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

it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.

They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger. Those old bloodshot eyes--those wrinkled hands on the throat of the doctor--horrible!

They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the Squire's room. Then Robert and Benson got the Squire back by main force. The whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron. Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them they got it swallowed.

But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have had time to work, the Squire shrank together like a puppet of which the threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors' hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.

Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, emphasizing, as though in mockery, the long straight back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage. But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.

'The last--the last!' he said, choked, the tears falling down his lined cheeks on to the Squire's hand. 'He can never rally from this. And I was fool enough to think yesterday I had pulled him through!'

Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief; then he looked up at Robert.

'He wouldn't have Benson to-night. I slept in the next room with the door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him moving. I was up in an instant, and found him standing by that door, peering through, bare-footed, a wind like ice coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. "_My father_," he said--"_my father_--he went that way--what do _you_ want here? Keep back!" I threw myself on him; he had something sharp which scratched me on the temple; I got that away from him, but it was his hands'--and the old man shuddered. 'I thought they would have done for me before anyone could hear, and that then he would kill himself as his father did.'

Again be hung over the figure on the bed--his own withered hand stroking that of the Squire with a yearning affection.

'When was the last attack?' asked Robert sadly.

'A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere, he suffered. And he's been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no one to please him with his food--to put his cushions right--to coax him up a bit, and that,--and his poor sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course he would stand to it, he liked to be alone. But I'll never believe men are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a wife or a child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir, when you went away. Not that he'd say a word, but he moped. His books didn't seem to please him, nor anything else. I've just broke my heart over him this last year.'

There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round with the shapes of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken effect. The Squire's countenance was no longer convulsed. The great brow was calm; a more than common dignity and peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert bent over him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away; the dying scholar and thinker lay before him.

'Will he rally?' he asked, under his breath.

Meyrick shook his head.

'I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. The heart is failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, Mr. Elsmere, you go--go and sleep. Benson and I'll watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir. I'm used to a rough-and-tumble life. But you go. If there's a change we'll wake you.'

Elsmere bent down and kissed the Squire's forehead tenderly, as a son might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.

It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew back the curtains, made up the fire, and wrapping himself in a fur coat which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.

As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in. The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness, suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth century tapestry which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the woodpath? Surely that was Catherine's figure trailing--and that dome--strange! Was he still walking in Grey's funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking sadly down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under life from the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight of which men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder, and he looks shuddering into it.

Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink: on the other side was Grey and the Squire. But he felt no pang of separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harbored image and expectation alike with perfect calm.

Then the fever-spell broke,--the brain cleared,--and he was terribly himself again. Whence came it--this fresh, inexorable consciousness? He tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought, to God's love and Catherine's. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one hand, the fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!

'_My God! my God! no time, no future!_'

In his misery, he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed with ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an instant, beyond the bridge, in the unearthly blue?

And quietly,--heavily,--like an irrevocable sentence, there came, breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words that he had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside his hand--words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though by accident, the most traginc of all human cries--

'_Quittez le long espoir et les vastes pensees_.'

He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but their own.

'_Quittez,--quittez,--le long espoir et les vastes pensees!_'


CHAPTER LI.

There is little more to tell. The man who had lived so fast was no long time dying. The eager soul was swift in this as in all else.

The day after Elsmere's return from Murewell, where he left the Squire still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached Bedford Square a few hours after Robert's arrival), Edmondson came up to see him and examine him. He discovered tubercular disease of the larynx, which begins with slight hoarseness and weariness, and develops into one of the most rapid forms of phthisis. In his opinion it had been originally set up by the effects of that chill at Petites Dalles acting upon a constitution never strong, and at that moment peculiarly susceptible to mischief. And of course the speaking and preaching of the last four months had done enormous harm.

It was with great outward composure that Elsmere received his _arret de mort_ at the hands of the young doctor, who announced the result of his examination with a hesitating lip and a voice which struggled in vain to preserve its professional calm. He knew too much of medicine himself to be deceived by Edmondson's optimist remarks as to the possible effect of a warm climate like Algiers on his condition. He sat down, resting his head on his hands a moment; then wringing Edmondson's hand, he went out feebly to find his Wife.

Catherine had been waiting in the dining-room, her whole soul one dry, tense misery. She stood looking out of the window, taking curious heed of a Jewish wedding that was going on in the Square, of the preposterous bouquets of the coachman and the gaping circle of errand-boys. How pinched the bride looked in the north wind!

When the door opened and Catherine saw her husband come in--her young husband, to whom she had been married not yet four years--with that indescribable look in the eyes which seemed to divine and confirm all those terrors which had been shaking her during her agonized waiting, there followed a moment between them which words cannot render. When it ended--that half-articulate convulsion of love and anguish--she found herself sitting on the sofa beside him, his head on her breast, his hand clasping hers.

'Do you wish me to go, Catherine?' he asked her gently, '--to Algiers?'

Her eyes implored for her.

'Then I will,' he said, but with a long sigh. 'It will only prolong it two months,' he thought; 'and does one not owe it to the people for whom one has tried to live, to make a brave end among them? Ah, no! no! those two months are hers!'

So, without any outward resistance, he let the necessary preparations be made. It wrung his heart to go, but he could not wring hers by staying.

After his interview wit Robert, and his further interview with Catherine, to whom he gave the most minute recommendations and directions, with a reverent gentleness which seemed to make the true state of the case more ghastly plain to the wife than ever, Edmondson went off to Flaxman.

Flaxman heard his news with horror.

'A _bad_ case, you say--advanced?'

'A bad case!' Edmondson repeated gloomily. 'He has been fighting against it too long under that absurd delusion of clergyman's throat. If only men would not insist upon being their own doctors! And, of course, that going down to Murewell the other day was madness. I shall go with him to Algiers, and probably stay a week or two. To think of that life, that career, cut short! This is a queer sort of world!'

When Flaxman went over to Bedford Square in the afternoon, he went like a man going himself to execution. In the hall he met Catherine.

'You have seen Dr. Edmondson?' she asked, pale and still, except for a little nervous quivering of the lip.

He stooped and kissed her hand.

'Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come after if you will have me. The climate may do wonders.'

She looked at him with the most heart-rending