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

sixty nuns who inhabit the convent over the way, and sell us the most delicious butter and cream. Imagine, if she were a trifle older, her mother would hardly view the proceedings of those dear berosaried women with so much equanimity.'

'As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and receives more than an editor of the "Times." I have the strongest views, as you know, as to the vanity of letter-writing. There was a time when you shared them, but there are circumstances and conjunctures, alas! in which no man can be sure of his friend or his friend's principles. Kind friend, good fellow, go often to Elgood Street. Tell me everything about everybody. It is possible, after all, that I may live to come back to them.'

But a week later, alas! the letters fell into a very different strain. The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp and rainy, the natives of course declaring that such gloom and storm in January had never been known before. Edmondson wrote in discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch of cold, had been confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter was full of medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that in spite of the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the disease was attacking constantly fresh tissue. 'He is very depressed too,' said Edmondson; 'I have never seen him so yet. He sits and looks at us in the evening sometimes with eyes that wring one's heart. It is as though, after having for a moment allowed himself to hope, he found it a doubly hard task to submit.'

Ah, that depression! It was the last eclipse through which a radiant soul was called to pass; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigor, showed itself now in all its stern nakedness--sat down, as it were, eye to eye with Elsmere--immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to withdraw him so pitifully from their yearning grasp! In these dark days he would sit crouching over the wood-fire in the little _salon_, or lie drawn to the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.'

'But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the wife's inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree. Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we know, ever since that passionate submission of the wife which had thrown her morally at her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man of science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends before hand that he is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own; or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light, the light of the Crucified, shine through.

Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert's serenity Catherine's poor last effort would have been much feebler, briefer, more hesitating. But when she saw him plunged for a short space in mortal discouragement in a sombreness that as the days went on had its points and crests of feverish irritation, her anguished pity came to the help of her creed. Robert felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being urging, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and ways, in her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious books and prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her maintaining at night beside him, he felt a persistent attack which nearly--in his weakness--overthrew him.

For 'reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves.' Some of the greatest and most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before the last farewell. And the simpler Christian faith has still to create around it those venerable associations and habits which buttress individual feebleness and diminish the individual effort.

One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert stretched out his hand for his wife and found her kneeling beside him. The dim mingled light showed him her face vaguely--her clasped hands, her eyes. He looked at her in silence, she at him--there seemed to be a strange sheen as of battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him.

'Catherine,' he said to her in a feeble intense whisper, 'would you leave me without comfort, without help, at the end?'

'Oh, my beloved!' she cited, under her breath, throwing her arms round him, 'if you would but stretch out your hand to the true comfort--the true help--the Lamb of God sacrificed for us!'

He stroked her hair tenderly.

'My weariness might yield--my true best self never. I know whom I have believed. Oh, my darling, be content. Your misery, your prayers hold me back from God--from that truth and that trust which can alone be honestly mine. Submit, my wife! Leave me in God's hands.'

She raised her head. His eyes were bright with fever, his lips trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself again, with a quiet burst of tears, and all indescribable self abasement. They had had their last struggle, and once more he had conquered! Afterward the cloud lifted from him. Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her often as though he lay already on the breast of God; even her, wifely love grew timid and awestruck.

Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was like a scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more than it's father has allowed it to know. At the same time, it was plain to those about him that the only realities to him in a world of shadows were God--love--the soul.

One day he suddenly caught Catherine's hands, drew her face to him, and studied it with his, glowing and hollow eyes, as though he would draw it into his soul.

'He made it,' he said hoarsely, as he let her go--'this love--this yearning. And in life He only makes us yearn that He may satisfy. He cannot lead us to the end and disappoint the craving He himself set in us. No, no--could you--Could I--do it? And He, the source of love, of justice----'

Flaxman arrived a few days afterward. Edmondson had started for London the night before, leaving Elsmere better again, able to drive and even walk a little, and well looked after by a local doctor of ability. As Flaxman, tramping up behind his carriage climbed the long hill to El Biar, he saw the whole marvellous place in a white light of beauty--the bay, the city, the mountains, olive-yard and orange-grove, drawn in pale tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a steep and narrow lane, he noticed a slight figure parasol standing--a parasol against the sun.

'We thought You would like to be shown the short cut up the hill,' said Rose's voice--strangely demure and shy. 'The man can drive round.'

A grip of the hand, a word to the driver, and they were alone in the high-walled lane which was really the old road up the hill before the French brought zigzags and civilization. She gave him news of Robert--better than he had expected. Under the influence of one of the natural reactions that wait on illness, the girl's tone was cheerful, and Flaxman's spirits rose. They talked of the splendor of the day, the discomforts of the steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing--of anything and everything but the hidden something which was responsible for the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occasional swift veiling of her own.

Then, at, an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool and brown into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke joyously through the gray cloud of olive-wood, where not a sight or sound was to be heard of all the busy life which hides and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his hands seizing hers.

'How long?' he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling back from his strong, well-made frame; 'from August to February--how long?'

No more! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the moment death stood aside and love asserted itself. But this is no place to chronicle what it said.

And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, before the same misgiving, the same, shrinking, seized on the lovers themselves. They sped up the hill, they crept into the house far apart. It was agreed that neither of them should say word.

But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that sometimes goes with such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the position of things before he and Flaxman had been half an hour together. He took a boyish pleasure in making his friend confess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at once sent for Catherine and told her.

Catherine, coming out afterward, met Flaxman in the little tiled hall. How she had aged and blanched! She stood a moment opposite to him, in her plain long dress with its white collar and cuffs, her face working a little.

'We are so glad!' she said, but almost with a sob-'God bless you!'

And, wringing his hand, she passed away from him, hiding her eyes, but without a sound. When they met again she was quite self-contained and bright, talking much both with him and Rose about the future.

And one little word of Rose's must be recorded here, for those who have followed her through these four years. It was at night, when Robert, with smiles, had driven them out of doors to look at the moon over the bay, from the terrace just beyond the windows. They had been sitting on the balustrade talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had lost her mocking ways; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman felt it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much.

When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little white suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder.

'You won't--you won't ever be angry with me for making you wait like that? It was impertinent--it was like a child playing tricks!'

Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He was terribly emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals in the day; and it was clear that his nights were often one long struggle for breath. But his spirits were extraordinarily