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

are enough for me. I saw you wanting sympathy and affection----'

'My wife!' cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. And then, his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he made a stern step forward.

'Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget that you are a woman, and I a man, and that in some way I cannot understand my own blindness and folly----'

'Must have led to this most undesirable scene,' she said with mocking suddenness, throwing, herself, however, effectually in his way. Then a change came over her, and erect, ghastly white, with frowning brow and shaking limbs, a baffled and smarting woman from whom every restraint had fallen away, let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness which he could not have cut short without actual violence.

He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when what seemed to him an outbreak of mania should have spent itself. But suddenly he caught Catherine's name coupled with some contemptuous epithet or other, and his self-control failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to her and took her wrists in a grip of iron.

'You shall not,' he said; beside himself, 'You shall not! What have I done--what has she done--that you should allow yourself such words? My poor wife!'

A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked it back. It was desecration that her name should be mentioned in that room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.

'Thank God,' he said slowly, 'thank God for yourself and me that I love my wife! I am not worthy of her--doubly unworthy, since it has been possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and dishonor her! But worthy or not----No!--no matter! Madame de Netteville, let me go, and forget that such a person exists.'

She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realized what she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she, waved her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, passed her, and the door shut.

For nearly an hour afterward Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly through the darkness and silence of the park.

The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling in the grip of dark, implacable things, upheld by a single thread above that moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual life sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man realizes within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all things hideous and vile. '_Save for the grace of God_,' he says to himself, shuddering, 'save only for the grace of God----'

Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he had just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a stinging self-reproach--all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of love and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason against both?

Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of effort--a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?

All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.

One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning--to keep his wife's love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame! Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded deep on the rock of personal love and duty?

Oh! let him go back to her!--wrestle with her, open his heart again, try new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of _her_ trial has been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature; he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of remorseful love.

So he sped homeward at last through the noise of Oxford Street, hearing nothing. He opened, his own door, and let himself into the dim, silent house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment of his life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs and softly turned the handle of her room.

Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide open. The free, loosely growing branches of the plane trees made a dark, delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air came to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and walked toward him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused, breathless, expectant.

She came to him. She linked her cold, trembling fingers round his neck.

'Robert, I have been waiting so long--it was so late! I thought'--and she choked down a sob-'perhaps something has happened to--him, we are separated forever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr. Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so hard! I have broken my vow. I don't deserve it; but--_Robert!_----'

She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband's arms.

He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He led her to her chair, and kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the emotion of both would let him, to make her realize what was in his own heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her. Without a mention of Madame de Netteville's name, indeed! _That_ horror she should never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed his poignant sense of something half-jeopardized and wholly recovered; it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would hear nothing of his self-blame--nothing. She put her hand across his lips.

'I have seen things as they are, Robert,' she said very simply; 'while I have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flaxman left me. You were right--I _would_ not understand. And, in a sense, I shall never understand. I cannot change,' and her voice broke into piteousness. 'My Lord is my Lord always--, but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say what you will! _That_ is what has been hidden from me; that is what my trouble has taught me; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words. _It is the spirit that quickeneth_. I should never have felt it so, but for this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering in strange places, through strange thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I have dared to think He had but one, the one I know. I have dared'--and she faltered--'to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh! I lay there so long in the dark downstairs, seeing you by that bed; I heard your voice, I crept to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was--He was! Leave me that comfort! What are you saying? Wrong--you? unkind? Your wife knows nothing of it. Oh, did you think when you came in just now before dinner that I didn't care, that I had a heart of stone? Did you think I had broken my solemn promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell? So I have, a hundred times over. I made it in ignorance; I had not counted the cost--how could I? It was all so new, so strange. I dare not make it again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. But oh! take me back into your life! Hold me there! Remind me always of this night; convict me out of my own mouth! But I _will_ learn my lesson; I will learn to hear the two voices, the voice that speaks to you and the voice that speaks to me--I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been appointed me.'

Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back in her chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish touch over his hair.

'But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. Words are nothing.'

Strange ending to a day of torture! As she towered above him in the dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of nature all dissolved, lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, he thought of the man who passed through the place of sin, and the place of expiation, and saw, at last the rosy light creeping along the East; caught the white moving figures, and that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air, which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of those 'shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.' For eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant. Dante knew it when he talked of '_quella que imparadisa la mia mente_.' Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands, whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of personality are beaten down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit.


CHAPTER XLIV.

The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we have followed for so long, was over and done with. Henceforward to the end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as of old.

But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert than on Catherine. Afterward she gradually came to feel, running all through his views