Robert Elsmere
'That depends upon your general ideas of what is worth while,' he
answered smiling.
'Oh, everything is worth while that passes the time,' she said
hurriedly. 'The clergy of the old _regime_ went through life half
asleep. That was their way of passing it. Your way, being a modern, is
to bustle and try experiments.'
Her eyes, half closed but none the less provocative, ran over Elsmere's
keen face and pliant frame. An atmosphere of intellectual and social
assumption enwrapped her, which annoyed Robert in much the same way as
Langham's philosophical airs were wont to do. He was drawn without
knowing it into a match of wits wherein his strokes, if they lacked the
finish and subtlety of hers, showed certainly no lack of sharpness or
mental resource. Madame de Netteville's tone insensibly changed, her
manner quickened, her great eyes gradually unclosed.
Suddenly, as they were in the middle of a skirmish as to the reality of
influence, Madame de Netteville paradoxically maintaining that no human
being had ever really converted, transformed, or convinced another, the
voice of young Wishart, shrill and tremulous, rose above the general
level of talk.
'I am quite ready; I am not the least afraid of a definition. Theology
is organised knowledge in the field of religion, a science like any
other science!'
'Certainly, my dear sir, certainly,' said Mr. Spooner, leaning forward
with his hands round his knees, and speaking with the most elegant and
good-humoured _sangfroid_ imaginable, 'the science of the world's
ghosts! I cannot imagine any more fascinating.'
'Well,' said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a deep breath, '_that_
was a remark to have hurled at you all at once out of doors on a
summer's afternoon! Oh, Mr. Spooner!' she said, raising her voice,
'don't play the heretic here! There is no fun in it; there are too many
with you.'
'I did not begin it, my dear madam, and your reproach is unjust. On one
side of me Archbishop Manning's _fidus Achates_,' and the speaker took
off his large straw hat and gracefully waved it--first to the right,
then to the left. 'On the other, the rector of the parish. "Cannon to
right of me, cannon to left of me." I submit my courage is
unimpeachable!'
He spoke with a smiling courtesy as excessive as his silky moustache,
his long straw-coloured beard, and his Panama hat. Madame de Netteville
surveyed him with cool critical eyes. Robert smiled slightly,
acknowledged the bow, but did not speak.
Mr. Wishart evidently took no heed of anything but his own thoughts. He
sat bolt upright with shining excited eyes.
'Ah, I remember that article of yours in the _Fortnightly_! How you
sceptics miss the point!'
And out came a stream of argument and denunciation which had probably
lain lava-hot at the heart of the young convert for years, waiting for
such a moment as this, when he had before him at close quarters two of
the most famous antagonists of his faith. The outburst was striking, but
certainly unpardonably ill-timed. Madame de Netteville retreated into
herself with a shrug. Robert, in whom a sore nerve had been set jarring,
did his utmost to begin his talk with her again.
In vain!--for the squire struck in. He had been sitting huddled
together--his cynical eyes wandering from Wishart to Elsmere--when
suddenly some extravagant remark of the young Catholic, and Robert's
effort to edge away from the conversation, caught his attention at the
same moment. His face hardened, and in his nasal voice he dealt a swift
epigram at Mr. Wishart, which for the moment left the young disputant
floundering.
But only for the moment. In another minute or two the argument, begun so
casually, had developed into a serious trial of strength, in which the
squire and young Wishart took the chief parts, while Mr. Spooner threw
in a laugh and a sarcasm here and there.
And as long as Mr. Wendover talked, Madame de Netteville listened.
Robert's restless repulsion to the whole incident, his passionate wish
to escape from these phrases and illustrations and turns of argument
which were all so wearisomely stale and familiar to him, found no
support in her. Mrs. Darcy dared not second his attempts at chat, for
Mr. Wendover, on the rare occasions when he held forth, was accustomed
to be listened to; and Elsmere was of too sensitive a social fibre to
break up the party by an abrupt exit, which could only have been
interpreted in one way.
So he stayed, and perforce listened, but in complete silence. None of
Mr. Wendover's side-hits touched him. Only as the talk went on, the
rector in the background got paler and paler; his eyes, as they passed
from the mobile face of the Catholic convert, already, for those who
knew, marked with the signs of death, to the bronzed visage of the
squire, grew duller--more instinct with a slowly-dawning despair.
* * * * *
Half an hour later he was once more on the road leading to the park
gate. He had a vague memory that at parting the squire had shown him the
cordiality of one suddenly anxious to apologise by manner, if not by
word. Otherwise everything was forgotten. He was only anxious, half
dazed as he was, to make out wherein lay the vital difference between
his present self and the Elsmere who had passed along that road an hour
before.
He had heard a conversation on religious topics, wherein nothing was new
to him, nothing affected him intellectually at all. What was there in
that to break the spring of life like this? He stood still, heavily
trying to understand himself.
Then gradually it became clear to him. A month ago, every word of that
hectic young pleader for Christ and the Christian certainties would have
roused in him a leaping passionate sympathy--the heart's yearning
assent, even when the intellect was most perplexed. Now that inmost
strand had given way. Suddenly the disintegrating force he had been so
pitifully, so blindly, holding at bay had penetrated once for all into
the sanctuary! What had happened to him had been the first real failure
of _feeling_, the first treachery of the _heart_. Wishart's hopes and
hatreds, and sublime defiances of man's petty faculties, had aroused in
him no echo, no response. His soul had been dead within him.
As he gained the shelter of the wooded lane beyond the gate it seemed to
Robert that he was going through, once more, that old fierce temptation
of Bunyan's,--
'For after the Lord had in this manner thus graciously delivered me, and
had set me down so sweetly in the faith of His Holy Gospel, and had
given me such strong consolation and blessed evidence from heaven,
touching my interest in His love through Christ, the tempter came upon
me again, and that with a more grievous and dreadful temptation than
before. And that was, "To sell and part with this most blessed Christ;
to exchange Him for the things of life, for anything!" The temptation
lay upon me for the space of a year, and did follow me so continually
that I was not rid of it one day in a month: no, not sometimes one hour
in many days together, for it did always, in almost whatever I thought,
intermix itself therewith, in such sort that I could neither eat my
food, stoop for a pin, chop a stick, or cast mine eyes to look on this
or that, but still the temptation would come: "Sell Christ for this, or
sell Christ for that, sell Him, sell Him!"'
Was this what lay before the minister of God now in this _selva oscura_
of life? The selling of the Master, of 'the love so sweet, the unction
spiritual,' for an intellectual satisfaction, the ravaging of all the
fair places of the heart by an intellectual need!
And still through all the despair, all the revolt, all the pain, which
made the summer air a darkness, and closed every sense in him to the
evening beauty, he felt the irresistible march and pressure of the new
instincts, the new forces, which life and thought had been calling into
being. The words of St. Augustine which he had read to Catherine, taken
in a strange new sense, came back to him--'Commend to the keeping of the
Truth whatever the Truth hath given thee, and thou shalt lose nothing!'
Was it the summons of Truth which was rending the whole nature in this
way?
Robert stood still, and with his hands locked behind him, and his face
turned like the face of a blind man towards a world of which it saw
nothing, went through a desperate catechism of himself.
'_Do I believe in God?_ Surely, surely! "Though He slay me yet will I
trust in Him!" _Do I believe in Christ?_ Yes,--in the teacher, the
martyr, the symbol to us Westerns of all things heavenly and abiding,
the image and pledge of the invisible life of the spirit--with all my
soul and all my mind!
'_But in the Man-God_, the Word from Eternity,--in a wonder-working
Christ, in a risen and ascended Jesus, in the living Intercessor and
Mediator for the lives of His doomed brethren?'
He waited, conscious that it was the crisis of his history, and there
rose in him, as though articulated one by one by an audible voice, words
of irrevocable meaning.
'Every human soul in which the voice of God makes itself felt, enjoys,
equally with Jesus of Nazareth, the divine sonship, and "_miracles do
not happen!_"'
It was done. He felt for the moment as Bunyan did after his lesser
defeat.
'Now was the battle won, and down fell I as a bird that is shot from the
top of a tree into great guilt and fearful despair. Thus getting out of
my bed I went moping in the field; but God knows with as heavy an heart
as mortal man I think could bear, where for the space of two hours I was
like a man bereft of life.'
All these years of happy spiritual certainty, of rejoicing oneness with
Christ, to end in this wreck and loss! Was not this indeed '_il gran
rifiuto_'--the greatest of which human daring is capable? The lane
darkened round him. Not a soul was in sight. The only sounds were the
sounds of a gently-breathing nature, sounds of birds and swaying
branches and intermittent gusts of air rustling through the gorse and
the drifts of last year's leaves in the wood beside him. He moved
mechanically onward, and presently, after the first flutter of desolate
terror had passed away, with a new inrushing sense which seemed to him a
sense of liberty--of infinite expansion.
Suddenly the trees before him thinned, the ground sloped away, and there
to the left on the westernmost edge of the hill lay the square stone
rectory, its windows open to the evening coolness, a white flutter of
pigeons round the dovecote on the side lawn, the gold of the August
wheat in the great cornfield showing against the heavy girdle of
oak-wood.
Robert stood gazing at it--the home consecrated by love, by effort, by
faith. The high alternations of intellectual and spiritual debate, the
strange emerging sense of deliverance, gave way to a most bitter human
pang of misery.
'_O God! My wife--my work!_'
... There was a sound of a voice calling--Catherine's voice calling for
him. He leant against the gate of the wood-path, struggling sternly with
himself. This was no simple matter of his own intellectual consistency
or happiness. Another's whole life was concerned. Any precipitate
speech, or hasty action, would be a crime. A man is bound above all
things to protect those who depend on him from his own immature or
revocable impulses. Not a word yet, till this sense of convulsion and
upheaval had passed away, and the mind was once more its own master.
He opened the gate and went towards her. She was strolling along the
path looking out for him, one delicate hand gathering up her long
evening dress--that very same black brocade she had worn in the old days
at Burwood--the other playing with their Dandie Dinmont puppy who was