Robert Elsmere
leaping beside her. As she caught sight of him, there was the flashing
smile, the hurrying step. And he felt he could but just drag himself to
meet her.
'Robert, how long you have been! I thought you must have stayed to
dinner after all! And how tired you seem!'
'I had a long walk,' he said, catching her hand, as it slipped itself
under his arm, and clinging to it as though to a support. 'And I am
tired. There is no use whatever in denying it.'
His voice was light, but if it had not been so dark she must have been
startled by his face. As they went on towards the house, however, she
scolding him for over-walking, he won his battle with himself. He went
through the evening so that even Catherine's jealous eyes saw nothing
but extra fatigue. In the most desperate straits of life love is still
the fountain of all endurance, and if ever a man loved it was Robert
Elsmere.
But that night, as he lay sleepless in their quiet room, with the window
open to the stars and to the rising gusts of wind, which blew the petals
of the cluster-rose outside in drifts of 'fair weather snow' on to the
window-sill, he went through an agony which no words can adequately
describe.
He must, of course, give up his living and his orders. His standards and
judgments had always been simple and plain in these respects. In other
men it might be right and possible that they should live on in the
ministry of the Church, doing the humane and charitable work of the
Church, while refusing assent to the intellectual and dogmatic framework
on which the Church system rests; but for himself it would be neither
right nor wrong, but simply impossible. He did not argue or reason about
it. There was a favourite axiom of Mr. Grey's which had become part of
his pupil's spiritual endowment, and which was perpetually present to
him at this crisis of his life, in the spirit, if not in the
letter--'_Conviction is the Conscience of the Mind._' And with this
intellectual conscience he was no more capable of trifling than with the
moral conscience.
The night passed away. How the rare intermittent sounds impressed
themselves upon him!--the stir of the child's waking soon after midnight
in the room overhead; the cry of the owls on the oak-wood; the purring
of the night-jars on the common; the morning chatter of the swallows
round the eaves.
With the first invasion of the dawn Robert raised himself and looked at
Catherine. She was sleeping with that light sound sleep which belongs to
health of body and mind, one hand under her face, the other stretched
out in soft relaxation beside her. Her husband hung over her in a
bewilderment of feeling. Before him passed all sorts of incoherent
pictures of the future; the mind was caught by all manner of incongruous
details in that saddest uprooting which lay before him. How her sleep,
her ignorance, reproached him! He thought of the wreck of all her pure
ambitions--for him, for their common work, for the people she had come
to love; the ruin of her life of charity and tender usefulness, the
darkening of all her hopes, the shaking of all her trust. Two years of
devotion, of exquisite self-surrender, had brought her to this! It was
for this he had lured her from the shelter of her hills, for this she
had opened to him all her sweet stores of faith, all the deepest springs
of her womanhood. Oh, how she must suffer! The thought of it and his own
helplessness wrung his heart.
Oh, could he keep her love through it all? There was an unspeakable
dread mingled with his grief--his remorse. It had been there for months.
In her eyes would not only pain but sin divide them? Could he possibly
prevent her whole relation to him from altering and dwindling?
It was to be the problem of his remaining life. With a great cry of the
soul to that God it yearned and felt for through all the darkness and
ruin which encompassed it, he laid his hand on hers with the timidest
passing touch.
'Catherine, I will make amends! My wife, I will make amends!'
CHAPTER XXVII
The next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept on after
their usual waking time, and remembering his exhaustion of the night
before, left him softly, and kept the house quiet that he might not be
disturbed. She was in charge of the now toddling Mary in the dining-room
when the door opened and Robert appeared.
At sight of him she sprang up with a half-cry; the face seemed to have
lost all its fresh colour, its look of sun and air; the eyes were sunk;
the lips and chin lined and drawn. It was like a face from which the
youth had suddenly been struck out.
'Robert!---' but her question died on her lips.
'A bad night, darling, and a bad headache,' he said, groping his way, as
it seemed to her, to the table, his hand leaning on her arm. 'Give me
some breakfast.'
She restrained herself at once, put him into an armchair by the window,
and cared for him in her tender noiseless way. But she had grown almost
as pale as he, and her heart was like lead.
'Will you send me off for the day to Thurston ponds?' he said presently,
trying to smile with lips so stiff and nerveless that the will had small
control over them.
'Can you walk so far? You did overdo it yesterday, you know. You have
never got over Mile End, Robert.'
But her voice had a note in it which in his weakness he could hardly
bear. He thirsted to be alone again, to be able to think over quietly
what was best for her--for them both. There must be a next step, and in
her neighbourhood he was too feeble, too tortured, to decide upon it.
'No more, dear--no more,' he said impatiently, as she tried to feed him;
then he added as he rose: 'Don't make arrangements for our going next
week, Catherine; it can't be so soon.'
Catherine looked at him with eyes of utter dismay. The sustaining hope
of all these difficult weeks, which had slipped with such terrible
unexpectedness into their happy life, was swept away from her.
'Robert, you _ought_ to go.'
'I have too many things to arrange,' he said sharply, almost irritably.
Then his tone changed: 'Don't urge it, Catherine.'
His eyes in their weariness seemed to entreat her not to argue. She
stooped and kissed him, her lips trembling.
'When do you want to go to Thurston?'
'As soon as possible. Can you find me my fishing-basket and get me some
sandwiches? I shall only lounge there and take it easy.'
She did everything for him that wifely hands could do. Then when his
fishing-basket was strapped on, and his lunch was slipped into the
capacious pocket of the well-worn shooting coat, she threw her arms
round him.
'Robert, you will come away _soon_.'
He roused himself and kissed her.
'I will,' he said simply, withdrawing, however, from her grasp as though
he could not bear those close pleading eyes. 'Good-bye! I shall be back
some time in the afternoon.'
From her post beside the study window she watched him take the short cut
across the cornfield. She was miserable, and all at sea. A week ago he
had been so like himself again, and now----! Never had she seen him in
anything like this state of physical and mental collapse.
'Oh, Robert,' she cried under her breath, with an abandonment like a
child's, strong soul that she was, 'why _won't_ you tell me, dear? Why
won't you let me share? I might help you through--I might.'
She supposed he must be again in trouble of mind. A weaker woman would
have implored, tormented, till she knew all. Catherine's very strength
and delicacy of nature, and that respect which was inbred in her for the
_sacra_ of the inner life, stood in her way. She could not catechise
him, and force his confidence on this subject of all others. It must be
given freely. And oh! it was so long in coming!
Surely, surely, it must be mainly physical, the result of
over-strain--expressing itself in characteristic mental worry, just as
daily life reproduces itself in dreams. The worldly man suffers at such
times through worldly things, the religious man through his religion.
Comforting herself a little with thoughts of this kind, and with certain
more or less vague preparations for departure, Catherine got through the
morning as best she might.
Meanwhile, Robert was trudging along to Thurston under a sky which,
after a few threatening showers, promised once more to be a sky of
intense heat. He had with him all the tackle necessary for spooning
pike, a sport the novelty and success of which had hugely commended it
the year before to those Esau-like instincts Murewell had so much
developed in him.
And now--oh the weariness of the August warmth, and the long stretches
of sandy road! By the time he reached the ponds he was tired out; but
instead of stopping at the largest of the three, where a picturesque
group of old brick cottages brought a reminder of man and his works into
the prairie solitude of the common, he pushed on to a smaller pool just
beyond, now hidden in a green cloud of birch-wood. Here, after pushing
his way through the closely-set trees, he made some futile attempts at
fishing, only to put up his rod long before the morning was over and lay
it beside him on the bank. And there he sat for hours, vaguely watching
the reflection of the clouds, the gambols and quarrels of the waterfowl,
the ways of the birds, the alternations of sun and shadow on the
softly-moving trees,--the real self of him passing all the while through
an interminable inward drama, starting from the past, stretching to the
future, steeped in passion, in pity, in regret.
He thought of the feelings with which he had taken orders, of Oxford
scenes and Oxford persons, of the efforts, the pains, the successes of
his first year at Murewell. What a ghastly mistake it had all been! He
felt a kind of sore contempt for himself, for his own lack of
prescience, of self-knowledge. His life looked to him so shallow and
worthless. How does a man ever retrieve such a false step? He groaned
aloud as he thought of Catherine linked to one born to defeat her hopes,
and all that natural pride that a woman feels in the strength and
consistency of the man she loves. As he sat there by the water he
touched the depths of self-humiliation.
As to religious belief, everything was a chaos. What might be to him the
ultimate forms and condition of thought, the tired mind was quite
incapable of divining. To every stage in the process of destruction it
was feverishly alive. But its formative energy was for the moment gone.
The foundations were swept away, and everything must be built up afresh.
Only the _habit_ of faith held, the close instinctive clinging to a
Power beyond sense--a Goodness, a Will, not man's. The soul had been
stripped of its old defences, but at his worst there was never a moment
when Elsmere felt himself _utterly_ forsaken.
But his people--his work! Every now and then into the fragmentary debate
still going on within him there would flash little pictures of Murewell.
The green, with the sun on the house-fronts, the awning over the village
shop, the vane on the old 'Manor-house,' the familiar figures at the
doors; his church, with every figure in the Sunday congregation as clear
to him as though he were that moment in the pulpit; the children he had
taught, the sick he had nursed, this or that weather-beaten or
brutalised peasant whose history he knew, whose tragic secrets he had
learnt,--all these memories and images clung about him as though with
ghostly hands, asking, 'Why will you desert us? You are ours--stay with
us!'
Then his thoughts would run over the future, dwelling, with a tense
realistic sharpness, on every detail which lay before him--the
arrangements with his _locum tenens_, the interview with the bishop, the
parting with the rectory. It even occurred to him to wonder what must be