Robert Elsmere
'Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful evening!'
He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs together.
She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly aware that these months
were to him months of incessant travail of spirit, and she caught at
this moment the old strenuous look of eye and brow she knew so well. A
year ago, and every thought of his mind had been open to her--and
now--she herself had shut them out--but her heart sank within her.
She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over her. But
inwardly all the ardour of his mood collapsed at the touch of her. For
the protests of a world in arms can be withstood with joy, but the
protest that steals into your heart, that takes love's garb and uses
love's ways--_there_ is the difficulty!
CHAPTER XXXIII
But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realising any
fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad Church
vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He undertook some
rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on elementary science to boys
and men. But after a while he began to feel his position false and
unsatisfactory. In truth, his opinions were in the main identical with
those of the vicar under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a Broad
Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it
absolutely necessary to 'keep things going,' and by a policy of prudent
silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great 'plant' of
the Establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of the High
Churchmen. In consequence he was involved, as Robert held, in endless
contradictions and practical falsities of speech and action. His large
church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons.
Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach, more
than was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe. He was
hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought
and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting
and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of
power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.
But if these became Robert's views as to Vernon, Vernon's feeling
towards Elsmere after six weeks' acquaintance was not less decided. He
was constitutionally timid, and he probably divined in his new helper a
man of no ordinary calibre, whose influence might very well turn out
some day to be of the 'incalculably diffusive' kind. He grew
uncomfortable, begged Elsmere to beware of any 'direct religious
teaching,' talked in warm praise of a 'policy of omissions,' and in
equally warm denunciation of 'anything like a policy of attack.' In
short, it became plain that two men so much alike, and yet so different,
could not long co-operate.
However, just as the fact was being brought home to Elsmere, a friendly
chance intervened.
Hugh Flaxman, the Leyburns' new acquaintance and Lady Helen's brother,
had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight; and a meeting or two, now at
Lady Charlotte's, now at the Leyburns', had led both men far on the way
to a friendship. Of Hugh Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all
that need be recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman's house, overlooking
St. James's Park, Robert first met a man who was to give him the opening
for which he was looking.
Mr. Flaxman was fond of breakfast parties _a la_ Rogers, and on the
first occasion when Robert could be induced to attend one of these
functions, he saw opposite to him what he supposed to be a lad of
twenty, a young slip of a fellow, whose sallies of fun and invincible
good humour attracted him greatly.
Sparkling brown eyes, full lips rich in humour and pugnacity, 'lockes
crull as they were layde in presse,' the same look of 'wonderly'
activity too, in spite of his short stature and dainty make, as Chaucer
lends his squire--the type was so fresh and pleasing that Robert was
more and more held by it, especially when he discovered to his
bewilderment that the supposed stripling must be from his talk a man
quite as old as himself, an official besides, filling what was clearly
some important place in the world. He took his full share in the
politics and literature started at the table, and presently, when
conversation fell on the proposed municipality for London, said things
to which the whole party listened. Robert's curiosity was aroused, and
after breakfast he questioned his host and was promptly introduced to
'Mr. Murray Edwardes.'
Whereupon it turned out that this baby-faced sage was filling a post, in
the work of which perhaps few people in London could have taken so much
interest as Robert Elsmere.
Fifty years before, a wealthy merchant who had been one of the chief
pillars of London Unitarianism had made his will and died. His great
warehouses lay in one of the Eastern riverside districts of the city,
and in his will he endeavoured to do something according to his lights
for the place in which he had amassed his money. He left a fairly large
bequest wherewith to build and endow a Unitarian chapel and found
certain Unitarian charities, in the heart of what was even then one of
the densest and most poverty-stricken of London parishes. For a long
time, however, chapel and charities seemed likely to rank as one of the
idle freaks of religious wealth and nothing more. Unitarianism of the
old sort is perhaps the most illogical creed that exists, and certainly
it has never been the creed of the poor. In old days it required the
presence of a certain arid stratum of the middle classes to live and
thrive at all. This stratum was not to be found in R----, which rejoiced
instead in the most squalid types of poverty and crime, types wherewith
the mild shrivelled Unitarian minister had about as much power of
grappling as a Poet Laureate with a Trafalgar Square Socialist.
Soon after the erection of the chapel, there arose that shaking of the
dry bones of religious England which we call the Tractarian movement.
For many years the new force left R---- quite undisturbed. The parish
church droned away, the Unitarian minister preached decorously to empty
benches, knowing nothing of the agitations outside. At last, however,
towards the end of the old minister's life, a powerful church of the new
type, staffed by friends and pupils of Pusey, rose in the centre of
R----, and the little Unitarian chapel was for a time more snuffed out
than ever, a fate which this time it shared dismally with the parish
church. As generally happened, however, in those days, the proceedings
at this new and splendid St. Wilfrid's were not long in stirring up the
Protestantism of the British rough,--the said Protestantism being always
one of the finest excuses for brickbats of which the modern cockney is
master. The parish lapsed into a state of private war--hectic clergy
heading exasperated processions or intoning defiant Litanies on the one
side,--mobs, rotten eggs, dead cats, and blatant Protestant orators on
the other.
The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging the
minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned
chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister, a
Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant
attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including
some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was
then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to
be up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his
entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition
to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of
three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an
aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings
was of a much quieter sterner sort, and amongst whom the uproar had
mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon
this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded.
He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living;
he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before
he had been five years in harness had not only made himself a power in
R----, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small
interest by many outsiders.
This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked
twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-bye to
their host, and wandered out together into St. James's Park, where the
trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the
fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to
attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a familiar
subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the
Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a
Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could
rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian
temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes,
it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The
young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness, even
unction; and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a
fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other's heart.
They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and
the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying
little, asking much.
At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.
'You cannot work with the Church!' he said--'it is impossible. You will
only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain what you could do
infinitely more good, as things stand now, by pouring out. Come to
us!--I will put you in the way. You shall be hampered by no pledges of
any sort. Come and take the direction of some of my workers. We have all
got our hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would be
invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England just now for
men of your way of thinking and mine. Come! Who knows what we may be
putting our hands to--what fruit may grow from the smallest seed?'
The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robert gathered
that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating
dream of a reorganised Christendom, a new wide-spreading shelter of
faith for discouraged browbeaten man, as in his own. 'I will!' he said
briefly, after a pause, his own look kindling--'it is the opening I have
been pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the
chance.'
* * * * *
That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of various
engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for 'Fader,' had just been
carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs kicking, off to bed.
Catherine was straightening the room, which had been thrown into
confusion by the child's romps.
It was with an effort--for he knew it would be a shock to her--that he
began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. Flaxman's, and his
talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had made it a rule with himself to
tell her everything that he was doing or meant to do. She would not let
him tell her what he was thinking. But as much openness as there could
be between them, there should be.
Catherine listened--still moving about the while--the thin beautiful
lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was hard to her, very
hard; the people among whom she had been brought up, her father
especially, would have held out the hand of fellowship to any body of