Robert Elsmere Part 92

Catherine lingered a little, watching him, longing miserably, like any girl of eighteen, to throw herself on his neck and reproach him for their unhappiness, his friends--she knew not what! He all the time was intimately conscious of her presence, of her pale beauty, which now at twenty-nine, in spite of its severity, had a subtler finish and attraction than ever, of the restless little movements so unlike herself, which she made from time to time. But neither spoke except upon indifferent things. Once more the difficult conditions of their lives seemed too obvious, too oppressive. Both were ultimately conquered by the same sore impulse to let speech alone.

CHAPTER XLII

And after this little scene, through the busy exciting weeks of the season which followed, Robert, taxed to the utmost on all sides, yielded to the impulse of silence more and more.

Society was another difficulty between them, Robert delighted in it so far as his East End life allowed him to have it. No one was ever more ready to take other men and women at their own valuation than he.

Nothing was so easy to him as to believe in other people's goodness, or cleverness, or superhuman achievement. On the other hand, London is kind to such men as Robert Elsmere. His talk, his writing, were becoming known and relished; and even the most rigid of the old school found it difficult to be angry with him. His knowledge of the poor and of social questions attracted the men of actions; his growing historical reputation drew the attention of the men of thought. Most people wished to know him and to talk to him, and Catherine, smiled upon for his sake, and a.s.sumed to be his chief disciple, felt herself more and more bewildered and antagonistic as the season rushed on.

For what pleasure could she get out of these dinners and these evenings, which supplied Robert with so much intellectual stimulus? With her all the moral nerves were jarring and out of tune. At any time Richard Leyburn's daughter would have found it hard to tolerate a society where everything is an open question and all confessions of faith are more or less bad taste. But now, when there was no refuge to fall back upon in Robert's arms, no certainty of his sympathy--nay, a certainty that, however tender and pitiful he might be, he would still think her wrong and mistaken! She went here and there obediently because he wished; but her youth seemed to be ebbing, the old Murewell gaiety entirely left her, and people in general wondered why Elsmere should have married a wife older than himself, and apparently so unsuited to him in temperament.

Especially was she tried at Madame de Netteville's. For Robert's sake she tried for a time to put aside her first impression and to bear Madame de Netteville's evenings--little dreaming, poor thing, all the time that Madame de Netteville thought her presence at the famous 'Fridays' an incubus only to be put up with because the husband was becoming socially an indispensable.

But after two or three Fridays Catherine's endurance failed her. On the last occasion she found herself late in the evening hemmed in behind Madame de Netteville and a distinguished African explorer, who was the lion of the evening. Eugenie de Netteville had forgotten her silent neighbour, and presently, with some biting little phrase or other, she asked the great man his opinion on a burning topic of the day, the results of Church Missions in Africa. The great man laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and ran lightly through a string of stories in which both missionaries and converts played parts which were either grotesque or worse. Madame de Netteville thought the stories amusing, and as one ceased she provoked another, her black eyes full of a dry laughter, her white hand lazily plying her great ostrich fan.

Suddenly a figure rose behind them.

'Oh, Mrs. Elsmere!' said Madame de Netteville, starting, and then coolly recovering herself, 'I had no idea you were there all alone. I am afraid our conversation has been disagreeable to you. I am afraid you are a friend of missions!'

And her glance, turning from Catherine to her companion, made a little malicious signal to him which only he detected, as though bidding him take note of a curiosity.

'Yes, I care for them, I wish for their success,' said Catherine, one hand, which trembled slightly, resting on the table beside her, her great gray eyes fixed on Madame de Netteville. 'No Christian has any right to do otherwise.'

Poor brave goaded soul! She had a vague idea of 'bearing testimony' as her father would have borne it in like circ.u.mstances. But she turned very pale. Even to her the word 'Christian' sounded like a bombsh.e.l.l in that room. The great traveller looked up astounded. He saw a tall woman in white with a beautiful head, a delicate face, a something indescribably n.o.ble and unusual in her whole look and att.i.tude. She looked like a Quaker prophetess--like Dinah Morris in society--like--but his comparisons failed him. How did such a being come _there_? He was amazed; but he was a man of taste, and Madame de Netteville caught a certain aesthetic approbation in his look.

She rose, her expression hard and bright as usual.

'May one Christian p.r.o.nounce for all?' she said with a scornful affectation of meekness. 'Mrs. Elsmere, please find some chair more comfortable than that ottoman; and Mr. Ansdale, will you come and be introduced to Lady Aubrey?'

After her guests had gone Madame de Netteville came back to the fire flushed and frowning. It seemed to her that in that strange little encounter she had suffered, and she never forgot or forgave the smallest social discomfiture.

'Can I put up with that again?' she asked herself with a contemptuous hardening of the lip. 'I suppose I must if _he_ cannot be got without her. But I have an instinct that it is over--that she will not appear here again. Daudet might make use of her. I can't. What a specimen! A boy and girl match, I suppose. What else could have induced that poor wretch to cut his throat in such fas.h.i.+on? He, of all men!'

And Eugenie de Netteville stood thinking--not, apparently, of the puritanical wife; the dangerous softness which overspread the face could have had no connection with Catherine.

Madame de Netteville's instinct was just. Catherine Elsmere never appeared again in her drawing-room.

But, with a little sad confession of her own invincible distaste, the wife pressed the husband to go without her. She urged it at a bitter moment, when it was clear to her that their lives must of necessity, even in outward matters, be more separate than before. Elsmere resisted for a time; then, lured one evening towards the end of February by the prospect conveyed in a note from Madame de Netteville, wherein Catherine was mentioned in the most scrupulously civil terms, of meeting one of the most eminent of French critics, he went, and thenceforward went often. He had, so far, no particular liking for the hostess; he hated some of her _habitues_; but there was no doubt that in some ways she made an admirable holder of a _salon_, and that round about her there was a subtle mixture of elements, a liberty of discussion and comment, to be found nowhere else. And how bracing and refres.h.i.+ng was that free play of equal mind to the man weary sometimes of his leader's _role_ and weary of himself!

As to the _woman_, his social _navete_, which was extraordinary, but in a man of his type most natural, made him accept her exactly as he found her. If there were two or three people in Paris or London who knew or suspected incidents of Madame de Netteville's young married days which made her reception at some of the strictest English houses a matter of cynical amus.e.m.e.nt to them, not the remotest inkling of their knowledge was ever likely to reach Elsmere. He was not a man who attracted scandals. Nor was it anybody's interest to spread them. Madame de Netteville's position in London society was obviously excellent. If she had peculiarities of manner and speech they were easily supposed to be French. Meanwhile she was undeniably rich and distinguished, and gifted with a most remarkable power of protecting herself and her neighbours from boredom. At the same time, though Elsmere was, in truth, more interested in her friends than in her, he could not possibly be insensible to the consideration shown for him in her drawing-room.

Madame de Netteville allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates as to the young reformer's social simplicity, his dreams, his optimisms.

But those intimates were the first to notice that as soon as he entered the room those optimisms of his were adroitly respected. She had various delicate contrivances for giving him the lead; she exercised a kind of _surveillance_ over the topics introduced; or in conversation with him she would play that most seductive part of the cynic shamed out of cynicism by the neighbourhood of the enthusiast.

Presently she began to claim a practical interest in his Elgood Street work. Her offers were made with a curious mixture of sympathy and mockery. Elsmere could not take her seriously. But neither could he refuse to accept her money, if she chose to spend it on a library for Elgood Street, or to consult with her about the choice of books. This whim of hers created a certain friendly bond between them which was not present before. And on Elsmere's side it was strengthened when, one evening, in a corner of her inner drawing-room, Madame de Netteville suddenly, but very quietly, told him the story of her life--her English youth, her elderly French husband, the death of her only child, and her flight as a young widow to England during the war of 1870. She told the story of the child, as it seemed to Elsmere, with a deliberate avoidance of emotion, nay, even with a certain hardness. But it touched him profoundly. And everything else that she said, though she professed no great regret for her husband, or for the break-up of her French life, and though everything was reticent and measured, deepened the impression of a real forlornness behind all the outward brilliance and social importance. He began to feel a deep and kindly pity for her, coupled with an earnest wish that he could help her to make her life more adequate and satisfying. And all this he showed in the look of his frank gray eyes, in the cordial grasp of the hand with which he said good-bye to her.

Madame de Netteville's gaze followed him out of the room--the tall boyish figure, the n.o.bly carried head. The riddle of her flushed cheek and sparkling eye was hard to read. But there were one or two persons living who could have read it, and who could have warned you that the _true_ story of Eugenie de Netteville's life was written, not in her literary studies or her social triumphs, but in various recurrent outbreaks of unbridled impulse--the secret, and in one or two cases the shameful landmarks of her past. And, as persons of experience, they could also have warned you that the cold intriguer, always mistress of herself, only exists in fiction, and that a certain poisoned and fevered interest in the religious leader, the young and pious priest, as such, is common enough among the corrupter women of all societies.

Towards the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine '_en pet.i.t comite_, a gentlemen's dinner--except for my cousin, Lady Aubrey Willert'--to meet an eminent Liberal Catholic, a friend of Montalembert's youth.

It was a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw experiment. Do what each would, the sore silence between the husband and wife was growing, was swallowing up more of life.

'Shall I go, Catherine?' he asked, handing her the note.

'It would interest you,' she said gently, giving it back to him scrupulously, as though she had nothing to do with it.

He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, looking at her with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal written in them. His heart was hungry for that old clinging dependence, that willing weakness of love, her youth had yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent strength of antagonism. The memory of her Murewell self flashed miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence towards him after her first sight of Newcome, of their night walks during the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his arms only the ghost and shadow of that Murewell Catherine?

She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, for she gave a little s.h.i.+ver, as though bracing herself with a kind of agony to resist.

'Let me go, Robert!' she said gently, kissing him on the forehead and drawing back. 'I hear Mary calling, and nurse is out.'

The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville's dinner-party had come round. About seven o'clock that evening Catherine sat with the child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert. He had gone off early in the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a committee of workmen organised for the establishment of a choral union in R----, the scheme of which had been Flaxman's chief contribution so far to the Elgood Street undertaking.

It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open on to the bit of garden, where the trees were already withered and begrimed, that the air without and her heart within were alike stifling and heavy with storm. _Something_ must put an end to this oppression, this misery! She did not know herself. Her whole inner being seemed to her lessened and degraded by this silent struggle, this fever of the soul, which made impossible all those serenities and sweetnesses of thought in which her nature had always lived of old. The fight into which fate had forced her was destroying her. She was drooping like a plant cut off from all that nourishes its life.

And yet she never conceived it possible that she should relinquish that fight. Nay, at times there sprang up in her now a dangerous and despairing foresight of even worse things in store. In the middle of her suffering she already began to feel at moments the ascetic's terrible sense of compensation. What, after all, is the Christian life but warfare? '_I came not to send peace, but a sword!_'

Yes, in these June days Elsmere's happiness was perhaps nearer wreck than it had ever been. All strong natures grow restless under such a pressure as was now weighing on Catherine. Shock and outburst become inevitable.

So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by vague terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, with a ceaseless energy, like her father.

The outer door opened, and she heard Robert's step, and apparently Mr.

Flaxman's also. There was a hurried subdued word or two in the hall, and the two entered the room where she was sitting.

Robert came, pressing back the hair from his eyes with a gesture which with him was the invariable accompaniment of mental trouble. Catherine sprang up.

'Robert, you look so tired! and how late you are!' Then as she came nearer to him: 'And your coat--_torn--blood_!'

'There is nothing wrong with _me_, dear,' he said hastily, taking her hands--'nothing! But it has been an awful afternoon. Flaxman will tell you. I must go to this place, I suppose, though I hate the thought of it! Flaxman, will you tell her all about it?' And, loosing his hold, he went heavily out of the room and upstairs.

'It has been an accident,' said Flaxman gently, coming forward, 'to one of the men of his cla.s.s. May we sit down, Mrs. Elsmere? Your husband and I have gone through a good deal these last two hours.'

He sat down with a long breath, evidently trying to regain his ordinary even manner. His clothes, too, were covered with dust, and his hand shook. Catherine stood before him in consternation, while a nurse came for the child.

'We had just begun our committee at four o'clock,' he said at last, 'though only about half of the men had arrived, when there was a great shouting and commotion outside, and a man rushed in calling for Elsmere.

We ran out, found a great crowd, a huge brewer's dray standing in the street, and a man run over. Your husband pushed his way in. I followed, and, to my horror, I found him kneeling by--Charles Richards!'

'Charles Richards?' Catherine repeated vacantly.

Flaxman looked up at her, as though puzzled; then a flash of astonishment pa.s.sed over his face.

'Elsmere has never told you of Charles Richards, the little gasfitter, who has been his right hand for the past three months?'

'No--never,' she said slowly.

Again he looked astonished; then he went on sadly: 'All this spring he has been your husband's shadow--I never saw such devotion. We found him lying in the middle of the road. He had only just left work, a man said who had been with him, and was running to the meeting. He slipped and fell, crossing the street, which was muddy from last night's rain. The dray swung round the corner--the driver was drunk or careless--and they went right over him. One foot was a sickening sight. Your husband and I luckily knew how to lift him for the best. We sent off for doctors. His home was in the next street, as it happened--nearer than any hospital; so we carried him there. The neighbours were round the door.'