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

she shaded her eyes, while her other hand played silently with her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching her closely, however little he might seem to do so, was struck by her austere and delicate beauty as he had never been before.

She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger. He went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any excitement, in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now and then, expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and not always favorably. But gradually the whole picture emerged, began to live before them. At last he hurriedly looked at his watch.

'What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you.'

'You have not had dinner!' she said, looking up at him with a sudden nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his impression of her.

'No matter. I will got some at home. Good-night!'

When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterward in the drawing-room, where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on the chair.

The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with God. It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known--greater even than that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.


CHAPTER XLIII.

Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westward by the recurrent memory of that miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying face.

In Madame de Netteville's drawing-room he found a small number of people assembled. M. de Querouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of 'a beastly set of tenants;' Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private secretary with a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a general air of superlativeness which demanded, and secured attention; a famous journalist, whose smiling, self-repressive look assured you that he carried with him the secrets of several empires; and one Sir John Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man with a limp--an ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted in London as an amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of society as he was popular with the other.

'Purely for talk, you see, not for show!' said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood waiting for the commencement of dinner.

'I shall hardly do my part,' he said with a little sigh. 'I have just come from a very different scene.'

She looted at him with inquiring eyes.

'A terrible accident in the East End,' he said briefly. 'We won't talk of it. I only mention it to propitiate you before-hand. Those things are not forgotten at once.'

She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart, physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle consideration for him at dinner. M. de Querouelle was made to talk. His hostess wound him up and set him going, tune after tune. He played them all and, by dint of long practice, to perfection, in the French way. A visit of his youth to the Island grave of Chateaubriand; his early memories, as a poetical aspirant, of the magnificent flatteries by which Victor Hugo made himself the god of young romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in the days of _L'Avenir_; his memories of Lamennais' sombre figure, of Maurice de Guerin's feverish ethereal charm; his account of the opposition _salons_ under the Empire--they had all been elaborated in the course of years, till every word fitted and each point led to the next with the 'inevitableness' of true art. Robert, at first silent and _distraut_, found it impossible after a while not to listen with interest. He admired the skill, too, of Madame de Netteville's second in the duet, the finish, the alternate sparkle and melancholy of it; and at last he too was drawn in, and found himself listened to with great benevolence by the French man, who had been informed about him, and regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of English religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addlestone, who had won a European reputation for wisdom by a great scantiness of speech in society, coupled with the look of Minerva's owl, attached himself to them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr. Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party at the other end.

'Are you still in your old quarters?' Lady Aubrey asked Sir John Headlam, turning his old, roguish face upon her. 'That house of Well Gwynne's, wasn't it, in Meade Street?'

'Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then they made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten years. There is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and wants to live in it. I could have left a train of gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so cross!'

'Ah,--"Reculer pour mieux _faire_ sauter!"' said Sir John, mincing out his pun as though he loved it.

'Not bad, Sir John,' she said, looking at him calmly, 'but you have way to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner, that positively----'

'You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the "Societe de Londres,"' he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen an angry flash in his little eyes. 'My dear Lady Aubrey, it was simply because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but one we meet, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the way, have you read the "Princesse de----"'

He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.

'I haven't,' she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a rapier-glance at him, 'but if I had, I should say precisely the same. Lord Rupert will you kindly keep Sir John in order?'

Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably assumed that all 'the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in adorning his person.' Not at all! The _tenue_ of a dandy was never more cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top rungs.

It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the whole scene--the dainty oval room, the lights, the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the tapestried wall--would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream never has.

The hard self-confidence of these people--did it belong to the same world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone on him that afternoon from Charles Richards' begrimed and blood-stained face? '_Blessed are the poor in spirit_,' he said to himself once with an inward groan. 'Why am I here? Why am I not at home with Catherine?'

But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had never seen her so womanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate social skill. As she talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of literature, or politics, or famous folk, flashing her beautiful eyes from one to the other, Sir John Headlam would, every now and then, turn his odd puckered face observantly toward the farther end of the table.

'By Jove!' he said afterward to Wharncliffe as they walked away from the door together, 'she was inimitable to-night; she has more roles than Desforets!' Sir John and his hostess were very old friends.

Upstairs, smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining in. M. de Querouelle, having talked the best of his repertoire at dinner, was now inclined for amusement, and had discovered that Lady Aubrey could amuse him, and was, moreover, _une belle personne_. Madame de Netteville, was obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men stood chatting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious of a complete failure of social energy, began to took at his watch. Instantly Madame de Netteville glided up to him.

'Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know how nay affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come into my little writing-room.' And she led him into a tiny panelled room at the far end of the drawing-room and shut off from it by a heavy curtain, which she now left half-drawn.

'The latest?' said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising his eyebrows with the slightest motion of the head toward the writing-room.

'I suppose so,' she said indifferently; 'She is East-Ending, for a change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy's young man who "liked bad wine, he was so bored with good."'

Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the open window of the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her.

'You look as if you had had a strain,' she said to him, abruptly, after they had talked business for a few minutes. 'What has been the matter?'

He told her Richards' story, very shortly. It would have been impossible to him to give more than the dryest outline of it in that room. His companion listened gravely. She was an epicure in all things, especially in moral sensation, and she liked his moments of reserve and strong self-control. They made his general expansiveness more distinguished.

Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying,--

'I was at your lecture last Sunday--you didn't see me!'

'Were you? Ah! I remember a person in black, and veiled, who puzzled me. I don't think we want you there, Madame de Netteville.'

His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it.

'Why not? Is it only