Robert Elsmere Part 28

During the last six weeks the colours of 'this threadbare world' had been freshening before her in marvellous fas.h.i.+on. And now, as she stood looking out, the quiet fields opposite, the sight of a cow pus.h.i.+ng its head through the hedge, the infinite sunset sky, the quiet of the house, filled her with a sudden depression. How dull it all seemed--how wanting in the glow of life!

CHAPTER XII

Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was pa.s.sing, watched by Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had retreated into a corner of his own as soon as another visitor appeared. Beside Catherine sat a Ritualist clergyman in ca.s.sock and long cloak--a saint clearly, though perhaps, to judge from the slight restlessness of movement that seemed to quiver through him perpetually, an irritable one. But he had the saint's wasted unearthly look, the ascetic brow high and narrow, the veins showing through the skin, and a personality as magnetic as it was strong.

Catherine listened to the new-comer, and gave him his tea, with an aloofness of manner which was not lost on Langham. 'She is the Thirty-nine Articles in the fles.h.!.+' he said to himself. 'For her there must neither be too much nor too little. How can Elsmere stand it?'

Elsmere apparently was not perfectly happy. He sat balancing his long person over the arm of a chair listening to the recital of some of the High Churchman's parish troubles with a slight half-embarra.s.sed smile.

The vicar of Nottingham was always in trouble. The narrative he was pouring out took shape in Langham's sarcastic sense as a sort of cla.s.sical epic, with the High Churchman as a new champion of Christendom, hara.s.sed on all sides by pagan paris.h.i.+oners, cra.s.s churchwardens, and treacherous bishops. Catherine's fine face grew more and more set, nay disdainful. Mr. Newcome was quite blind to it. Women never entered into his calculations except as sisters or as penitents.

At a certain diocesan conference he had discovered a sympathetic fibre in the young rector of Murewell, which had been to the imperious persecuted zealot like water to the thirsty. He had come to-day, drawn by the same quality in Elsmere as had originally attracted Langham to the St. Anselm's undergraduate, and he sat pouring himself out with as much freedom as if all his companions had been as ready as he was to die for an alb, or to spend half their days in piously circ.u.mventing a bishop.

But presently the conversation had slid, no one knew how, from Nottingham and its intrigues to London and its teeming East. Robert was leading, his eye now on the apostolic-looking priest, now on his wife.

Mr. Newcome resisted, but Robert had his way. Then it came out that behind these battles of kites and crows at Mottringham, there lay an heroic period, when the pale ascetic had wrestled ten years with London poverty, leaving health and youth and nerves behind him in the _melee_.

Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian bishop--what Christian dare parade ten years of love to G.o.d and man? And presently round Elsmere's lip there dawned a little smile of triumph.

Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was bending forward eagerly--listening. Stroke by stroke, as the words and facts were beguiled from him, all that was futile and quarrelsome in the sharp-featured priest sank out of sight; the face glowed with inward light; the stature of the man seemed to rise; the angel in him unsheathed its wings. Suddenly a story of the slums that Mr. Newcome was telling--a story of the purest Christian heroism told in the simplest way--came to an end, and Catherine leaned towards him with a long quivering breath.

'Oh, thank you, thank you! That must have been a joy, a privilege!'

Mr. Newcome turned and looked at her with surprise.

'Yes, it was a privilege,' he said slowly--the story had been an account of the rescue of a young country lad from a London den of thieves and profligates--'you are right; it was just that.'

And then some sensitive inner fibre of the man was set vibrating, and he would talk no more of himself or his past, do what they would.

So Robert had hastily to provide another subject, and he fell upon that of the squire.

Mr. Newcome's eyes flashed.

'He is coming back? I am sorry for you, Elsmere. "Woe is me that I am constrained to dwell with Mesech, and to have my habitation among the tents of Kedar!"'

And he fell back in his chair, his lips tightening, his thin long hand lying along the arm of it, answering to that general impression of combat, of the spiritual athlete, that hung about him.

'I don't know,' said Robert brightly, as he leant against the mantelpiece looking curiously at his visitor. 'The squire is a man of strong character, of vast learning. His library is one of the finest in England, and it is at my service. I am not concerned with his opinions.'

'Ah, I see,' said Newcome in his driest voice, but sadly. 'You are one of the people who believe in what you call tolerance--I remember.'

'Yes, that is an impeachment to which I plead guilty,' said Robert, perhaps with equal dryness; 'and you--have your worries driven you to throw tolerance overboard?'

Newcome bent forward quickly. Strange glow and intensity of the fanatical eyes--strange beauty of the wasted persecuting lips!

'Tolerance!' he said with irritable vehemence--'tolerance! Simply another name for betrayal, cowardice, desertion--nothing else. G.o.d, Heaven, Salvation on the one side, the devil and h.e.l.l on the other--and one miserable life, one wretched sin-stained will, to win the battle with; and in such a state of things _you_--' he drooped his voice, throwing out every word with a scornful, sibilant emphasis--'_you_ would have us behave as though our friends were our enemies and our enemies our friends, as though eternal misery were a bagatelle and our faith a mere alternative. _I stand for Christ_, and His foes are mine.'

'By which I suppose you mean,' said Robert quietly, 'that you would shut your door on the writer of _The Idols of the Market-place_?'

'Certainly.'

And the priest rose, his whole attention concentrated on Robert, as though some deeper-lying motive were suddenly brought into play than any suggested by the conversation itself.

'Certainly. _Judge not_--so long as a man has not judged himself,--only till then. As to an open enemy, the Christian's path is clear. We are but soldiers under orders. What business have we to be truce-making on our own account? The war is not ours, but G.o.d's!'

Robert's eyes had kindled. He was about to indulge himself in such a quick pa.s.sage of arms as all such natures as his delight in, when his look travelled past the gaunt figure of the Ritualist vicar to his wife.

A sudden pang smote, silenced him. She was sitting with her face raised to Newcome; and her beautiful gray eyes were full of a secret pa.s.sion of sympathy. It was like the sudden re-emergence of something repressed, the satisfaction of something hungry. Robert moved closer to her, and the colour flushed over all his young boyish face.

'To me,' he said in a low voice, his eyes fixed rather on her than on Newcome, 'a clergyman has enough to do with those foes of Christ he cannot choose but recognise. There is no making truce with vice or cruelty. Why should we complicate our task and spend in needless struggle the energies we might give to love and to our brother?'

His wife turned to him. There was trouble in her look, then a swift lovely dawn of something indescribable. Newcome moved away with a gesture that was half bitterness, half weariness.

'Wait, my friend,' he said slowly, 'till you have watched that man's books eating the very heart out of a poor creature as I have. When you have once seen Christ robbed of a soul that might have been His, by the infidel of genius, you will loathe all this Laodicean cant of tolerance as I do!'

There was an awkward pause. Langham, with his eyegla.s.s on, was carefully examining the make of a carved paper-knife lying near him. The strained preoccupied mind of the High Churchman had never taken the smallest account of his presence, of which Robert had been keenly, not to say humorously, conscious throughout.

But after a minute or so the tutor got up, strolled forward, and addressed Robert on some Oxford topic of common interest. Newcome, in a kind of dream which seemed to have suddenly descended on him, stood near them, his priestly cloak falling in long folds about him, his ascetic face grave and rapt. Gradually, however, the talk of the two men dissipated the mystical cloud about him. He began to listen, to catch the savour of Langham's modes of speech, and of his languid indifferent personality.

'I must go,' he said abruptly, after a minute or two, breaking in upon the friends' conversation. 'I shall hardly get home before dark.'

He took a cold punctilious leave of Catherine, and a still colder and slighter leave of Langham. Elsmere accompanied him to the gate.

On the way the older man suddenly caught him by the arm.

'Elsmere, let me--I am the elder by so many years--let me speak to you.

My heart goes out to you!'

And the eagle face softened; the harsh commanding presence became enveloping, magnetic. Robert paused and looked down upon him, a quick light of foresight in his eye. He felt what was coming.

And down it swept upon him, a hurricane of words hot from Newcome's inmost being, a protest winged by the gathered pa.s.sion of years against certain 'dangerous tendencies' the elder priest discerned in the younger, against the wors.h.i.+p of intellect and science as such which appeared in Elsmere's talk, in Elsmere's choice of friends. It was the eternal cry of the mystic of all ages.

'Scholars.h.i.+p! learning!' Eyes and lips flashed into a vehement scorn.

'You allow them a value in themselves, apart from the Christian's test.

It is the modern canker, the modern curse! Thank G.o.d, my years in London burnt it out of me! Oh, my friend, what have you and I to do with all these curious triflings, which lead men oftener to rebellion than to wors.h.i.+p? Is this a time for wholesale trust, for a maudlin universal sympathy? Nay, rather a day of suspicion, a day of repression!--a time for trampling on the l.u.s.ts of the mind no less than the l.u.s.ts of the body, a time when it is better to believe than to know, to pray than to understand!'

Robert was silent a moment, and they stood together, Newcome's gaze of fiery appeal fixed upon him.

'We are differently made, you and I,' said the young rector at last with difficulty. 'Where you see temptation I see opportunity. I cannot conceive of G.o.d as the Arch-plotter against His own creation!'

Newcome dropped his hold abruptly.

'A groundless optimism,' he said with harshness. 'On the track of the soul from birth to death there are two sleuth-hounds--Sin and Satan.

Mankind for ever flies them, is for ever vanquished and devoured. I see life always as a thread-like path between abysses along which man _creeps_'--and his gesture ill.u.s.trated the words--'with bleeding hands and feet towards one--narrow--solitary outlet. Woe to him if he turn to the right hand or the left--"I will repay, saith the Lord!"'

Elsmere drew himself up suddenly; the words seemed to him a blasphemy.

Then something stayed the vehement answer on his lips. It was a sense of profound intolerable pity. What a maimed life! what an indomitable soul!

Husbandhood, fatherhood, and all the sacred education that flows from human joy for ever self-forbidden, and this grim creed for recompense!

He caught Newcome's hand with a kind of filial eagerness.