Robert Elsmere
Then his settlement in London had absorbed him, as all such matters
absorb men who have become the slaves of their own solitary habits, and
in the joy of his new freedom, and the fresh zest for learning it had
aroused in him, the beautiful unmanageable child who had disturbed his
peace at Murewell was not likely to be more, but less, remembered. When
he stumbled across her unexpectedly in the National Gallery, his
determining impulse had been merely one of flight.
However, as he had written to Robert towards the beginning of his London
residence, there was no doubt that his migration had made him for the
time much more human, observant, and accessible. Oxford had become to
him an oppression and a nightmare, and as soon as he had turned his back
on it his mental lungs seemed once more to fill with air. He took his
modest part in the life of the capital; happy in the obscurity afforded
him by the crowd; rejoicing in the thought that his life and his affairs
were once more his own, and the academical yoke had been slipped for
ever.
It was in this mood of greater cheerfulness and energy that his fresh
sight of Rose found him. For the moment, he was perhaps more susceptible
than he ever could have been before to her young perfections, her
beauty, her brilliancy, her provoking stimulating ways. Certainly, from
that first afternoon onwards he became more and more restless to watch
her, to be near her, to see what she made of herself and her gifts. In
general, though it was certainly owing to her that he came so much, she
took small notice of him. He regarded, or chose to regard, himself as a
mere 'item'--something systematically overlooked and forgotten in the
bustle of her days and nights. He saw that she thought badly of him,
that the friendship he might have had was now proudly refused him, that
their first week together had left a deep impression of resentment and
hostility in her mind. And all the same he came; and she asked him! And
sometimes, after an hour when she had been more difficult or more
satirical than usual, ending notwithstanding with a little change of
tone, a careless 'You will find us next Wednesday as usual; So-and-so is
coming to play,' Langham would walk home in a state of feeling he did
not care to analyse, but which certainly quickened the pace of life a
good deal. She would not let him try his luck at friendship again, but
in the strangest slightest ways did she not make him suspect every now
and then that he _was_ in some sort important to her, that he sometimes
preoccupied her against her will; that her will, indeed, sometimes
escaped her, and failed to control her manner to him?
It was not only his relations to the beauty, however, his interest in
her career, or his perpetual consciousness of Mrs. Elsmere's cold
dislike and disapproval of his presence in her mother's drawing-room,
that accounted for Langham's heightened mental temperature this winter.
The existence and the proceedings of Mr. Hugh Flaxman had a very
considerable share in it.
'Tell me about Mr. Langham,' said Mr. Flaxman once to Agnes Leyburn, in
the early days of his acquaintance with the family; 'is he an old
friend?'
'Of Robert's,' replied Agnes, her cheerful impenetrable look fixed upon
the speaker. 'My sister met him once for a week in the country at the
Elsmeres'. My mother and I have been only just introduced to him.'
Hugh Flaxman pondered the information a little.
'Does he strike you as--well--what shall we say?--unusual?'
His smile struck one out of her.
'Even Robert might admit that,' she said demurely.
'Is Elsmere so attached to him? I own I was provoked just now by his
tone about Elsmere. I was remarking on the evident physical and mental
strain your brother-in-law had gone through, and he said with a
_nonchalance_ I cannot convey: "Yes, it is astonishing Elsmere should
have ventured it. I confess I often wonder whether it was worth while."
"Why?" said I, perhaps a little hotly. Well, he didn't know--wouldn't
say. But I gathered that, according to him, Elsmere is still swathed in
such an unconscionable amount of religion that the few rags and patches
he has got rid of are hardly worth the discomfort of the change. It
seemed to me the tone of the very cool spectator, rather than the
friend. However--does your sister like him?'
'I don't know,' said Agnes, looking her questioner full in the face.
Hugh Flaxman's fair complexion flushed a little. He got up to go.
He is one of the most extraordinarily handsome persons I ever saw,' he
remarked as he buttoned up his coat. 'Don't you think so?'
'Yes,' said Agnes dubiously, 'if he didn't stoop, and if he didn't in
general look half-asleep.'
Hugh Flaxman departed more puzzled than ever as to the reason for the
constant attendance of this uncomfortable anti-social person at the
Leyburns' house. Being himself a man of very subtle and fastidious
tastes, he could imagine that so original a suitor, with such eyes, such
an intellectual reputation so well sustained by scantiness of speech and
the most picturesque capacity for silence, _might_ have attractions for
a romantic and wilful girl. But where were the signs of it? Rose rarely
talked to him, and was always ready to make him the target of a
sub-acid raillery. Agnes was clearly indifferent to him, and Mrs.
Leyburn equally clearly afraid of him. Mrs. Elsmere, too, seemed to
dislike him, and yet there he was, week after week. Flaxman could not
make it out.
Then he tried to explore the man himself. He started various topics with
him--University reform, politics, music. In vain. In his most
characteristic Oxford days Langham had never assumed a more wholesale
ignorance of all subjects in heaven and earth, and never stuck more
pertinaciously to the flattest forms of commonplace. Flaxman walked away
at last boiling over. The man of parts masquerading as the fool is
perhaps at least as exasperating as the fool playing at wisdom.
However, he was not the only person irritated. After one of these
fragments of conversation Langham also walked rapidly home in a state of
most irrational petulance, his hands thrust with energy into the pockets
of his overcoat.
'No, my successful aristocrat, you shall not have everything your own
way so easily with me or with _her_! You may break me, but you shall not
play upon me. And as for her, I will see it out--I will see it out!'
And he stiffened himself as he walked, feeling life electric all about
him, and a strange new force tingling in every vein.
Meanwhile, however, Mr. Flaxman was certainly having a good deal of his
own way. Since the moment when his aunt, Lady Charlotte, had introduced
him to Miss Leyburn--watching him the while with a half-smile which soon
broadened into one of sly triumph--Hugh Flaxman had persuaded himself
that country houses are intolerable even in the shooting season, and
that London is the only place of residence during the winter for the man
who aspires to govern his life on principles of reason. Through his
influence and that of his aunt, Rose and Agnes--Mrs. Leyburn never went
out--were being carried into all the high life that London can supply in
November and January. Wealthy, high-born, and popular, he was gradually
devoting his advantages in the freest way to Rose's service. He was an
excellent musical amateur, and he was always proud to play with her; he
had a fine country house, and the little rooms on Campden Hill were
almost always filled with flowers from his gardens; he had a famous
musical library, and its treasures were lavished on the girl violinist;
he had a singularly wide circle of friends, and with his whimsical
energy he was soon inclined to make kindness to the two sisters the one
test of a friend's goodwill.
He was clearly touched by Rose; and what was to prevent his making an
impression on her? To her sex he had always been singularly attractive.
Like his sister, he had all sorts of bright impulses and audacities
flashing and darting about him. He had a certain _hauteur_ with men, and
could play the aristocrat when he pleased, for all his philosophical
radicalism. But with women he was the most delightful mixture of
deference and high spirits. He loved the grace of them, the daintiness
of their dress, the softness of their voices. He would have done
anything to please them, anything to save them pain. At twenty-five,
when he was still 'Citizen Flaxman' to his college friends, and in the
first fervours of a poetic defiance of prejudice and convention, he had
married a gamekeeper's pretty daughter. She had died with her
child--died, almost, poor thing! of happiness and excitement--of the
over-greatness of Heaven's boon to her. Flaxman had adored her, and
death had tenderly embalmed a sentiment to which life might possibly
have been less kind. Since then he had lived in music, letters, and
society, refusing out of a certain fastidiousness to enter politics, but
welcomed and considered, wherever he went, tall, good-looking,
distinguished, one of the most agreeable and courted of men, and perhaps
the richest _parti_ in London.
Still, in spite of it all, Langham held his ground--Langham would see it
out! And indeed Flaxman's footing with the beauty was by no means
clear--least of all to himself. She evidently liked him, but she
bantered him a good deal; she would not be the least subdued or dazzled
by his birth and wealth, or by those of his friends; and if she allowed
him to provide her with pleasures, she would hardly ever take his
advice, or knowingly consult his tastes.
Meanwhile she tormented them both a good deal by the artistic
acquaintance she gathered about her. Mrs. Pierson's world, as we have
said, contained a good many dubious odds and ends, and she had handed
them all over to Rose. The Leyburns' growing intimacy with Mr. Flaxman
and his circle, and through them with the finer types of the artistic
life, would naturally and by degrees have carried them away somewhat
from this earlier circle if Rose would have allowed it. But she clung
persistently to its most unpromising specimens, partly out of a natural
generosity of feeling, but partly also for the sake of that opposition
her soul loved, her poor prickly soul, full under all her gaiety and
indifference of the most desperate doubt and soreness,--opposition to
Catherine, opposition to Mr. Flaxman, but, above all, opposition to
Langham.
Flaxman could often avenge himself on her--or rather on the more
obnoxious members of her following--by dint of a faculty for light and
stinging repartee which would send her, flushed and biting her lip, to
have her laugh out in private. But Langham for a long time was
defenceless. Many of her friends in his opinion were simply pathological
curiosities--their vanity was so frenzied, their sensibilities so
morbidly developed. He felt a doctor's interest in them coupled with
more than a doctor's scepticism as to all they had to say about
themselves. But Rose would invite them, would assume a _quasi_-intimacy
with them; and Langham as well as everybody else had to put up with it.
Even the trodden worm, however---- And there came a time when the
concentration of a good many different lines of feeling in Langham's
mind betrayed itself at last in a sharp and sudden openness. It began to
seem to _him_ that she was specially bent often on tormenting him by
these caprices of hers, and he vowed to himself finally, with an
outburst of irritation due in reality to a hundred causes, that he would
assert himself, that he would make an effort at any rate to save her
from her own follies.
One afternoon, at a crowded musical party, to which he had come much
against his will, and only in obedience to a compulsion he dared not
analyse, she asked him in passing if he would kindly find Mr. MacFadden,