Robert Elsmere
It was almost like a child's wail. His brow contracted still more
painfully.
'My darling,' he said; 'my darling--my dear dear wife!' and he bent his
head down to her as she lay against his breast, kissing her hair with a
passion of pity, of remorse, of tenderness, which seemed to rend his
whole nature.
'Tell me--tell me--Robert!'
He guided her gently across the room, past the sofa over which her work
lay scattered, past the flower-table, now a many-coloured mass of roses,
which was her especial pride, past the remains of a brick castle which
had delighted Mary's wondering eyes and mischievous fingers an hour or
two before, to a low chair by the open window looking on the wide
moonlit expanse of cornfield. He put her into it, walked to the window
on the other side of the room, shut it, and drew down the blind. Then he
went back to her, and sank down beside her, kneeling, her hands in his.
'My dear wife--you have loved me--you do love me?'
She could not answer, she could only press his hands with her cold
fingers, with a look and gesture that implored him to speak.
'Catherine,' he said, still kneeling before her, 'you remember that
night you came down to me in the study, the night I told you I was in
trouble and you could not help me. Did you guess from what I said what
the trouble was?'
'Yes,' she answered, trembling, 'yes, I did, Robert; I thought you were
depressed--troubled--about religion.'
'And I know,' he said with an outburst of feeling, kissing her hands as
they lay in his--'I know very well that you went upstairs and prayed for
me, my white-souled angel! But Catherine, the trouble grew--it got
blacker and blacker. You were there beside me, and you could not help
me. I dared not tell you about it; I could only struggle on alone, so
terribly alone, sometimes; and now I am beaten, beaten. And I come to
you to ask you to help me in the only thing that remains to me. Help me,
Catherine, to be an honest man--to follow conscience--to say and do the
truth!'
'Robert,' she said piteously, deadly pale, 'I don't understand.'
'Oh, my poor darling!' he cried, with a kind of moan of pity and misery.
Then still holding her, he said, with strong deliberate emphasis,
looking into the gray-blue eyes--the quivering face so full of austerity
and delicacy,--
'For six or seven months, Catherine--really for much longer, though I
never knew it--I have been fighting with _doubt_--doubt of orthodox
Christianity--doubt of what the Church teaches--of what I have to say
and preach every Sunday. First it crept on me I knew not how. Then the
weight grew heavier, and I began to struggle with it. I felt I must
struggle with it. Many men, I suppose, in my position would have
trampled on their doubts--would have regarded them as sin in themselves,
would have felt it their duty to ignore them as much as possible,
trusting to time and God's help. I _could_ not ignore them. The thought
of questioning the most sacred beliefs that you and I'--and his voice
faltered a moment--'held in common was misery to me. On the other hand,
I knew myself. I knew that I could no more go on living to any purpose,
with a whole region of the mind shut up, as it were, barred away from
the rest of me, than I could go on living with a secret between myself
and you. I could not hold my faith by a mere tenure of tyranny and fear.
Faith that is not free--that is not the faith of the whole creature,
body, soul, and intellect--seemed to me a faith worthless both to God
and man!'
Catherine looked at him stupefied. The world seemed to be turning round
her. Infinitely more terrible than his actual words was the accent
running through words and tone and gesture--the accent of
irreparableness, as of something dismally _done_ and _finished_. What
did it all mean? For what had he brought her there? She sat stunned,
realising with awful force the feebleness, the inadequacy, of her own
fears.
He, meanwhile, had paused a moment, meeting her gaze with those yearning
sunken eyes. Then he went on, his voice changing a little,--
'But if I had wished it ever so much, I could not have helped myself.
The process, so to speak, had gone too far by the time I knew where I
was. I think the change must have begun before the Mile End time.
Looking back, I see the foundations were laid in--in--the work of last
winter.'
She shivered. He stooped and kissed her hands again passionately. 'Am I
poisoning even the memory of our past for you?' he cried. Then,
restraining himself at once, he hurried on again: 'After Mile End you
remember I began to see much of the squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at
me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak
shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began,
his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimise it. I was
not made to stand alone!'
And again that bitter, perplexed, half-scornful sense of his own pliancy
at the hands of circumstance as compared with the rigidity of other men
descended upon him. Catherine made a faint movement as though to draw
her hands away.
'Was it well,' she said, in a voice which sounded like a harsh echo of
her own, 'was it right for a clergyman to discuss sacred things--with
such a man?'
He let her hands go, guided for the moment by a delicate imperious
instinct which bade him appeal to something else than love. Rising, he
sat down opposite to her on the low window seat, while she sank back
into her chair, her fingers clinging to the arm of it, the lamplight far
behind deepening all the shadows of the face, the hollows in the cheeks,
the line of experience and will about the mouth. The stupor in which she
had just listened to him was beginning to break up. Wild forces of
condemnation and resistance were rising in her; and he knew it. He knew,
too, that as yet she only half realised the situation, and that blow
after blow still remained to him to deal.
'Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with the squire?'
he repeated, his face resting on his hands. 'What are religious matters,
Catherine, and what are not?'
Then, still controlling himself rigidly, his eyes fixed on the shadowy
face of his wife, his ear catching her quick uneven breath, he went once
more through the dismal history of the last few months, dwelling on his
state of thought before the intimacy with Mr. Wendover began, on his
first attempts to escape the squire's influence, on his gradual pitiful
surrender. Then he told the story of the last memorable walk before the
squire's journey, of the moment in the study afterwards, and of the
months of feverish reading and wrestling which had followed. Half-way
through it a new despair seized him. What was the good of all he was
saying? He was speaking a language she did not really understand. What
were all these critical and literary considerations to her?
The rigidity of her silence showed him that her sympathy was not with
him, that in comparison with the vibrating protest of her own passionate
faith which must be now ringing through her, whatever he could urge must
seem to her the merest culpable trifling with the soul's awful
destinies. In an instant of tumultuous speech he could not convey to her
the temper and results of his own complex training, and on that
training, as he very well knew, depended the piercing, convincing force
of all that he was saying. There were gulfs between them--gulfs which,
as it seemed to him, in a miserable insight, could never be bridged
again. Oh, the frightful separateness of experience!
Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the conversation at
the Hall, described--in broken words of fire and pain--the moment of
spiritual wreck which had come upon him in the August lane, his night of
struggle, his resolve to go to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so
much narrating as pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love's.
Love was at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the
pale varying face, were really pleading, through all the long story of
intellectual change.
At the mention of Mr. Grey Catherine grew restless; she sat up suddenly,
with a cry of bitterness.
'Robert, why did you go away from me? It was cruel. I should have known
first. He had no right--no right!'
She clasped her hands round her knees, her beautiful mouth set and
stern. The moon had been sailing westward all this time, and as
Catherine bent forward the yellow light caught her face, and brought out
the haggard change in it. He held out his hands to her with a low groan,
helpless against her reproach, her jealousy. He dared not speak of what
Mr. Grey had done for him, of the tenderness of his counsel towards her
specially. He felt that everything he could say would but torture the
wounded heart still more.
But she did not notice the outstretched hands. She covered her face in
silence a moment, as though trying to see her way more clearly through
the mazes of disaster; and he waited. At last she looked up.
'I cannot follow all you have been saying,' she said, almost harshly. 'I
know so little of books, I cannot give them the place you do. You say
you have convinced yourself the Gospels are like other books, full of
mistakes, and credulous, like the people of the time; and therefore you
can't take what they say as you used to take it. But what does it all
quite mean? Oh, I am not clever--I cannot see my way clear from thing to
thing as you do. If there are mistakes, does it matter so--so--terribly
to you?' and she faltered. 'Do you think _nothing_ is true because
something may be false? Did not--did not--Jesus still live, and die, and
rise again?--_can_ you doubt--_do_ you doubt--that He rose--that He is
God--that He is in heaven--that we shall see Him?'
She threw an intensity into every word, which made the short breathless
questions thrill through him, through the nature saturated and steeped
as hers was in Christian association, with a bitter accusing force. But
he did not flinch from them.
'I can believe no longer in an Incarnation and Resurrection,' he said
slowly, but with a resolute plainness. 'Christ is risen in our hearts,
in the Christian life of charity. Miracle is a natural product of human
feeling and imagination; and God was in Jesus--pre-eminently, as He is
in all great souls, but not otherwise--not otherwise in kind than He is
in me or you.'
His voice dropped to a whisper. She grew paler and paler.
'So to you,' she said presently in the same strange altered voice. 'My
father--when I saw that light on his face before he died, when I heard
him cry, "Master, _I come!_" was dying--deceived--deluded. Perhaps
even,' and she trembled, 'you think it ends here--our life--our love?'
It was agony to him to see her driving herself through this piteous
catechism. The lantern of memory flashed a moment on to the immortal
picture of Faust and Margaret. Was it not only that winter they had read
the scene together?
Forcibly he possessed himself once more of those closely locked hands,
pressing their coldness on his own burning eyes and forehead in hopeless
silence.
'_Do_ you, Robert?' she repeated insistently.
'I know nothing,' he said, his eyes still hidden. 'I know nothing! But I
trust God with all that is dearest to me, with our love, with the soul
that is His breath, His work in us!'
The pressure of her despair seemed to be wringing his own faith out of
him, forcing into definiteness things and thoughts that had been lying
in an accepted, even a welcomed, obscurity.
She tried again to draw her hands away, but he would not let them go.
'And the end of it all, Robert?' she said--'the end of it?'
Never did he forget the note of that question, the desolation of it, the