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

to what both you and I hold dear. And the men are decent fellows. There will be no disturbance.'

'What are you going to do?' she asked in a low voice.

'I have been trying to think it out,' he said with difficulty. 'I want simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image of Jesus of Nazareth which thought--and love--and reading--have left upon my own. I want to make them realize for themselves the historical character, so far as it can be, realized--to make them see for themselves the real figure, as it went in and out among men--so far as our eyes can now discern it.'

The words came quicker toward the end, while the voice sank--took the vibrating characteristic note the wife knew so well.

'How can that help them?' she said abruptly. 'Your historical Christ, Robert, will never win souls. If he was God, every word you speak will insult him. If he was man, he was not a good man!'

'Come and see,' was all he said, holding out his hand to her. It was in some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, the inevitable renewal of an offer he felt bound to make, and she felt bound to resist.

She let her knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken, incessant baby-talk, and the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones of the parents.

'Don't ask me, Robert, don't ask me! Do you want me to come and sit thinking of last year's Easter Eve?'

'Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve,' he said slowly.

'And now,' she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden agitation of every feature, 'now you are not miserable? You are quite confident and sure? You are going to devote your life to attacking the few remnants of faith that still remain in the world?

Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this accent of bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew his hand, and there was a silence.

'I held once a wife in my arms,' he said presently with a voice hardly audible, 'who said to me that she would never persecute her husband. But what is persecution, if it is not the determination not to understand?'

She buried her face in her hands. 'I could not understand,' she said sombrely.

'And rather than try,' he insisted, 'you will go on believing that I am a man without faith, seeking only to destroy.'

'I know you think you have faith,' she answered, 'but how can it seem faith to me? "He that will not confess Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven." Your unbelief seems to me more dangerous than these horrible things which shock you. For you can make it attractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith of Christ loved.'

He was silent She raised her face presently, whereon were the traces of some of those quiet, difficult tears which were characteristic of her, and went softly out of the room.

He stood awhile leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little Mary's clamor, and to her occasional clutches at his knees, as she tried to raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A sense as though of some fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him. And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalpable truths which the optimist is always much too ready to forget.

Heredity, the moulding force of circumstance, the iron hold of the past upon the present--a man like Elsmere realizes the working of these things in other men's lives with it singular subtlety and clearness, and is for ever overlooking them, running his head against them, in his own.

He turned and laid his arms on the chimney-piece, burying his head on them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, looking down, saw Mary peering up, her masses of dark hair streaming back from the straining little face, the grave open mouth, and alarmed eyes.

'Fader, tiss! fader, tiss!' she said imperatively.

He lifted her up and covered the little brown cheeks with kisses. But the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh dread--the like of something he had often divined of late in Catherine. Was she actually afraid now that he might feel himself bound in future to take her child spiritually from her? The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him a fresh anguish; it seemed a measure of the distance they had travelled from that old perfect unity.

'She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and torturer,' he said to himself with measureless pain, 'and who knows--who can answer for himself? Oh, the puzzle of living!'

When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Catherine said nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after a while she opened his study door.

'Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next week, and let me put out the pictures?'

It was the first time she had made any such offer. He sprang up with a flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip of paper with a list. She took it without looking at him. But he caught her in his arms, and for a moment in that embrace the soreness of both hearts passed away.

But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this critical occasion without auditors from his own immediate circle. On the evening of Good Friday Flaxman had found his way to Bedford Square, and as Catherine was out, was shown into Elsmere's study.

'I have come,' he announced, 'to try and persuade you and Mrs. Elsmere to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow. My Easter party has come to grief, and it would be a real charity on your part to come and resuscitate it. Do! You look abominably fagged, and as if some country would, do you good.'

'But I thought--' began Robert, taken aback.

'You thought,' repeated Flaxman coolly, 'that, your two sisters-in-law were going down there with Lady Helen, to meet some musical folk. Well, they are not coming. Miss Leyburn thinks your mother-in-law not very well to-day, and doesn't like to come. And your younger sister prefers also to stay in town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But--' And he shrugged his shoulders.

Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His sisters-in-law were certainly inscrutable young women. This Easter party at Greenlaws, Mr. Flaxman's country house, had been planned, he knew, for weeks. And certainly nothing could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine would have been warned.

'I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,' he said, with some embarrassment.

'Of course they are,' implied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He stood opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets.

'Will you have a confidence?' the bright eyes seemed to say. 'I am quite ready. Claim it if you like.'

But Elsmere had no intention of offering it. The position of all Rose's kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had the least knowledge of Rose's mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had, she lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman's absorption in her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated to make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet. Impossible for them, much as they liked him, to make any of the advances!

No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to take the responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took up his visitor's invitation to themselves, and explained the engagement for Easter Eve, which tied them to London.

'Whew!' said Hugh Flaxman, 'but that will be a shindy worth seeing, I must come!'

'Nonsense!' said Robert, smiling. 'Go down to Greenlaws, and go to church. That will be much more in your line.'

'As for church,' said Flaxman meditatively. 'If I put off may party altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further advantage, that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I can, with a blameless impartiality, spend the following day in St. Andrew's, Wells Street. Yes! I telegraph to Helen--she knows my ways--and I come down to protect you against an atheistical mob to-morrow night!'

Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. Flaxman's Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence of his youth had subsided, the man harbored and dallied with a dozen contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere. They were so now, just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which could not be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence.

But Flaxman was determined.

'No,' he said: 'this one day we'll give to heresy. Don't look so forbidding! In the first place, you won't see me; in the next, if you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in Sophocles--always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all for the Church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still are, you will admit, that she is the right of it. And if so, why should I cut myself off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be got outside her? But the next day--_vive_ Elsmere and the Revolution! If only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually! But I never yet came across a religious novelty that seemed to me to have a leg of logic to stand on!'

He laid his hand on Robert's shoulder, his eyes twinkling with a sudden energy. Robert made no answer. He stood erect, frowning a little, his hands thrust far into the pockets of his light gray coat. He was in no mood to disclose himself to Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with extraordinary intensity on quite another sort of antagonist with whom the mind was continuously grappling.

'Ah, well--till to-morrow!' said Flaxman, with a smile, shook hands, and went.

Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte's.

He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room alone, one on either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was reading the latest political biography with an apparent profundity of attention; Mr. Wynnstay was lounging and caressing the cat. But both his aunt's absorption and Mr. Wynnstay's nonchalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a domestic breeze.

Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had come to propose that she should accompany him the following evening to hear Elsmere lecture.

'I advise you to come,' he said. 'Elsmere will deliver his soul, and the amount of soul he has to deliver in these dull days is astounding. A dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I will go down beforehand and see some one on the spot, in case there should be difficulties about getting in. Perhaps Miss Leyburn, too, might like to hear her brother-in-law?'

'_Really_, Hugh,' cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, 'I think you might take