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

of smiles.

'Will you go in to Robert? He is in the study.'

He went, in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up on the sofa, apparently reading.

'Don't--don't old fellow,' he said affectionately, as Flaxman almost broke down. 'It comes to all of us sooner or later. Whenever it comes we think it too soon. I believe I have been sure of it for some time. We are such strange creatures! It has been so present to me lately that life was too good to last. You remember the sort of feeling one used to have as a child about some treat in the distance--that it was too much joy--that something was sure to come between you and it? Well, in a sense, I have had my joy the first fruits of it at least.'

But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman saw the eyes darken and the naive boyish mouth contract, and knew that under all these brave words there was a heart which hungered.

'How strange!' Robert went on reflectively; 'yesterday I was travelling, walking like other men, a member of society. To-day I am an invalid; in the true sense, a man no longer. The world has done with me; a barrier. I shall never recross has sprung up between me and it.--Flaxman, to-night is the story-telling. Will you read to them? I have the book here prepared--some scenes from David Copperfield. And you will fell them?'

A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he forget the scene. Some ominous rumor had spread, and the New Brotherhood was besieged. Impossible to give the reading. A hall full of strained up-turned faces listened to Flaxman's announcement, and to Elsmere's messages of cheer and exhortation, and then a wild wave of grief spread through the place. The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each other's eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, all feeling themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When Elsmere heard the news of it, he turned on his face, and asked even Catherine to leave him for a while.

The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood had just become the subject of an animated discussion in the press, and London was touched by the news of its young founder's breakdown. Catherine found herself besieged by offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill above Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resident on the spot was to take all trouble off their hands; they were to find servants ready for them, and every comfort.

Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness with a self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to Flaxman that her heart was broken--that half of her, in feeling, was already on the other side of this horror which stared them all in the face. Was it his perception of it which stirred Robert after a while to a greater hopefulness of speech, a constant bright dwelling on the flowery sunshine for which they were about to exchange the fog and cold of London? The momentary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than his first quiet resignation.

He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters! in which the feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery under-current through all the sad brotherly record of the invalid's doings and prospects. There was deep trouble in Long Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and hysterical, and wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote in distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing her own inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only be an extra burden on the Elsmeres if the journey were achieved. Rose wrote asking to be allowed to go with them to Algiers; and after a little consultation it was so arranged, Mrs. Leyburn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself writing, to stay where she was.

The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert sent for Murray Edwardes. They were closeted together for nearly an hour. Edwardes came out with the look of one who has been lifted into 'heavenly places.'

'I thank God,' he said to Catherine, with deep emotion, 'that I ever knew him. I pray that I may be found worthy to carry out my pledges to him.'

When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gazing into the fire with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up to her with a smile.

'Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to the work. If necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it on. But we hope it will be possible to work them together. What a brick he is! What a blessed chance it was that took me to that breakfast party at Flaxman's!'

The rest of the time before departure he spent almost entirely in consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It was terrible how rapidly worse he seemed to grow directly the situation had declared itself, and the determination _not_ to be ill had been perforce overthrown. But his struggle against breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms of his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day of all, by his own persistent wish, a certain number of members of the Brotherhood came to say good-by to him. They came in one by one, Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, from the height of his sixty years of tough weather-beaten manhood, looked down on Robert with a fatherly concern.

'Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it's a fine place yur gawin' tu, they say. Ye'll do weel there, sir--ye'll do weel. And as for the wark, sir, we'll keep it oop-we'll not lot the Deil mak' hay o' it, if we knaws it--the auld leer!' he added with a phraseology which did more honor to the Calvinism of his blood than the philosophy of his training.

Lestrange came in, with a pale sharp face, and said little in his ten minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed curiosity and excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his feverish eyes toward _le grand secret_. 'You, who preached to us that consciousness, and God, and the soul are the only realities--are you so sure of it now you are dying, as you were in health? Are your courage, your certainty, what they were?' These were the sort of questions that seemed to underlie the man's spoken words.

There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best to put aside his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his help in the past, and implored him to stand by the young society and Mr. Edwardes.

'I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one man matter? One soldier falls, another presses forward.'

The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush passing over him.

'We can't stand without you!' he said abruptly, then, seeing Robert's look of distress, he seemed to cast about for something reassuring to say, but could find nothing. Robert at last held out his hand with a smile, and he went. He left Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible depression. In reality there was no man who worked harder at the New Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. He worked under perpetual protest from the _frondeur_ within him, but something stung him on--on--till a habit had been formed which promises to be the joy and salvation of his later life. Was it the haunting memory of that thin figure--the hand clinging to the chair--the white appealing look?

Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the consequences. She herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, comforting the sobbing creatures afterward with a calmness born of her own despair. Robson, in the last stage himself, sent him a grimly characteristic message. 'I shall solve the riddle, sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days. For the first time in my life, I shall know what you are still guessing at. May the blessing of one who never blessed thing or creature before he saw you go with you!'

After it all Robert sank on the sofa with a groan.

'No more!' he said hoarsely-'no more! Now for air-the sea! To-mmorow, wife, to-morrow! _Cras ingens iterabimus sequor_. Ah me! I leave _my_ new Salamis behind!'

But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham and Newcome.

'I will spare Langham the sight of me,' he said, smiling sadly. 'And I will spare myself the sight of Newcome--I could not bear it, I think! But I must say good-by--for I love them both.'

Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it. 'Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the house-maid, and the priest turned away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the passionate heart bore the burden of that 'too late,' believing that even at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.

Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In any other circumstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four hours he could press no claim of his own.

When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood watching, the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky. Catherine caught her look and attitude, and could have cried aloud in her own gnawing pain.

Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival. Their journey had gone well; even the odious passage from Marseilles had been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was luxurious, the weather good.

'I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' wrote Edmondson, 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June--when an English June behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the Bay, the great plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds. His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers, raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he were unlike the common sons of men--as though to _him_ it might be possible to subdue even this fell disease.'

Elsmere himself wrote--

'"I had not heard the half"-Flaxman! An enchanted land--air, sun, warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis--everything that feeds the outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth of sunlit air between us and the curve of the Bay, is for the moment heaven! One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous blue of the morning. I am better--I breathe again.'

'Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, and has been adopted by