, no!' said Robert, smiling. 'I may get away in September,
perhaps--not till then.'
'Mr. Wendover at home?' said the other, his eyes turning to the Hall, of
which the chimneys were just visible from where they stood.
'No, he is abroad.'
'You and he have made friends, I understand,' said the other abruptly,
his eagle look returning to Elsmere; 'I hear of you as always together.'