Robert Elsmere by Mrs. Humphry Ward (best classic literature txt) 📕

the night, and hung shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long past--incredible almost.

And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent, insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love. Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal note also, that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.

So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt the torturing thrill of passion--he has evoked such an answer as all men might envy him,--and fresh from Rose's kiss, from Rose's beauty, the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of gratitude and tenderness; the next--is nothing what it promises to be?--and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?

The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent upper room. Nothing caught Langham's ear. He was absorbed in the dialogue which was to decide his life.

Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.

'But I love her!--I love her! A little courage--a little effort--and I too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not forced her love--it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it, if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope thrown to him?'

To which the pale spectre self said scornfully--

'_Courage_ and _effort_ may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two others--_habit_ and _character_. Slave as you are of habit, of the character you have woven for yourself--out of years of deliberate living--what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can re-create! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden, but for God's sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you with theirs!'

'But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so warm a heart! Poor child--poor child! I have played on her pity. I have won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face--oh monstrous--oh inhuman!' and the cold drops stood on his forhead.

But the other self was inexorable. 'You have acted as you were bound to act--as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What in God's name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such ambitions? You are poor--you must go back to Oxford--you must take up the work your soul loathes--grow more soured, more embittered--maintain a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the world! Think of the little house--the children--the money difficulties--she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,--you incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck--submit--refuse that long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time. _Kismet!--Kismet!_'

And spread out before Langham's shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures, two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with old and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.

The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, cold and bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of manhood, had been alike powerless to save.

The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table and wrote.

Then for hours afterward he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done--it was also a strange thing psychologically--and at intervals he tried to understand it--to track it to its causes.

At nine o'clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.

On his way back he passed a gunsmith's, and stood looking fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy--become farcical even.

'I should only stand a month--arguing--with my finger on the trigger.'

In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging books and boxes about as though he were packing.

A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27, looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through the fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose's mood answered to that of nature.

Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two, was in a chair by the fire, reading some letters forwarded to her from Bedford Square.

He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview, with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of her behavior to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh blow! 'But afterward, when she has got over it--when she knows that it makes me happy,--that nothing else would make me happy,--then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. I won't be angry or hard over it--poor Cathie!'

And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly toward her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte's house the night before had been a very different matter from the royally attended leave takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. 'I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.'

But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself. So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by the clamor, will take up very much the same line.

What matter! The girl's spirit seemed to rise against all the world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.

Besides--success! To make a man hope and love, and live again--_that_ shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling, her heart very soft.

Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterward the dining-room door opened.

'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.

Rose took it--glanced at the hand-writing. A bright flush--a surreptitious glance at Catherine, who sat absorbed in a wandering letter from, Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and opened it.

Catherine read on, gathering up, the Murewell names and details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.

'Rose,' she said, looking up, 'was that someone brought you a note?'

The girl turned with a start--a letter fell to the ground. She made a faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.

'Rose--darling!' cried Catherine, springing up, 'are you ill?'

Rose looked at her with a perfectly colorless fixed face, made a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them.

Catherine stood over her aghast. 'My darling--what is it? Come and lie down--take this water.'

She put some close to her sister's hand, but Rose pushed it away. 'Don't talk to me, 'she said, with difficulty.

Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek resting against her sister's shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once recognized Langham's handwriting. But before she could combine any rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister's arm.

'I was startled,' she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 'Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him--I expected him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me that--he made a mistake--and he was very sorry! So am I! It is so--so--bewildering!'

She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The older sister followed her, and throwing an