Robert Elsmere
I had not only been wicked towards you--I had offended Christ. I could
think of nothing as I lay there--again and again--but "_Little children,
love one another; little children, love one another._" Oh, my
beloved,'--and she looked up with the solemnest, tenderest smile
breaking on the marred tear-stained face,--'I will never give up hope, I
will pray for you night and day. God will bring you back. You cannot
lose yourself so. No, no! His grace is stronger than our wills. But I
will not preach to you--I will not persecute you--I will only live
beside you--in your heart--and love you always. Oh, how could I--how
could I have such thoughts!'
And again she broke off, weeping, as if to the tender torn heart the
only crime that could not be forgiven was its own offence against love.
As for him he was beyond speech. If he had ever lost his vision of God,
his wife's love would that moment have given it back to him.
'Robert,' she said presently, urged on by the sacred yearning to heal,
to atone, 'I will not complain--I will not ask you to wait. I take your
word for it that it is best not, that it would do no good. The only hope
is in time--and prayer. I must suffer, dear, I must be weak sometimes;
but oh, I am so sorry for you! Kiss me, forgive me, Robert; I will be
your faithful wife unto our lives' end.'
He kissed her, and in that kiss, so sad, so pitiful, so clinging, their
new life was born.
CHAPTER XXX
But the problem of these two lives was not solved by a burst of feeling.
Without that determining impulse of love and pity in Catherine's heart
the salvation of an exquisite bond might indeed have been impossible.
But in spite of it the laws of character had still to work themselves
inexorably out on either side.
The whole gist of the matter for Elsmere lay really in this question:
Hidden in Catherine's nature, was there, or was there not, the true
stuff of fanaticism? Madame Guyon left her infant children to the
mercies of chance, while she followed the voice of God to the holy war
with heresy. Under similar conditions Catherine Elsmere might have
planned the same. Could she ever have carried it out?
And yet the question is still ill stated. For the influences of our
modern time on religious action are so blunting and dulling, because in
truth the religious motive itself is being constantly modified, whether
the religious person knows it or not. Is it possible now for a good
woman with a heart, in Catherine Elsmere's position, to maintain herself
against love, and all those subtle forces to which such a change as
Elsmere's opens the house doors, without either hardening, or greatly
yielding? Let Catherine's further story give some sort of an answer.
Poor soul! As they sat together in the study, after he had brought her
home, Robert, with averted eyes, went through the plans he had already
thought into shape. Catherine listened, saying almost nothing. But
never, never had she loved this life of theirs so well as now that she
was called on, at barely a week's notice, to give it up for ever! For
Robert's scheme, in which her reason fully acquiesced, was to keep to
their plan of going to Switzerland, he having first, of course, settled
all things with the bishop, and having placed his living in the hands of
Mowbray Elsmere. When they left the rectory, in a week or ten days'
time, he proposed, in fact, his voice almost inaudible as he did so,
that Catherine should leave it for good.
'Everybody had better suppose,' he said choking, 'that we are coming
back. Of course we need say nothing. Armitstead will be here for next
week certainly. Then afterwards I can come down and manage everything. I
shall get it over in a day if I can, and see nobody. I cannot say
good-bye, nor can you.'
'And next Sunday, Robert?' she asked him, after a pause.
'I shall write to Armitstead this afternoon and ask him, if he possibly
can, to come to-morrow afternoon, instead of Monday, and take the
service.'
Catherine's hands clasped each other still more closely. So then she had
heard her husband's voice for the last time in the public ministry of
the Church, in prayer, in exhortation, in benediction! One of the most
sacred traditions of her life was struck from her at a blow.
It was long before either of them spoke again. Then she ventured another
question.
'And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert--of--of our
future?'
'Shall we try London for a little?' he answered in a queer strained
voice, leaning against the window, and looking out, that he might not
see her. 'I should find work among the poor--so would you--and I could
go on with my book. And your mother and sister will probably be there
part of the winter.'
She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future it seemed to
them both, beside the wide and honourable range of his clergyman's life
as he and she had developed it. But she did not dwell long on that. Her
thoughts were suddenly invaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in
which she had recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of
fifteen, from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas
to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago, ruined, the
victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his teeth in fierce
and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a shelter, and was to see
her through her 'trouble'; the girl, a frail half-witted creature, who
could find no words even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while
with the dumbest, pitifulest tenacity.
How _could_ she leave that girl? It was as if all the fibres of life
were being violently wrenched from all their natural connections.
'Robert!' she cried at last with a start. 'Had you forgotten the
Institute to-morrow?'
'No--no,' he said with the saddest smile. 'No, I had not forgotten it.
Don't go, Catherine--don't go. I must. But why should you go through
it?'
'But there are all those flags and wreaths,' she said, getting up in
pained bewilderment. 'I must go and look after them.'
He caught her in his arms.
'Oh, my wife, my wife, forgive me!' It was a groan of misery. She put up
her hands and pressed his hair back from his temples.
'I love you, Robert,' she said simply, her face colourless, but
perfectly calm.
Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, he went
into the workroom and found her surrounded with flags, and a vast litter
of paper roses and evergreens, which she and the new agent's daughters
who had come up to help her were putting together for the decorations of
the morrow. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big
pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to
smile and talk as usual, her lap full of evergreens, and her politeness
exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to Robert one
of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He fled from it out
into the village driven by a restless longing for change and movement.
Here he found a large gathering round the new Institute. There were
carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, and close by, an
admiring circle of children and old men, huddling in the shade of a
great chestnut.
Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending,
stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting friendliness of those
about him, or worried by their blunt comments on his looks. He could not
bear more than a glance into the new rooms apportioned to the
Naturalists' Club. There against the wall stood the new glass cases he
had wrung out of the squire, with various new collections lying near,
ready to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections
stood out bravely in the added space and light; the walls were hung here
and there with a wonderful set of geographical pictures he had carried
off from a London exhibition, and fed his boys on for weeks; the floors
were freshly matted; the new pine fittings gave out their pleasant
cleanly scent; the white paint of doors and windows shone in the August
sun. The building had been given by the squire. The fittings and
furniture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had planned for
it all!--only to see the fruits of two years' effort out of doors, and
personal frugality at home, handed over to some possibly unsympathetic
stranger. The heart beat painfully against the iron bars of fate,
rebelling against the power of a mental process so to affect a man's
whole practical and social life!
He went out at last by the back of the Institute, where a little bit of
garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to a lane.
At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge made by the
builders' carts, he saw a man standing, who turned away down the lane,
however, as soon as the rector's figure emerged into view.
Robert had recognised the slouching gait and unwieldy form of Henslowe.
There were at this moment all kinds of gruesome stories afloat in the
village about the ex-agent. It was said that he was breaking up fast; it
was known that he was extensively in debt; and the village shopkeepers
had already held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best
mode of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of
cautious action towards his custom in future. The man, indeed, was
sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, maintaining all
the while a snarling exasperating front to the world, which was rapidly
converting the careless half-malicious pity wherewith the village had
till now surveyed his fall into that more active species of baiting
which the human animal is never very loth to try upon the limping
specimens of his race.
Henslowe stopped and turned as he heard the steps behind him. Six
months' self-murdering had left ghastly traces. He was many degrees
nearer the brute than he had been even when Robert made his ineffectual
visit. But at this actual moment Robert's practised eye--for every
English parish clergyman becomes dismally expert in the pathology of
drunkenness--saw that there was no fight in him. He was in one of the
drunkard's periods of collapse--shivering, flabby, starting at every
sound, a misery to himself and a spectacle to others.
'Mr. Henslowe!' cried Robert, still pursuing him, 'may I speak to you a
moment?'
The ex-agent turned, his prominent bloodshot eyes glowering at the
speaker. But he had to catch at his stick for support, or at the nervous
shock of Robert's summons his legs would have given way under him.
Robert came up with him and stood a second, fronting the evil silence of
the other, his boyish face deeply flushed. Perhaps the grotesqueness of
that former scene was in his mind. Moreover, the vestry meetings had
furnished Henslowe with periodical opportunities for venting his gall on
the rector, and they had never been neglected. But he plunged on boldly.
'I am going away next week, Mr. Henslowe; I shall be away some
considerable time. Before I go I should like to ask you whether you do
not think the feud between us had better cease. Why will you persist in
making an enemy of me? If I did you an injury it was neither wittingly
nor willingly. I know you have been ill and I gather that--that--you are
in trouble. If I could stand between you and further mischief I
would--most gladly. If help--or--or money----' He paused. He shrewdly
suspected, indeed, from the reports that reached him, that Henslowe was
on the brink of bankruptcy.
The rector had spoken with the utmost diffidence and delicacy, but
Henslowe found energy in return for an outburst of quavering animosity,
from which, however, physical weakness had extracted all its sting.
'I'll thank you to make your canting offers to some one else, Mr.
Elsmere. When I want your advice I'll ask it. Good day to you.' And he