Robert Elsmere, Mrs. Humphry Ward [e book reader online TXT] 📗

never done since she was a tiny child. She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square drawing-room pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality recovering, like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing influence of thought and silence.

One day when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine by saying with one of her old, odd smiles,--

'Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of hullucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great astonishment, there is no bone broken!'

And she held herself back from Catherine's knee lest her sister should attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow an answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.

In truth, Rose Leyburn's girlish passion for Edward Langham had been a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and lounging when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities. His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl's immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the interval of angry, resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it. As to the months in London, they had been one long duel between herself and him--a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncertainty, but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large portion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory, Langham's endangered habits and threatened individuality had asserted themselves once for all. And from the whole long struggle--passion, exultation, and crushing defeat--it often seemed to her that she had gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character, a soul!

It may easily be imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen interest in Langham's disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle House rehearsal he had awaited Rose's coming in a state of extraordinary irritation. He expected a blushing _fiancee_, in a fool's paradise, asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him. And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some double-edged congratulations.

Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale, tired girl who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.

His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way up to her, and was her watchful, unobtrusive guardian for the rest of the afternoon.

He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient conjecture.

'As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot--and if he did, _a fortiori_, for clearly she is _miserable_. But what a brave child! How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that _I_ saw nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!'

Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had left London.

Gone! But not without a crisis--that was evident. During the din of preparation for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings which it entailed, now at the Varleys', now at the house of some other connection of his--for the concert was the work of his friends, and given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel--he had many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft, indefinable change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been so marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was to his fancy absent and _distraite_, pursuing, through the tumult of which she was often the central figure, some inner meditations of which neither he or anyone else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over the girl's light, self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.

Flaxman's guesses as to what had happened came often very near the truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received his own conjectures amused himself.

'To think,' he said to himself once with a long breath 'that that creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without any one of the kickings due to him!'

Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude toward this same 'creature,' toward the man who had released a prize he had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. _Free_ again--to be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.

His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask of her friends was not to be made to feel.

He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh's behalf, Lady Helen had been dumfounded by the sudden emergence of Langham at Lady Charlotte's party for their common discomfiture. Who was the man?--why?--what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love, and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected, that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for him which at the moment he could not play for himself.

So in the cheeriest, daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally, to Mrs. Pierson's disgust, became the girls' chief chaperon in a fast filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend or amuse his sister's _protegees_--always there, but never in the way. He was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone toward her which made his companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose's health, a few unexplained stares and 'humphs' and grunts, a few irrelevant disquisitions on her nephew's merits of head and heart, were all she was able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething with a mass of sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant to give expression--anger with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous as to prefer some one else to Hugh; terror with Hugh for his persistent disregard of her advice and the Duke's feelings; and a burning desire to know the precise why and wherefore of Langham's disappearance. She was too lofty to become Rose's aunt without a struggle, but she was not too lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs.

But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited most by Rose's shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming over, restless under her own smart, would fall to watching the trial of the woman and the wife, and would often perforce forget herself and her smaller woes in the pity of it. She stayed in Bedford Square once for a week, and then for the first time she realized the profound change which had passed over the Elsmeres' life. As much tenderness between husband and wife as ever--perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though from an instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from each other and from the world. But Robert went his way, Catherine hers. Their spheres of work lay far apart; their interests were diverging fast; and though Robert at any rate was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh invading silences were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the number of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in the East End. under Murray Edwardes' auspices. He was already known to certain circles as a seceder from the Church who was likely to become both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the 'Nineteenth Century,' on disputed points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made their mark, and several of the veterans of philosophical debate had already taken friendly and flattering notice of the new writer. Meanwhile Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon's Sunday-school, and attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert's energies became, the more she suffered, and the more the small daily opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could hardly bear to hear him talk about his work, and she never opened the number of the 'Nineteenth Century' which contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to ask her to read them.

Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appearance in R----, with a cordiality and a helpfulness of the most self-effacing kind. Robert had begun with assuring his new friend that he saw no chance, at any rate for the present, of his formally joining the Unitarians.

'I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet! And I own I look rather for a combination from many sides than for the development of any now existing sect. But, supposing,' he added, smiling, 'supposing I do in time set up a congregation and a service of my own, is there really room for you and me? Should I not be infringing on a work I respect a great deal too much for anything of the sort?'

Edwardes laughed the notion to scorn.

The parish, as a whole, contained 20,000 persons. The existing churches, which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid's, were miserably attended, provided accommodation at the out-side for 3,000. His own chapel held 400, and was about half full.

'You and I may drop our lives here,' he said, his pleasant friendliness darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy which London work seems to develop even in the most buoyant of men, 'and only a few hundred persons, at the most, be ever the wiser. Begin with us--then make your own circle.'

And he forthwith carried off