Robert Elsmere Part 67

The wildest fears had taken possession of him. Running in his head was a pa.s.sage from _The confessions_, describing Monica's horror of her son's heretical opinions. 'Shrinking from and detesting the blasphemies of his error, she began to doubt whether it was right in her to allow her son to live in her house and to eat at the same table with her;' and the mother's heart, he remembered, could only be convinced of the lawfulness of its own yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth's conversion. He recalled, with a s.h.i.+ver, how in the life of Madame Guyon, after describing the painful and agonising death of a kind but comparatively irreligious husband, she quietly adds, 'As soon as I heard that my husband had just expired, I said to Thee, O my G.o.d, Thou hast broken my bonds, and I will offer to Thee a sacrifice of praise!' He thought of John Henry Newman, disowning all the ties of kins.h.i.+p with his younger brother because of divergent views on the question of baptismal regeneration; of the long tragedy of Blanco White's life, caused by the slow dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground of heretical belief. What right had he, or any one in such a strait as his, to a.s.sume that the faith of the present is no longer capable of the same stern self-destructive consistency as the faith of the past? He knew that to such Christian purity, such Christian inwardness as Catherine's, the ultimate sanction and legitimacy of marriage rest, both in theory and practice, on a common acceptance of the definite commands and promises of a miraculous revelation. He had had a proof of it in Catherine's pa.s.sionate repugnance to the idea of Rose's marriage with Edward Langham.

Eleven o'clock striking from the distant tower. He walked desperately along the wood-path, meaning to go through the copse at the end of it towards the park, and look there. He had just pa.s.sed into the copse, a thick interwoven ma.s.s of young trees, when he heard the sound of the gate which on the farther side of it led on to the road. He hurried on; the trees closed behind him; the gra.s.sy path broadened; and there, under an arch of young oak and hazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the sound of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her; he could not go on.

Husband and wife looked at each other one long quivering moment. Then Catherine sprang forward with a sob and threw herself on his breast.

They clung to each other, she in a pa.s.sion of tears--tears of such self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living soul had ever seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him he was trembling from head to foot, his arms scarcely strong enough to hold her, his young worn face bent down over her.

'Oh, Robert!' she sobbed at last, putting up her hand and touching his hair, 'you look so pale, so sad.'

'I have you again!' he said simply.

A thrill of remorse ran through her.

'I went away,' she murmured, her face still hidden--'I went away, because when I woke up it all seemed to me, suddenly, too ghastly to be believed; I could not stay still and bear it. But, Robert, Robert, I kissed you as I pa.s.sed! I was so thankful you could sleep a little and forget. I hardly know where I have been most of the time--I think I have been sitting in a corner of the park, where no one ever comes. I began to think of all you said to me last night--to put it together--to try and understand it, and it seemed to me more and more horrible! I thought of what it would be like to have to hide my prayers from you--my faith in Christ--my hope of heaven. I thought of bringing up the child--how all that was vital to me would be a superst.i.tion to you, which you would bear with for my sake. I thought of death,' and she shuddered--'your death, or my death, and how this change in you would cleave a gulf of misery between us. And then I thought of losing my own faith, of denying Christ. It was a nightmare--I saw myself on a long road, escaping with Mary in my arms, escaping from you! Oh, Robert! it wasn't only for myself,'--and she clung to him as though she were a child, confessing, explaining away, some grievous fault hardly to be forgiven. 'I was agonised by the thought that I was not my own--I and my child were _Christ's_. Could I risk what was His? Other men and women had died, had given up all for His sake. Is there no one now strong enough to suffer torment, to kill even love itself rather than deny Him--rather than crucify Him afresh?'

She paused, struggling for breath. The terrible excitement of that bygone moment had seized upon her again and communicated itself to him.

'And then--and then,' she said sobbing, 'I don't know how it was. One moment I was sitting up looking straight before me, without a tear, thinking of what was the least I must do, even--even--if you and I stayed together--of all the hard compacts and conditions I must make--judging you all the while from a long, long distance, and feeling as though I had buried the old self--sacrificed the old heart--for ever!

And the next I was lying on the ground crying for you, Robert, crying for you! Your face had come back to me as you lay there in the early morning light. I thought how I had kissed you--how pale and gray and thin you looked. Oh, how I loathed myself! That I should think it could be G.o.d's will that I should leave you, or torture you, my poor husband!

I had not only been wicked towards you--I had offended Christ. I could think of nothing as I lay there--again and again--but "_Little children, love one another; little children, love one another._" Oh, my beloved,'--and she looked up with the solemnest, tenderest smile breaking on the marred tear-stained face,--'I will never give up hope, I will pray for you night and day. G.o.d will bring you back. You cannot lose yourself so. No, no! His grace is stronger than our wills. But I will not preach to you--I will not persecute you--I will only live beside you--in your heart--and love you always. Oh, how could I--how could I have such thoughts!'

And again she broke off, weeping, as if to the tender torn heart the only crime that could not be forgiven was its own offence against love.

As for him he was beyond speech. If he had ever lost his vision of G.o.d, his wife's love would that moment have given it back to him.

'Robert,' she said presently, urged on by the sacred yearning to heal, to atone, 'I will not complain--I will not ask you to wait. I take your word for it that it is best not, that it would do no good. The only hope is in time--and prayer. I must suffer, dear, I must be weak sometimes; but oh, I am so sorry for you! Kiss me, forgive me, Robert; I will be your faithful wife unto our lives' end.'

He kissed her, and in that kiss, so sad, so pitiful, so clinging, their new life was born.

CHAPTER x.x.x

But the problem of these two lives was not solved by a burst of feeling.

Without that determining impulse of love and pity in Catherine's heart the salvation of an exquisite bond might indeed have been impossible.

But in spite of it the laws of character had still to work themselves inexorably out on either side.

The whole gist of the matter for Elsmere lay really in this question: Hidden in Catherine's nature, was there, or was there not, the true stuff of fanaticism? Madame Guyon left her infant children to the mercies of chance, while she followed the voice of G.o.d to the holy war with heresy. Under similar conditions Catherine Elsmere might have planned the same. Could she ever have carried it out?

And yet the question is still ill stated. For the influences of our modern time on religious action are so blunting and dulling, because in truth the religious motive itself is being constantly modified, whether the religious person knows it or not. Is it possible now for a good woman with a heart, in Catherine Elsmere's position, to maintain herself against love, and all those subtle forces to which such a change as Elsmere's opens the house doors, without either hardening, or greatly yielding? Let Catherine's further story give some sort of an answer.

Poor soul! As they sat together in the study, after he had brought her home, Robert, with averted eyes, went through the plans he had already thought into shape. Catherine listened, saying almost nothing. But never, never had she loved this life of theirs so well as now that she was called on, at barely a week's notice, to give it up for ever! For Robert's scheme, in which her reason fully acquiesced, was to keep to their plan of going to Switzerland, he having first, of course, settled all things with the bishop, and having placed his living in the hands of Mowbray Elsmere. When they left the rectory, in a week or ten days'

time, he proposed, in fact, his voice almost inaudible as he did so, that Catherine should leave it for good.

'Everybody had better suppose,' he said choking, 'that we are coming back. Of course we need say nothing. Armitstead will be here for next week certainly. Then afterwards I can come down and manage everything. I shall get it over in a day if I can, and see n.o.body. I cannot say good-bye, nor can you.'

'And next Sunday, Robert?' she asked him, after a pause.

'I shall write to Armitstead this afternoon and ask him, if he possibly can, to come to-morrow afternoon, instead of Monday, and take the service.'

Catherine's hands clasped each other still more closely. So then she had heard her husband's voice for the last time in the public ministry of the Church, in prayer, in exhortation, in benediction! One of the most sacred traditions of her life was struck from her at a blow.

It was long before either of them spoke again. Then she ventured another question.

'And have you any idea of what we shall do next, Robert--of--of our future?'

'Shall we try London for a little?' he answered in a queer strained voice, leaning against the window, and looking out, that he might not see her. 'I should find work among the poor--so would you--and I could go on with my book. And your mother and sister will probably be there part of the winter.'

She acquiesced silently. How mean and shrunken a future it seemed to them both, beside the wide and honourable range of his clergyman's life as he and she had developed it. But she did not dwell long on that. Her thoughts were suddenly invaded by the memory of a cottage tragedy in which she had recently taken a prominent part. A girl, a child of fifteen, from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago, ruined, the victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his teeth in fierce and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a shelter, and was to see her through her 'trouble'; the girl, a frail half-witted creature, who could find no words even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while with the dumbest, pitifulest tenacity.

How _could_ she leave that girl? It was as if all the fibres of life were being violently wrenched from all their natural connections.

'Robert!' she cried at last with a start. 'Had you forgotten the Inst.i.tute to-morrow?'

'No--no,' he said with the saddest smile. 'No, I had not forgotten it.

Don't go, Catherine--don't go. I must. But why should you go through it?'

'But there are all those flags and wreaths,' she said, getting up in pained bewilderment. 'I must go and look after them.'

He caught her in his arms.

'Oh, my wife, my wife, forgive me!' It was a groan of misery. She put up her hands and pressed his hair back from his temples.

'I love you, Robert,' she said simply, her face colourless, but perfectly calm.

Half an hour later, after he had worked through some letters, he went into the workroom and found her surrounded with flags, and a vast litter of paper roses and evergreens, which she and the new agent's daughters who had come up to help her were putting together for the decorations of the morrow. Mary was tottering from chair to chair in high glee, a big pink rose stuck in the belt of her pinafore. His pale wife, trying to smile and talk as usual, her lap full of evergreens, and her politeness exercised by the chatter of the two Miss Batesons, seemed to Robert one of the most pitiful spectacles he had ever seen. He fled from it out into the village driven by a restless longing for change and movement.

Here he found a large gathering round the new Inst.i.tute. There were carpenters at work on a triumphal arch in front, and close by, an admiring circle of children and old men, huddling in the shade of a great chestnut.

Elsmere spent an hour in the building, helping and superintending, stabbed every now and then by the unsuspecting friendliness of those about him, or worried by their blunt comments on his looks. He could not bear more than a glance into the new rooms apportioned to the Naturalists' Club. There against the wall stood the new gla.s.s cases he had wrung out of the squire, with various new collections lying near, ready to be arranged and unpacked when time allowed. The old collections stood out bravely in the added s.p.a.ce and light; the walls were hung here and there with a wonderful set of geographical pictures he had carried off from a London exhibition, and fed his boys on for weeks; the floors were freshly matted; the new pine fittings gave out their pleasant cleanly scent; the white paint of doors and windows shone in the August sun. The building had been given by the squire. The fittings and furniture had been mainly of his providing. What uses he had planned for it all!--only to see the fruits of two years' effort out of doors, and personal frugality at home, handed over to some possibly unsympathetic stranger. The heart beat painfully against the iron bars of fate, rebelling against the power of a mental process so to affect a man's whole practical and social life!

He went out at last by the back of the Inst.i.tute, where a little bit of garden, spoilt with building materials, led down to a lane.

At the end of the garden, beside the untidy gap in the hedge made by the builders' carts, he saw a man standing, who turned away down the lane, however, as soon as the rector's figure emerged into view.

Robert had recognised the slouching gait and unwieldy form of Henslowe.

There were at this moment all kinds of gruesome stories afloat in the village about the ex-agent. It was said that he was breaking up fast; it was known that he was extensively in debt; and the village shopkeepers had already held an agitated meeting or two, to decide upon the best mode of getting their money out of him, and upon a joint plan of cautious action towards his custom in future. The man, indeed, was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit of sordid misery, maintaining all the while a snarling exasperating front to the world, which was rapidly converting the careless half-malicious pity wherewith the village had till now surveyed his fall into that more active species of baiting which the human animal is never very loth to try upon the limping specimens of his race.

Henslowe stopped and turned as he heard the steps behind him. Six months' self-murdering had left ghastly traces. He was many degrees nearer the brute than he had been even when Robert made his ineffectual visit. But at this actual moment Robert's practised eye--for every English parish clergyman becomes dismally expert in the pathology of drunkenness--saw that there was no fight in him. He was in one of the drunkard's periods of collapse--s.h.i.+vering, flabby, starting at every sound, a misery to himself and a spectacle to others.

'Mr. Henslowe!' cried Robert, still pursuing him, 'may I speak to you a moment?'

The ex-agent turned, his prominent bloodshot eyes glowering at the speaker. But he had to catch at his stick for support, or at the nervous shock of Robert's summons his legs would have given way under him.

Robert came up with him and stood a second, fronting the evil silence of the other, his boyish face deeply flushed. Perhaps the grotesqueness of that former scene was in his mind. Moreover, the vestry meetings had furnished Henslowe with periodical opportunities for venting his gall on the rector, and they had never been neglected. But he plunged on boldly.

'I am going away next week, Mr. Henslowe; I shall be away some considerable time. Before I go I should like to ask you whether you do not think the feud between us had better cease. Why will you persist in making an enemy of me? If I did you an injury it was neither wittingly nor willingly. I know you have been ill and I gather that--that--you are in trouble. If I could stand between you and further mischief I would--most gladly. If help--or--or money----' He paused. He shrewdly suspected, indeed, from the reports that reached him, that Henslowe was on the brink of bankruptcy.

The rector had spoken with the utmost diffidence and delicacy, but Henslowe found energy in return for an outburst of quavering animosity, from which, however, physical weakness had extracted all its sting.