Robert Elsmere
'_I_ am not going to be banished,' said Mr. Flaxman, looking down upon
her, his well-bred, slightly worn face aglow with animation and
pleasure.
'Then you will be deafened,' said Rose, laughing, as she escaped from
him a moment, to arrange for a song from a tall formidable maiden, built
after the fashion of Mr. Gilbert's contralto heroines, with a voice
which bore out the ample promise of her frame.
'Your sister is a terribly self-possessed young person, Mr. Elsmere,'
said Lady Charlotte, as Robert piloted her across the room.
'Does that imply praise or blame on your part, Lady Charlotte?' asked
Robert, smiling.
'Neither at present. I don't know Miss Leyburn well enough. I merely
state a fact. No tea, Mr. Elsmere. I have had three teas already, and I
am not like the American woman who could always worry down another cup.'
She was introduced to Mrs. Leyburn; but the plaintive invalid was
immediately seized with terror of her voice and appearance, and was
infinitely grateful to Robert for removing her as promptly as possible
to a chair on the border of the two rooms where she could talk or listen
as she pleased. For a few moments she listened to Frauelein Adelmann's
veiled unmanageable contralto; then she turned magisterially to Robert
standing behind her.
'The art of singing has gone out.' she declared, 'since the Germans have
been allowed to meddle in it. By the way, Mr. Elsmere, how do you manage
to be here? Are you taking a holiday?'
Robert looked at her with a start.
'I have left Murewell, Lady Charlotte.'
'Left Murewell!' she said in astonishment, turning round to look at him,
her eyeglass in her eye. 'Why has Helen told me nothing about it? Have
you got another living?'
'No. My wife and I are settling in London. We only told Lady Helen of
our intentions a few weeks ago.'
To which it may be added that Lady Helen, touched and dismayed by
Elsmere's letter to her, had not been very eager to hand over the woes
of her friends to her aunt's cool and irresponsible comments.
Lady Charlotte deliberately looked at him a minute longer through her
glass. Then she let it fall.
'You don't mean to tell me any more, I can see, Mr. Elsmere. But you
will allow me to be astonished?'
'Certainly,' he said, smiling sadly, and immediately afterwards
relapsing into silence.
'Have you heard of the squire lately?' he asked her after a pause.
'Not from him. We are excellent friends when we meet, but he doesn't
consider me worth writing to. His sister--little idiot--writes to me
every now and then. But she has not vouchsafed me a letter since the
summer. I should say from the last accounts that he was breaking.'
'He had a mysterious attack of illness just before I left,' said Robert
gravely. 'It made one anxious.'
'Oh, it is the old story. All the Wendovers have died of weak hearts or
queer brains--generally of both together. I imagine you had some
experience of the squire's queerness at one time, Mr. Elsmere. I can't
say you and he seemed to be on particularly good terms on the only
occasion I ever had the pleasure of meeting you at Murewell.'
She looked up at him, smiling grimly. She had a curiously exact memory
for the unpleasant scenes of life.
'Oh, you remember that unlucky evening!' said Robert, reddening a
little. 'We soon got over that. We became great friends.'
Again, however, Lady Charlotte was struck by the quiet melancholy of his
tone. How strangely the look of youth--which had been so attractive in
him the year before--had ebbed from the man's face--from complexion,
eyes, expression! She stared at him, full of a brusque tormenting
curiosity as to the how and why.
'I hope there is some one among you strong enough to manage Miss Rose,'
she said presently, with an abrupt change of subject. 'That little
sister-in-law of yours is going to be the rage.'
'Heaven forbid!' cried Robert fervently.
'Heaven will do nothing of the kind. She is twice as pretty as she was
last year; I am told she plays twice as well. She had always the sort of
manner that provoked people one moment and charmed them the next. And,
to judge by my few words with her just now, I should say she had
developed it finely. Well, now, Mr. Elsmere, who is going to take care
of her?'
'I suppose we shall all have a try at it, Lady Charlotte.'
'Her mother doesn't look to me a person of nerve enough,' said Lady
Charlotte coolly. 'She is a girl certain--absolutely certain--to have
adventures, and you may as well be prepared for them.'
'I can only trust she will disappoint your expectations, Lady
Charlotte,' said Robert, with a slightly sarcastic emphasis.
* * * * *
'Elsmere, who is that man talking to Miss Leyburn?' asked Langham as the
two friends stood side by side, a little later, watching the spectacle.
'A certain Mr. Flaxman, brother to a pretty little neighbour of ours in
Surrey--Lady Helen Varley--and nephew to Lady Charlotte. I have not seen
him here before; but I think the girls like him.'
'Is he the Flaxman who got the mathematical prize at Berlin last year?'
'Yes, I believe so. A striking person altogether. He is enormously rich,
Lady Helen tells me, in spite of an elder brother. All the money in his
mother's family has come to him, and he is the heir to Lord Daniel's
great Derbyshire property. Twelve years ago I used to hear him talked
about incessantly by the Cambridge men one met. "Citizen Flaxman" they
called him, for his opinions' sake. He would ask his scout to dinner,
and insist on dining with his own servants, and shaking hands with his
friends' butlers. The scouts and the butlers put an end to that, and
altogether, I imagine, the world disappointed him. He has a story, poor
fellow, too--a young wife, who died with her first baby ten years ago.
The world supposes him never to have got over it, which makes him all
the more interesting. A distinguished face, don't you think?--the good
type of English aristocrat.'
Langham assented. But his attention was fixed on the group in which
Rose's bright hair was conspicuous; and when Robert left him and went to
amuse Mrs. Leyburn, he still stood rooted to the same spot watching.
Rose was leaning against the piano, one hand behind her, her whole
attitude full of a young, easy, self-confident grace. Mr. Flaxman was
standing beside her, and they were deep in talk--serious talk
apparently, to judge by her quiet manner and the charmed attentive
interest of his look. Occasionally, however, there was a sally on her
part, and an answering flash of laughter on his; but the stream of
conversation closed immediately over the interruption, and flowed on as
evenly as before.
Unconsciously Langham retreated farther and farther into the comparative
darkness of the inner room. He felt himself singularly insignificant and
out of place, and he made no more efforts to talk. Rose played a violin
solo, and played it with astonishing delicacy and fire. When it was over
Langham saw her turn from the applauding circle crowding in upon her and
throw a smiling interrogative look over her shoulder at Mr. Flaxman. Mr.
Flaxman bent over her, and as he spoke Langham caught her flush, and the
excited sparkle of her eyes. Was this the 'some one in the stream'? No
doubt!--no doubt!
When the party broke up Langham found himself borne towards the outer
room, and before he knew where he was going he was standing beside her.
'Are _you_ here still?' she said to him, startled, as he held out his
hand. He replied by some comments on the music, a little lumbering and
infelicitous, as all his small-talk was. She hardly listened, but
presently she looked up nervously, compelled as it were by the great
melancholy eyes above her.
'We are not always in this turmoil, Mr. Langham. Perhaps some other day
you will come and make friends with my mother?'
CHAPTER XXXII
Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere
and Catherine first realised in detail what Elsmere's act was to mean to
them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the
most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life
will need to be told that even for these two finely-natured people such
resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out.
'I will not preach to you--I will not persecute you!' Catherine had said
to her husband at the moment of her first shock and anguish. And she did
her utmost, poor thing, to keep her word! All through the innumerable
bitternesses which accompanied Elsmere's withdrawal from Murewell--the
letters which followed them, the remonstrances of public and private
friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they would, into
the newspapers--the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain poor
and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and Robert, and
whose bewildered lamentations came to them through young
Armitstead--through all this she held her peace; she did her best to
soften Robert's grief; she never once reproached him with her own.
But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes and
beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely strengthened that
puritan independent fibre in her which her youth had developed, and
which her happy marriage had only temporarily masked, not weakened.
Never had Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the
husband, who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious life, had
given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous
instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidity in her. Often
when she was alone--or at night--she was seized with a lonely, an awful
sense of responsibility. Oh! let her guard her faith, not only for her
own sake, her child's, her Lord's, but for _his_--that it might be given
to her patience at last to lead him back.
And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard it was to
set up certain barriers of silence. She feared that fiery persuasive
quality in Robert she had so often seen at work on other people. With
him conviction was life--it was the man himself, to an extraordinary
degree. How was she to resist the pressure of those new ardours with
which his mind was filling--she who loved him!--except by building, at
any rate for the time, an enclosure of silence round her Christian
beliefs? It was in some ways a pathetic repetition of the situation
between Robert and the squire in the early days of their friendship, but
in Catherine's mind there was no troubling presence of new knowledge
conspiring from within with the forces without. At this moment of her
life she was more passionately convinced than ever that the only
knowledge truly worth having in this world was the knowledge of God's
mercies in Christ.
So gradually with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain parts of
herself from Robert's ken; she avoided certain subjects, or anything
that might lead to them; she ignored the religious and philosophical
books he was constantly reading; she prayed and thought alone--always
for him, of him--but still resolutely alone. It was impossible, however,
that so great a change in their life could be effected without a
perpetual sense of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds and
griefs on both sides. There came a moment when, as he sat alone one
evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly awoke
to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and illusions, their
relation to each other _was_ altering, dwindling, impoverishing; the
terror of that summer night at Murewell was being dismally justified.
His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual discovery,
'sailing the seas where there was never sand'--the vast shadowy seas of