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

in which it had been held with a sudden burst of talk and movement. In the midst of it, and as the majority of the audience were filing out into the adjoining rooms, the gas-fitter's tall companion Andrews mounted the platform, while the gas-fitter himself with an impatient shrug, pushed his way into the outgoing crowd. Andrews went slowly and deliberately to work, dealing out his long cantankerous sentences with a nasal _sang-froid_ which seemed to change in a moment the whole aspect and temperature of things. He remarked that Mr. Elsmere had talked of what great scholars had done to clear up this matter of Christ and Christianity. Well, he was free to maintain that old Tom Paine was as good a scholar as any of 'em, and most of them in that hall knew what he thought about it. Tom Paine hadn't anything to say against Jesus Christ, and he hadn't. He was a workman and a fine sort of Man, and if he'd been alive now he'd have been a Socialist, 'as most of us are,' and he'd have made it hot for the rich loafers, and the sweaters, and the middle-men, 'as we'd like to make it hot for 'em.' But as for those people who got up the Church-Mythologists Tom Paine called 'em-and the miracles, and made an uncommonly good thing out of it, pecuniarily speaking, he didn't see what they'd got to do with keeping, or mending, or preserving _their_ precious bit of work. The world had found 'em out, and serve'em right.

And he wound up with a fierce denunciation of priests, not without harsh savor and eloquence, which was much clapped by the small knot of workmen among whom he had been standing.

Then there followed a Socialist--an eager, ugly, black-bearded little fellow, who preached the absolute necessity of doing without 'any cultus whatsoever,' threw scorn on both the Christians and the Positivists for refusing so to deny themselves, and appealed earnestly to his group of hearers 'to help in brining religion back from heaven to earth, where it belongs.' Mr. Elsmere's new church, if he ever got it, would only be a fresh instrument in the hands of the bourgeoisie. And when the people had got their rights and brought down the capitalists, they were not going to be such fools as put their necks under the heel of what were called 'the educated classes.' The people who wrote the newspapers Mr. Elsmere objected to, know quite enough for the working-man--And people should not be too smooth-spoken; what the working class wanted beyond everything just now was _grit_.

A few other short speeches followed, mostly of the common Secularist type, in defence of the newspapers attacked. But the defence, on the whole, was shuffling and curiously half-hearted. Robert, sitting by with his head on his hand, felt that there, at any rate, his onslaught had told.

He said a few words in reply, in a low husky voice, without a trace of his former passion, and the meeting broke up. The room had quickly filled when it was known that he was up again; and as he descended the steps of the platform, after shaking hands with the chairman, the hundreds present broke into a sudden burst of cheering. Lady Charlotte pressed forward to him through the crowd, offering to take him home. 'Come with us, Mr. Elsmere; you look like a ghost.' But he shook his head, smiling. No, thank you, Lady Charlotte--I must have some air,' and he took her out on his arm, while Flaxman followed with Rose.

It once occurred to Flaxman to look round for the priest he had seen come in. But there were no signs of him. 'I had an idea he would have spoken,' he thought. Just as Well perhaps. We should have had a row.'

Lady Charlotte threw herself back in the carriage as they drove off, with a long breath, and the inward reflection, 'So his wife wouldn't come and hear him! Must be a woman with a character, that--a Strafford in petticoats!'

Robert turned up the street to the City, the tall slight figure seeming to shrink together as he walked. After his passionate effort, indescribable depression had overtaken him.

'Words-words!' he said to himself, striking out his hands in a kind of feverish protest, as he strode along, against his own powerlessness, against that weight of the present and the actual which seems to the enthusiast alternately light as air, or heavy as the mass of AEtna on the breast of Enceladus.

Suddenly, at the corner of a street, a man's figure in a long black robe stopped him and laid a hand on his arm.

'Newcome!' cried Robert, standing still.

'I was there,' said the other, bending forward and looking close into his eyes. 'I heard almost all. I went to confront, to denounce you!'

By the light of a lamp not far off Robert caught the attenuated whiteness and sharpness of the well-known face, to which weeks of fasting and mystical excitement had given a kind of unearthly remoteness. He gathered himself together with an inward groan. He felt as though there were no force in him at that moment wherewith to meet reproaches, to beat down fanaticism. The pressure on nerve and strength seemed unbearable.

Newcome, watching him with eagle eye, saw the sudden shrinking and hesitation. He had often in old days felt the same sense of power over the man who yet, in what seemed his weakness, had always escaped him in the end.

'I went to denounce,' he continued, in a strange, tense voice; 'and the Lord refused it to me. He kept me watching for you here--these words are not mine I speak. I waited patiently in that room till the Lord should deliver His enemy into my hand. My wrath was hot against the deserter that could not even desert in silence--hot against his dupes. Then suddenly words came to me--they have come to me before, they burn up the very heart and marrow in me--"_Who is he that saith, and it cometh to pass, and the Lord commandeth it not?_" There they were in my ears, written on the walls--the air----'

The hand dropped from Robert's arm. A dull look of defeat, of regret, darkened the gleaming eyes. They were standing in a quiet deserted street, but through a side-opening the lights, the noise, the turbulence of the open-air market came drifting to them through the rainy atmosphere which blurred and magnified everything.

'Ay, after days and nights in His most blessed sanctuary,' Newcome resumed slowly, 'I came, by His commission, as I thought, to fight His battle, with a traitor! And at the last moment His strength, which was in me, went from me. I sat there dumb; His hand was heavy upon me. His will be done!'

The voice sank; the priest drew his thin, shaking hand across his eyes, as though the awe of a mysterious struggle were still upon him. Then he turned again to Elsmere, his face softening, radiating.

'Elsmere, take the sign, the message! I thought it was given to me to declare the Lord's wrath. Instead, He sends you once more by me, even now--even fresh from this new defiance of His mercy, the tender offer of His grace! He lies at rest to-night, my brother'--what sweetness in the low vibrating tones! 'after all the anguish. Let me draw you down on your knees beside Him. It is you, you, who have helped to drive in the nails, to embitter the agony! It is you who in His loneliness have been robbing Him of the souls that should be his! It is you who have been doing your utmost to make His cross and passion of no effect. Oh, let it break your heart to think of it! Watch by Him to-night, my friend, my brother, and to-morrow let the risen Lord reclaim his own!'

Never had Robert seen any mortal face so persuasively beautiful; never surely did saint or ascetic plead with a more penetrating gentleness. After the storm of those opening words the change was magical. The tears stood in Elsmere's eyes. But his quick insight, in spite of himself, divined the subtle natural facts behind the outburst, the strained physical state, the irritable brain--all the consequences of a long defiance of physical and mental law. The priest repelled him, the man drew him like a magnet.

'What can I say to you, Newcome?' he cried despairingly. 'Let me say nothing, dear old friend! I am tired out; so, I expect, are you. I know what this week has been to you. Walk with me a little. Leave these great things alone. We cannot agree. Be content--God knows! Tell me about the old place, and the people. I long for news of them.'

A sort of shudder passed through his companion. Newcome stood wrestling with himself. It was like the slow departure of a possessing force. Then he sombrely assented, and they turned toward the City. But his answers, as Robert questioned him, were sharp and mechanical and presently it became evident that the demands of the ordinary talk to which Elsmere vigorously held him were more than he could bear.

As they reached St. Paul's, towering into the watery moon-light of the clouded sky, he stopped abruptly and said good-night.

You came to me in the spirit of war,' said Robert, with some emotion, as he held his hand; 'give me instead the grasp of peace!'

The spell of his manner, his presence, prevailed at last. A quivering smile dawned on the priest's delicate lip.

'God bless you--God restore you!' he said sadly, and was gone.


CHAPTER XLI.

A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or forty members of the North R---- Club that he would give them a course of lectures on the New Testament. One of them was the gas-fitter Charles Richards; another was the watchmaker Lestrange, who had originally challenged Robert to deliver himself; and the third was a tough old Scotchman of sixty with a philosophical turn, under whose spoutings of Hume and Locke, of Reid and Dugald Stewart, delivered in the shrillest of cracked voices, the Club had writhed many an impatient half-hour on debating nights. He had an unexpected artistic gift, a kind of 'sport' as compared with the rest of his character, which made him a valued designer in the pottery works; but his real interests were speculative and argumentative, concerned with 'common nawtions of the praimary elements of reason,' and the appearance of Robert in the district seemed to offer him at last a foeman worthy of his steel. Elsmere shrewdly suspected that the last two looked forward to any teaching he might give mostly as a new and favorable exercising ground for their own wits but he took the risk, gladly accepted the invitation, and fixed Sunday afternoons for a weekly New Testament lecture.

His first lecture, which he prepared with great care, was delivered to thirty-seven men a fortnight later. It was on the political and social state of Palestine and the East at the time of Christ's birth; and Robert, who was as fervent a believer in 'large maps' as Lord Salisbury, had prepared a goodly store of them for the occasion, together with a number of drawings and photographs which formed part of the collection he had been gradually making since his own visit to the Holy Land. There was nothing he laid more stress on than, these helps to the eye and imagination in dealing with the Bible. He was accustomed to maintain in his arguments with Hugh Flaxman that