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

of life, a note sterner, deeper, maturer than any present there before. The reasons for it were unknown to her, though sometimes her own tender, ignorant, remorse supplied them. But they were hidden deep in Elsmere's memory.

A few days afterward he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He saw things as they were--without morbidness. But a certain boyish carelessness of mood he never afterward quite recovered. Men and women of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and more tragic--moral truths more awful--to him. It was the penalty of a highly strung nature set with exclusive intensity toward certain spiritual ends.

On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman which had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied Elsmere to his Sunday lecture. He tried a little, tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went, shrinking and yet determined.

She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon of his in Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brooding had been burnt into her mind. The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched, quick-eyed artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved, implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was glad to be there.

Afterward Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that 'any fool could see he was getting done up,' insisted on taking the children's class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised a little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there after all?

Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously coddled, and that Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off to the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward, Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the river; that, or his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart, with flashes of her old sweet gayety, as she had not talked for months.

Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life, in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile, the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them, the trees were green for them!

He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it. Every day some old St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left Oxford, he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man of our time, Henry Grey's influence was not primarily an influence of personal contact. His mere life, that he was there, on English soil, within a measurable distance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to conduct, every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales, nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintly life grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they have always clung to each other, to the visible, and the tangible; as the elders of Miletus, though the Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set their feet therein, 'sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more.'

The accounts grew worse--all friends shut out, no possibility of last words--the whole of Oxford moved and sorrowing. Then at list, on a Friday, came the dreaded, expected letter: 'He is gone! He died early this morning, without pain, conscious almost to the end. He mentioned several friends by name, you among them, during the night. The funeral is to be on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.'

Sad and memorable day! By an untoward chance it fell in Commemoration week, and Robert found the familiar streets teeming with life and noise, under a showery, uncertain sky, which every now and then would send the bevies of lightly gowned maidens, with their mothers, and their attendant squires, skurrying for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements glistening. He walked up to St. Anselm's, found as he expected that the first part of the service was to be in the chapel, the rest in the cemetery, and then mounted the well-known staircase to Langham's rooms. Langham was apparently in his bedroom. Lunch was on the table--the familiar commons, the familiar toast-and-water. There, in a recess, were the same splendid wall maps of Greece he had so often consulted after lecture. There was the little case of coins, with the gold Alexanders he had handled with so much covetous reverence at eighteen. Outside, the irregular quadrangle with its dripping trees stretched before him; the steps of the new Hall, now the shower was over, were crowded with gowned figures. It might have been yesterday that he had stood in that room, blushing with awkward pleasure under Mr. Grey's first salutation.

The bedroom door opened and Langham came in.

'Elsmere! But of course I expected you.'

His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was a flatness in it, an absence of positive cordiality which was new to him in any greeting of Langham's to himself, and had a chilling effect upon him. The face, too, was changed. Tint and expression were both dulled; its marble-like sharpness and finish had coarsened a little, and the figure, which had never possessed the erectness of youth had now the pinched look and the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian.

'I did not write to you, Elsmere,' he said immediately, as though in anticipation of what the other would be sure to say; 'I knew nothing but what the bulletins said, and I was told that Cathcart wrote to you. It is many years now since I have seen much of Grey. Sit down and have some lunch. We have time, but not too much time.'

Robert took a few mouthfuls. Langham was difficult, talked disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon painfully conscious that the old sympathetic bond between them no longer existed. Presently, Langham, as though with an effort to remember, asked after Catherine, then inquired what he was doing in the way of writing, and neither of them mentioned the name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat spasmodically talking, in reality expectant. And at last the sound present already in both minds made itself heard--the first long solitary stroke of the chapel bell.

Robert covered his eyes.

'Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced us first?'

'I remember,' replied the other abruptly. Then, with a half-cynical, half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he said, after a pause, 'What a faculty of hero-worship you have always had, Elsmere!'

'Do you know anything of the end?' Robert asked him presently, as that tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feeling beneath more irresistibly to the surface.

'No, I never asked!' cried Langham, with sudden harsh animation. 'What purpose could be served? Death should be avoided by the living. We have no business with it. Do what we will, we cannot rehearse our own parts. And the sight of other men's performances helps us no more than the sight of a great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do for us is to imperil the little nerve, break through the little calm, we have left.'

Elsmere's hand dropped, and he turned round to him with a flashing smile.

'Ah--I know it now--you loved him still.'

Langham, who was standing, looked down on him sombrely, yet more indulgently.

'How much you always made of feeling' he said after a little pause, 'in a world where, according to me, our chief object should be not to feel!'

Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another minute the two made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, where the rain was sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden voice of the bell rolled, from pause to pause, above the gowned figures, spreading thence in wide waves of mourning sound over Oxford.

The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic dream. The lines of undergraduate faces the Provost's white head, the voice of the chaplain reading, the full male unison of the voices replying--how they carried him back to the day when as a lad from school he had sat on one of the chancel benches beside his mother, listening for the first time to the subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the Provost's preaching! Just opposite to where he sat now with Langham, Grey had sat that first afternoon; the freshman's curious eyes had been drawn again and again to the dark massive head, the face with its look of reposeful force, of righteous strength. During the lesson from Corinthians, Elsmere's thoughts were irrelevantly busy with all sorts of mundane memories of the dead. What was especially present to him was a series of Liberal election meetings in which Grey had taken a warm part, and in which he himself had helped just before he took orders. A hundred, odd, incongruous details came back to Robert now with poignant force. Grey had been to him at one time primarily the professor, The philosopher, the representative of all that was best in the life of the University; now, fresh from his own grapple with London and its life, what moved him most was the memory of the citizen, the friend and brother of common man, the thinker who had never shirked action in the name of thought, for whom conduct had been from beginning to end the first reality.

The procession through the streets afterward which conveyed the body of this great son of modern Oxford to its last resting-place in the citizens' cemetery on the western side of the town, will not soon be forgotten, even in a place which forgets notoriously soon. All the University was there, all the town was there side by side with men honorably dear to England, who had carried with them into one or other of the great English careers the memory of the teacher, were men who had known from day to day the cheery modest helper in a hundred local causes; side by side with the youth of Alma Mater went the poor of Oxford; tradesmen and artisans followed or accompanied the group of gowned and venerable figures, representing the Heads of