Robert Elsmere
Open them wide that she may enter in,
And all the posts adorn as doth behove,
And all the pillars deck with garlands trim,
For to receive this saint with honour due
That cometh in to you.
With trembling steps and humble reverence,
She cometh in before the Almighty's view.'
The leaves fell over as the book dropped, and these lines, which had
been to him, as to other lovers, the utterance of his own bridal joy,
emerged. They brought about him a host of images--a little gray church
penetrated everywhere by the roar of a swollen river; outside, a road
filled with empty farmers' carts, and shouting children carrying
branches of mountain-ash--winding on and up into the heart of wild hills
dyed with reddening fern, the sun-gleams stealing from crag to crag, and
shoulder to shoulder; inside, row after row of intent faces, all turned
towards the central passage, and, moving towards him, a figure 'clad all
in white, that seems a virgin best,' whose every step brings nearer to
him the heaven of his heart's desire. Everything is plain to him--Mrs.
Thornburgh's round cheeks and marvellous curls and jubilant airs, Mrs.
Leyburn's mild and tearful pleasure, the vicar's solid satisfaction.
With what confiding joy had those who loved her given her to him! And he
knows well that out of all griefs, the grief he has brought upon her in
two short years is the one which will seem to her hardest to bear. Very
few women of the present day could feel this particular calamity as
Catherine Elsmere must feel it.
'Was it a crime to love and win you, my darling?' he cried to her in his
heart. 'Ought I to have had more self-knowledge? could I have guessed
where I was taking you? Oh, how could I know--how could I know.'
But it was impossible to him to sink himself wholly in the past.
Inevitably such a nature as Elsmere's turns very quickly from despair to
hope; from the sense of failure to the passionate planning of new
effort. In time will he not be able to comfort her, and, after a
miserable moment of transition, to repair her trust in him and make
their common life once more rich towards God and man? There must be
painful readjustment and friction, no doubt. He tries to see the facts
as they truly are, fighting against his own optimist tendencies, and
realising as best he can all the changes which his great change must
introduce into their most intimate relations. But after all can love and
honesty and a clear conscience do nothing to bridge over, nay, to
efface, such differences as theirs will be?
Oh to bring her to understand him! At this moment he shrinks painfully
from the thought of touching her faith--his own sense of loss is too
heavy, too terrible. But if she will only be still open with him!--still
give him her deepest heart, any lasting difference between them will
surely be impossible. Each will complete the other, and love knit up the
ravelled strands again into a stronger unity.
Gradually he lost himself in half-articulate prayer, in the solemn
girding of the will to this future task of a recreating love. And by the
time the morning light had well established itself sleep had fallen on
him. When he became sensible of the longed-for drowsiness, he merely
stretched out a tired hand and drew over him a shawl hanging at the foot
of the bed. He was too utterly worn out to think of moving.
When he woke the sun was streaming into the room, and behind him sat the
tiny Mary on the edge of the bed, the rounded apple cheeks and wild-bird
eyes aglow with mischief and delight. She had climbed out of her cot,
and, finding no check to her progress, had crept on, till now she sat
triumphantly, with one diminutive leg and rosy foot doubled under her,
and her father's thick hair at the mercy of her invading fingers, which,
however, were as yet touching him half timidly, as though something in
his sleep had awed the baby sense.
But Catherine was gone.
He sprang up with a start. Mary was frightened by the abrupt movement,
perhaps disappointed by the escape of her prey, and raised a sudden
wail.
He carried her to her nurse, even forgetting to kiss the little wet
cheek, ascertained that Catherine was not in the house, and then came
back, miserable, with the bewilderment of sleep still upon him. A sense
of wrong rose high within him. How _could_ she have left him thus
without a word?
It had been her way, sometimes, during the summer, to go out early to
one or other of the sick folk who were under her especial charge.
Possibly she had gone to a woman, just confined, on the farther side of
the village, who yesterday had been in danger.
But, whatever explanation he could make for himself, he was none the
less irrationally wretched. He bathed, dressed, and sat down to his
solitary meal in a state of tension and agitation indescribable. All the
exaltation, the courage of the night, was gone.
Nine o'clock, ten o'clock, and no sign of Catherine.
'Your mistress must have been detained somewhere,' he said as quietly
and carelessly as he could to Susan, the parlour-maid, who had been with
them since their marriage. 'Leave breakfast things for one.'
'Mistress took a cup of milk when she went out, cook says,' observed the
little maid with a consoling intention, wondering the while at the
rector's haggard mien and restless movements.
'Nursing other people indeed!' she observed severely downstairs, glad as
we all are at times to pick holes in excellence which is inconveniently
high. 'Missis had a deal better stay at home and nurse _him_!'
The day was excessively hot. Not a leaf moved in the garden; over the
cornfield the air danced in long vibrations of heat; the woods and hills
beyond were indistinct and colourless. Their dog Dandy lay sleeping in
the sun, waking up every now and then to avenge himself on the flies. On
the far edge of the cornfield reaping was beginning. Robert stood on the
edge of the sunk fence, his blind eyes resting on the line of men, his
ear catching the shouts of the farmer directing operations from his gray
horse. He could do nothing. The night before, in the wood-path, he had
clearly mapped out the day's work. A mass of business was waiting,
clamouring to be done. He tried to begin on this or that, and gave up
everything with a groan, wandering out again to the gate on to the
wood-path to sweep the distances of road or field with hungry straining
eyes.
The wildest fears had taken possession of him. Running in his head was a
passage from _The confessions_, describing Monica's horror of her son's
heretical opinions. 'Shrinking from and detesting the blasphemies of his
error, she began to doubt whether it was right in her to allow her son
to live in her house and to eat at the same table with her;' and the
mother's heart, he remembered, could only be convinced of the lawfulness
of its own yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth's conversion. He
recalled, with a shiver, how in the life of Madame Guyon, after
describing the painful and agonising death of a kind but comparatively
irreligious husband, she quietly adds, 'As soon as I heard that my
husband had just expired, I said to Thee, O my God, Thou hast broken my
bonds, and I will offer to Thee a sacrifice of praise!' He thought of
John Henry Newman, disowning all the ties of kinship with his younger
brother because of divergent views on the question of baptismal
regeneration; of the long tragedy of Blanco White's life, caused by the
slow dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground of heretical
belief. What right had he, or any one in such a strait as his, to assume
that the faith of the present is no longer capable of the same stern
self-destructive consistency as the faith of the past? He knew that to
such Christian purity, such Christian inwardness as Catherine's, the
ultimate sanction and legitimacy of marriage rest, both in theory and
practice, on a common acceptance of the definite commands and promises
of a miraculous revelation. He had had a proof of it in Catherine's
passionate repugnance to the idea of Rose's marriage with Edward
Langham.
Eleven o'clock striking from the distant tower. He walked desperately
along the wood-path, meaning to go through the copse at the end of it
towards the park, and look there. He had just passed into the copse, a
thick interwoven mass of young trees, when he heard the sound of the
gate which on the farther side of it led on to the road. He hurried on;
the trees closed behind him; the grassy path broadened; and there, under
an arch of young oak and hazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the sound
of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her; he could not go on.
Husband and wife looked at each other one long quivering moment. Then
Catherine sprang forward with a sob and threw herself on his breast.
They clung to each other, she in a passion of tears--tears of such
self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living soul had ever
seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him he was trembling from
head to foot, his arms scarcely strong enough to hold her, his young
worn face bent down over her.
'Oh, Robert!' she sobbed at last, putting up her hand and touching his
hair, 'you look so pale, so sad.'
'I have you again!' he said simply.
A thrill of remorse ran through her.
'I went away,' she murmured, her face still hidden--'I went away,
because when I woke up it all seemed to me, suddenly, too ghastly to be
believed; I could not stay still and bear it. But, Robert, Robert, I
kissed you as I passed! I was so thankful you could sleep a little and
forget. I hardly know where I have been most of the time--I think I have
been sitting in a corner of the park, where no one ever comes. I began
to think of all you said to me last night--to put it together--to try
and understand it, and it seemed to me more and more horrible! I thought
of what it would be like to have to hide my prayers from you--my faith
in Christ--my hope of heaven. I thought of bringing up the child--how
all that was vital to me would be a superstition to you, which you would
bear with for my sake. I thought of death,' and she shuddered--'your
death, or my death, and how this change in you would cleave a gulf of
misery between us. And then I thought of losing my own faith, of denying
Christ. It was a nightmare--I saw myself on a long road, escaping with
Mary in my arms, escaping from you! Oh, Robert! it wasn't only for
myself,'--and she clung to him as though she were a child, confessing,
explaining away, some grievous fault hardly to be forgiven. 'I was
agonised by the thought that I was not my own--I and my child were
_Christ's_. Could I risk what was His? Other men and women had died, had
given up all for His sake. Is there no one now strong enough to suffer
torment, to kill even love itself rather than deny Him--rather than
crucify Him afresh?'
She paused, struggling for breath. The terrible excitement of that
bygone moment had seized upon her again and communicated itself to him.
'And then--and then,' she said sobbing, 'I don't know how it was. One
moment I was sitting up looking straight before me, without a tear,
thinking of what was the least I must do, even--even--if you and I
stayed together--of all the hard compacts and conditions I must
make--judging you all the while from a long, long distance, and feeling
as though I had buried the old self--sacrificed the old heart--for ever!
And the next I was lying on the ground crying for you, Robert, crying
for you! Your face had come back to me as you lay there in the early
morning light. I thought how I had kissed you--how pale and gray and
thin you looked. Oh, how I loathed myself! That I should think it could
be God's will that I should leave you, or torture you, my poor husband!