Robert Elsmere
Christian people, but not to the Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling
divided them from any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them and
the Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces--forces of
thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time.
'He is going to work with them now,' she thought bitterly; 'soon he will
be one of them--perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.'
And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find nothing but
embarrassed monosyllables, and still more embarrassed silences,
wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once
more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.
Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her
head against his knee, saying nothing, but gathering his hand closely in
both her own.
Poor woman's heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He
bent down quickly and kissed her.
'Would you like,' he said presently, after both had sat silent a while
in the firelight, 'would you care to go to Madame de Netteville's
to-night?'
'By all means,' said Catherine with a sort of eagerness. 'It _was_
Friday she asked us for, wasn't it? We will be quick over dinner, and I
will go and dress.'
In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the squire in his
bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked. Mr.
Wendover had drily recommended Elsmere to cultivate Madame de
Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical,
and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to
the Elsmere move.
'You had better go there,' he said huskily, 'it will do you good. She
gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte
can't. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte's; she waters the wine too
much.'
And he had persisted with the subject--using it, as Elsmere thought, as
a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere's
plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.
There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with signs
of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which
evidently troubled the doctor most. But, behind the physical breakdown,
there was to Robert's sense something else, a spiritual something,
infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the
elder man's' will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of
sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his
correspondence with the squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night
chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville's that he might write an
account of it to Murewell.
Still the squire's talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had
made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The squire's ways of
describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert
sometimes imagined that he himself had been at one time more under her
spell than he cared to confess. If so, it must have been when she was
still in Paris, the young English widow of a man of old French family,
rich, fascinating, distinguished, and the centre of a small _salon_,
admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris.
Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her headquarters in
London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that the squire wrote to
her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger Wendover debts of various kinds,
and she had an encouraging memory of the young clergyman on the terrace
at Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the
intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings.
'I have never seen the wife,' she meditated, as her delicate jewelled
hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of the Elsmeres'
lodgings. 'But if she is the ordinary country clergyman's spouse, the
squire of course will have given the young man a hint.'
But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim humour towards
Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, the squire said not one
word about his wife to Robert in the course of their talk of Madame de
Netteville.
Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wishing to do Robert credit.
She put on one of the gowns she had taken to Murewell when she married.
It was black, simply made, and had been a favourite with both of them in
the old surroundings.
So they drove off to Madame de Netteville's. Catherine's heart was
beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting stairs of the
luxurious little house. All these new social experiences were a trial to
her. But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious ideas of what she was to
see in this particular house.
A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most English rooms, it
was barely though richly furnished. A Persian carpet, of a self-coloured
grayish blue, threw the gilt French chairs and the various figures
sitting upon them into delicate relief. The walls were painted white,
and had a few French mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine
French portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames.
The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and seemed to
be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly have read or
written in the room, but you could see a beautiful woman in a beautiful
dress there, and you could talk there, either _tete-a-tete_, or to the
assembled company, to perfection, so cunningly was it all devised.
When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people present--ten
gentlemen and two ladies. One of the ladies, Madame de Netteville, was
lying back in the corner of a velvet divan placed against the wall, a
screen between her and a splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the
room. The other, a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck
abnormally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men was
talking indiscriminately to both.
As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was a general stir
of surprise. The men looked round; Madame de Netteville half rose with a
puzzled look. It was more than a month since she had dropped her
invitation. Then a flash, not altogether of pleasure, passed over her
face, and she said a few hasty words to the woman near her, advancing
the moment afterwards to give her hand to Catherine.
'This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so soon. I had
imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to give me the pleasure of
seeing you.'
But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in everything, were not
cordial, for all their smile.
Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive manner,
and by the woman's look of conscious sarcastic strength, struggling
through all the outer softness of beauty and exquisite dress.
'Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am afraid, as
that afternoon on which we met last. Let me introduce you to Count
Wielandt--Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will you come over here, beside
Lady Aubrey Willert.'
Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, who seemed to him
to look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinised an
inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey made an imperceptible movement of
the head as Catherine was presented to her, and Madame de Netteville,
smiling and biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat.
There was a faint odour of smoke in the room. As Catherine sat down, a
young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end of a cigarette into
the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. Lady Aubrey also pushed
away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand.
Everybody there had the air more or less of an _habitue_ of the house;
and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very hard,
in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de
Netteville, to take any share in it.
'Well, I believe the story about Desforets is true,' said the
fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling
back in his chair.
Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English
rectory garden flashing incongruously back upon her.
'If you get it from the _Ferret_, my dear Evershed,' said the ex-Tory
minister, Lord Rupert, 'you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I
believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.'
'What do you mean?' said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.
'Well, it doesn't _pay_, you know, to write yourself down a fiend--not
quite.'
'What--you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good
joke!' and the young man laughed immoderately, joined by several of the
other guests.
'I don't imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,'
returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; 'but the British public haven't got
your nerve. They _may_ take it awkwardly--I don't say they will--when a
woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St.
Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies, comes to
ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.'
'What has one to do with an actress's private life, my dear Lord
Rupert?' asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth
clearness into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under
straight black brows.
'What indeed!' said the young man who had begun the conversation with a
disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching out his hand for another
cigarette, and drawing it back with a look under his drooped eyelids--a
look of cold impertinent scrutiny--at Catherine Elsmere.
'Ah! well--I don't want to be obtrusively moral--Heaven forbid! But
there is such a thing as destroying the illusion to such an extent that
you injure your pocket. Desforets is doing it--doing it actually in
Paris too.'
There was a ripple of laughter.
'Paris and illusions--_O mon Dieu!_' groaned young Evershed, when he had
done laughing, laying meditative hands on his knees and gazing into the
fire.
'I tell you I have seen it,' said Lord Rupert, waxing combative, and
slapping the leg he was nursing with emphasis. 'The last time I went to
see Desforets in Paris the theatre was crammed, and the
house--theatrically speaking--_ice_. They received her in dead
silence--they gave her not one single recall--and they only gave her a
clap, that I can remember, at those two or three points in the play
where clap they positively must or burst. They go to see her--but they
loathe her--and they let her know it.'
'Bah!' said his opponent, 'it is only because they are tired of her.
Her vagaries don't amuse them any longer--they know them by heart.
And--by George! she has some pretty rivals too, now!' he added
reflectively,--'not to speak of the Bernhardt.'
'Well, the Parisians _can_ be shocked,' said Count Wielandt in excellent
English, bending forward so as to get a good view of his hostess. 'They
are just now especially shocked by the condition of English morals!'
The twinkle in his eye was irresistible. The men, understanding his
reference to the avidity with which certain English aristocratic
scandals had been lately seized upon by the French papers, laughed
out--so did Lady Aubrey. Madame de Netteville contented herself with a
smile.
'They profess to be shocked, too, by Renan's last book,' said the editor
from the other side of the room.
'Dear me!' said Lady Aubrey, with meditative scorn, fanning herself
lightly the while, her thin but extraordinarily graceful head and neck
thrown out against the golden brocade of the cushion behind her.
'Oh! what so many of them feel in Renan's case, of course,' said Madame
de Netteville, 'is that every book he writes now gives a fresh opening
to the enemy to blaspheme. Your eminent freethinker can't afford just