Robert Elsmere
'We have made friends, and we walk a great deal when the squire is
here,' said Robert, meeting Newcome's harshness of tone with a bright
dignity 'Mr. Wendover has even been doing something for us in the
village. You should come and see the new Institute. The roof is on, and
we shall open it in August or September. The best building of the kind
in the country by far, and Mr. Wendover's gift.'
'I suppose you use the library a great deal?' said Newcome, paying no
attention to these remarks, and still eyeing his companion closely.
'A great deal.'
Robert had at that moment under his arm a German treatise on the history
of the Logos doctrine, which afterwards, looking back on the little
scene, he thought it probable Newcome recognised. They turned towards
the rectory together, Newcome still asking abrupt questions as to the
squire, the length of time he was to be away, Elsmere's work, parochial
and literary, during the past six months, the numbers of his Sunday
congregation, of his communicants, etc. Elsmere bore his catechism with
perfect temper, though Newcome's manner had in it a strange and almost
judicial imperativeness.
'Elsmere,' said his questioner presently, after a pause, 'I am going to
have a retreat for priests at the Clergy House next month. Father
H----,' mentioning a famous High Churchman, 'will conduct it. You would
do me a special favour'--and suddenly the face softened, and shone with
all its old magnetism on Elsmere--'if you would come. I believe you
would find nothing to dislike in it, or in our rule, which is a most
simple one.'
Robert smiled, and laid his hand on the other's arm.
'No, Newcome, no; I am in no mood for H----.'
The High Churchman looked at him with a quick and painful anxiety
visible in the stern eyes.
'Will you tell me what that means?'
'It means,' said Robert, clasping his hands tightly behind him, his pace
slackening a little to meet that of Newcome--'it means that if you will
give me your prayers, Newcome, your companionship sometimes, your pity
always, I will thank you from the bottom of my heart. But I am in a
state just now when I must fight my battles for myself, and in God's
sight only!'
It was the first burst of confidence which had passed his lips to any
one but Catherine.
Newcome stood still, a tremor of strong emotion running through the
emaciated face.
'You are in trouble, Elsmere; I felt it, I knew it, when I first saw
you!'
'Yes, I am in trouble,' said Robert quietly.
'Opinions?'
'Opinions, I suppose--or facts,' said Robert, his arms dropping wearily
beside him. 'Have you ever known what it is to be troubled in mind, I
wonder, Newcome?'
And he looked at his companion with a sudden pitiful curiosity.
A kind of flash passed over Mr. Newcome's face.
'_Have I ever known?_' he repeated vaguely, and then he drew his thin
hand, the hand of the ascetic and the mystic, hastily across his eyes,
and was silent--his lips moving, his gaze on the ground, his whole
aspect that of a man wrought out of himself by a sudden passion of
memory.
Robert watched him with surprise, and was just speaking, when Mr.
Newcome looked up, every drawn attenuated feature working painfully.
'Did you never ask yourself, Elsmere,' he said slowly, 'what it was
drove me from the bar and journalism to the East End? Do you think I
don't know,' and his voice rose, his eyes flamed, 'what black devil it
is that is gnawing at your heart now? Why, man, I have been through
darker gulfs of hell than you have ever sounded! Many a night I have
felt myself _mad--mad of doubt_--a castaway on a shoreless sea; doubting
not only God or Christ, but myself, the soul, the very existence of
good. I found only one way out of it, and _you_ will find only one way.'
The lithe hand caught Robert's arm impetuously--the voice with its
accent of fierce conviction was at his ear.
'Trample on yourself! Pray down the demon, fast, scourge, kill the body,
that the soul may live! What are we, miserable worms, that we should
defy the Most High, that we should set our wretched faculties against
His Omnipotence? Submit--submit--humble yourself, my brother! Fling away
the freedom which is your ruin. There is no freedom for man. Either a
slave to Christ, or a slave to his own lusts--there is no other choice.
Go away; exchange your work here for a time for work in London. You have
too much leisure here: Satan has too much opportunity. I foresaw it--I
foresaw it when you and I first met. I felt I had a message for you, and
here I deliver it. In the Lord's name, I bid you fly; I bid you yield in
time. Better to be the Lord's captive than _the Lord's betrayer_!'
The wasted form was drawn up to its full height, the arm was
outstretched, the long cloak fell back from it in long folds--voice and
eye were majesty itself. Robert had a tremor of responsive passion. How
easy it sounded, how tempting, to cut the knot, to mutilate and starve
the rebellious intellect which would assert itself against the soul's
purest instincts! Newcome had done it--why not he?
And then, suddenly, as he stood gazing at his companion, the spring sun,
and murmur all about them, another face, another life, another message,
flashed on his inmost sense--the face and life of Henry Grey. Words torn
from their context but full for him of intensest meaning, passed rapidly
through his mind: '_God is not wisely trusted when declared
unintelligible._' '_Such honour rooted in dishonour stands; such faith
unfaithful makes us falsely true._' '_God is for ever reason: and His
communication, His revelation, is reason._'
He turned away with a slight sad shake of the head. The spell was
broken. Mr. Newcome's arm dropped, and he moved sombrely on beside
Robert--the hand, which held a little book of Hours against his cloak,
trembling slightly.
At the rectory gate he stopped.
'Good-bye--I must go home.'
'You won't come in?--No, no, Newcome; believe me, I am no rash careless
egotist, risking wantonly the most precious things in life! But the call
is on me, and I must follow it. All life is God's, and all thought--not
only a fraction of it. He cannot let me wander very far!'
But the cold fingers he held so warmly dropped from his, and Newcome
turned away.
A week afterwards, or thereabouts, Robert had in some sense followed
Newcome's counsel. Admonished perhaps by sheer physical weakness, as
much as by anything else, he had for the moment laid down his arms; he
had yielded to an invading feebleness of the will, which refused, as it
were, to carry on the struggle any longer, at such a life-destroying
pitch of intensity. The intellectual oppression of itself brought about
wild reaction and recoil, and a passionate appeal to that inward witness
of the soul which holds its own long after the reason has practically
ceased to struggle.
It came about in this way. One morning he stood reading in the window of
the library the last of the squire's letters. It contained a short but
masterly analysis of the mental habits and idiosyncrasies of St. Paul,
_a propos_ of St. Paul's witness to the Resurrection. Every now and
then, as Elsmere turned the pages, the orthodox protest would assert
itself, the orthodox arguments make themselves felt as though in
mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality was gone.
Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery fallible man of
genius--so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral
passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate
criticism--the rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was
made. The one picture carried reason and imagination with it; the other
contented neither.
But as he put down the letter something seemed to snap within him. Some
chord of physical endurance gave way. For five months he had been living
intellectually at a speed no man maintains with impunity, and this
letter of the squire's, with its imperious demands upon the tired
irritable brain, was the last straw.
He sank down on the oriel seat, the letter dropping from his hands.
Outside, the little garden, now a mass of red and pink roses, the hill
and the distant stretches of park were wrapped in a thick sultry mist,
through which a dim far-off sunlight struggled on to the library floor,
and lay in ghostly patches on the polished boards and lower ranges of
books.
The simplest religious thoughts began to flow over him--the simplest
childish words of prayer were on his lips. He felt himself delivered, he
knew not how or why.
He rose deliberately, laid the squire's letter among his other papers,
and tied them up carefully; then he took up the books which lay piled on
the squire's writing-table: all those volumes of German, French, and
English criticism, liberal or apologetic, which he had been accumulating
round him day by day with a feverish toilsome impartiality, and began
rapidly and methodically to put them back in their places on the
shelves.
'I have done too much thinking, too much reading,' he was saying to
himself as he went through his task. 'Now let it be the turn of
something else!'
And still as he handled the books, it was as though Catherine's figure
glided backwards and forwards beside him, across the smooth floor, as
though her hand were on his arm, her eyes shining into his. Ah--he knew
well what it was had made the sharpest sting of this wrestle through
which he had been passing! It was not merely religious dread, religious
shame; that terror of disloyalty to the Divine Images which have filled
the soul's inmost shrine since its first entry into consciousness, such
as every good man feels in a like strait. This had been strong indeed;
but men are men, and love is love! Ay, it was to the dark certainty of
Catherine's misery that every advance in knowledge and intellectual
power had brought him nearer. It was from that certainty that he now,
and for the last time, recoiled. It was too much. It could not be borne.
He walked home, counting up the engagements of the next few weeks--the
school-treat, two club field-days, a sermon in the county town, the
probable opening of the new Workmen's Institute, and so on. Oh! to be
through them all and away, away amid Alpine scents and silences. He
stood a moment beside the gray slowly-moving river, half hidden beneath
the rank flower-growth, the tansy and willow-herb, the luxuriant elder
and trailing brambles of its August banks, and thought with hungry
passion of the clean-swept Alpine pasture, the fir-woods, and the
tameless mountain streams. In three weeks or less he and Catherine
should be climbing the Jaman or the Dent du Midi. And till then he would
want all his time for men and women. Books should hold him no more.
Catherine only put her arms round his neck in silence when he told her.
The relief was too great for words. He, too, held her close, saying
nothing. But that night, for the first time for weeks, Elsmere's wife
slept in peace and woke without dread of the day before her.
BOOK IV
CRISIS
CHAPTER XXVI
The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read nor
reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering
about the Mile End cottages, or the new Institute--sometimes fishing,
sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys,
hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into
the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the
gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of
enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and miry as his own, to
deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room. Once more the rector,
though physically perhaps less ardent than of yore, was the life of the