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

the body itself, to show that for the members of it, life rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested, on _trust_ and _memory!_--_trust_ in the God of experience and history; _memory_ of that God's work in man, by which alone we know Him, and can approach Him. Well, of that work--I have tried to prove it to you a thousand times--Jesus of Nazareth has become to us, by the evolution of circumstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and epitomes. We have made our protest--we are daily making it--in the face of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present time are excluding Him more and more from human love. But now, suppose we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of faith, the gathering and organizing of a new Company of Jesus!'

Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the smoke, the lines and groups of workingmen in every sort of working-dress, the occasional rumbling of huge wagons past the window, the click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir of spiritual passion which any competent observer might have felt sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of the world.

After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up. He was commonly known among his fellow potters as 'the hartist,' because of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his aesthetic susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him, their target, but the teasing of him that went on was more or less tempered by the knowledge that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart had been killed before his eyes a year before in a railway accident.

'I dun know,' he said in a high, treble voice, 'I dun know whether I speak for anybody but myself--very likely not; but what I _do_ know,' and he raised his right hand and shook it with a gesture of curious felicity, 'is this,--what Mr. Elsmere starts I'll join,--'where he goes I'll go--what's good enough for him's good enough, for me. He's put a new heart and a new stomach into me and what I've got he shall have, whenever it pleases 'im to call for it! So if he wants to run a new thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with it--I don't know as I'm very clear what he's driving at, nor what good I can do 'im--but when Tom Wheeler's asked for he'll be there!'

A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent, ran through the little assembly. Robert bent forward, his eye glistening, a moved acknowledgment in his look and gesture. But in reality a pang ran through the fiery soul. It was 'the personal estimate,' after all, that was shaping their future and his, and the idealist was up in arms for his idea, sublimely jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its power and place.

A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the possible outlines of a possible organization, and as to the observances which might be devised to mark its religious character. As it flowed on the atmosphere grew more and more electric. A new passion, though still timid and awe-struck, seemed to shine from the looks of the men, standing or sitting round the central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy about him; and when Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon him an almost awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future.

He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he sank into a chair and fainted. He was probably not unconscious very long, but after he had struggled back to his senses, and was lying stretched on the sofa among the books with which it was littered, the solitary candle in the big room throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of death. How was it he had come to feel so ill? Suddenly, as he looked back over the preceding weeks, the physical weakness and disturbance which had marked them, and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed as possible, took shape, spectre-like, in his mind.

And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against weakness and disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, his head in his hands.

'Rest--strength,' he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, 'for the work's sake!'

He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine till the morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to take him and the babe off without delay to the Norman coast, vowing that he would lounge and idle for six whole weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks, she gradually got from him the story of the night before. As he told it, his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her. The contrast, however between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one Sensitive dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed by a strange and desolate sense of her comparatively small share in this ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as though he were no longer hers--as though a craving, hungry world, whose needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her, claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind and delicate frame.

As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take them in, whether for protest or sympathy. She could think only of where to go, what doctor to consult, how she could persuade him to stay away long enough.

There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere announced that he must go off for a while. He so announced it that everybody who heard him understood that his temporary withdrawal was to be the mere preparation for a great effort--the vigil before the tourney; and the eager friendliness with which he was met sent him off in good heart.

Three or four days later, he, Catherine, and Mary were at Petites Dalles, a little place on the Norman coast, near Fecamp, with which he had first made acquaintance years before, when he was at Oxford.

Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered 'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock, Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into a quivering, changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and pluck of the two-year-old English _bebe_. By eleven the heat out of doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back--father and mother, and trailing child--past the hotels on the _plage_, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had established themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French _bonne_ to look after them; would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the dejeuner waiting for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a humble but perpetual warfare. Then afterward Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated one story from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless _salon_, would lie back in the rickety arm-chair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing, till dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another _comedie humaine_ unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist mind.

Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among them, _more suo_, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new acquaintances.

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the bean-stalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all around them--the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze, there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.

One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night-jar and immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.

Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears dropped on to her cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her always smote him to the heart.

'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for myself, but----'

For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?--of youth, of hope, of memory?

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-colored waves while he held her hand close and tenderly. No--she was not unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone forever out of that early joy. Her life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things.