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

even, and his days occupied to a point Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep, down stairs at eleven, read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street) write his answers to them--those difficult scrawls are among the treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to itself some of the best life in England--then often fall asleep with fatigue. After food there would come a short drive, or, if the day was very warm, an hour or two of sitting outside, generally his best time for talking. He had a wheeled chair in which Flaxman would take him across to the convent garden--a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy--leaf and blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; underneath a revel of every imaginable flower--narcissus and anemones, geraniums and clematis; and all about, hedges of monthly roses, dark red and pale alternately, making a roseleaf carpet under their feet. Through the tree-trunks shone the white sun-warmed convent and far beyond were glimpses of downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea.

Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank in beauty and delight; talking, too, whenever it was possible to him, of all things in heaven and earth. Then when he came home, he would have out his books and fall to some old critical problem--his worn and scored Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then to call Flaxman's attention to some fresh light on an obscure point--only to relinquish the effort again and again with an unfailing patience.

But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not keep his attention fixed to these things very long. Then it would be the turn of his favorite poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most frequently. Flaxman would read the AEneid aloud to him, Robert following the passages he loved best in whisper, his hand resting the while in Catherine's. And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie watching her while she played.

'I have had a letter,' he said to Flaxman one afternoon, 'from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the "absurd and wasteful isolation" of the New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement in East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp letter; I could not help it. It was borne in on me to tell him that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our time what the law was to the early Christians. We _must_ make up our minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be cleared; then may come the rebuilding. Religion itself, the peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or playing the part assigned us.'

On another occasion, in the convent garden, he broke out with,--

'I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which men become the slaves of some metaphysical word--_personality_, or _intelligence_, or what not! What meaning can they have as applied to God? Herbert Spencer is quite right. We no sooner attempt to define what we mean by a Personal God than we lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic. But why attempt it at all? I like that French saying, "_Quand on me demande ce que c'est que Dieu, je l'ignore; quand on ne me le demande pas, je le sais tres-bien!_" No, we cannot, realize Him in words--we can only live in Him, and die to Him!'

On another occasion, he said, speaking to Catherine of the Squire and of Meyrick's account of his last year of life,--

'How selfish one is, _always_--when one least thinks it! How could I have forgotten him so completely as I did during all that New Brotherhood time? Where, what is he now? Ah! if somewhere, somehow, one could----'

He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of his look finished it for him.

But the days passed on, and the voice grew rarer, the strength feebler. By the beginning of March all coming downstairs was over. He was entirely confined to his room, almost to his bed. Then there came a horrible week, when no narcotics took effect, when every night was a wrestle for life, which it seemed must be the last. They had a good nurse, but Flaxman and Catherine mostly shared the watching between them.

One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. Catherine was sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn world of sun which reminded her of the summer sunrises at Petites Dalles. She looked the shadow of herself. Spiritually, too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was no longer her own: she lived in him--in every look of those eyes--in every movement of that wasted frame.

As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unseeing gaze resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of hallucination took possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw the form of the Son of Man passing over the misty slope in front of her, that the dim majestic figure turned and beckoned. In her half-dream she fell on her knees. 'Master!' she cried in agony, 'I cannot leave him! Call me not! My life is here. I have no heart--it beats in his.'

And the figure passed on, the beckoning hand dropping at its side. She followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed to her as though mind and body were alike incapable of moving--that she would not if she could. Then suddenly a sound from behind startled her. She turned, her trance shaken off in an instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed.

For a moment her lover, her husband, of the early day was before her--as she ran to him. But he did not see her.

An ecstasy of joy was on his face; the whole man bent forward listening.

'_The child's cry!--thank God! Oh! Meyrick--Catherine--thank God!_'

And she knew that he stood again on the stairs at Murewell in that September night which gave them their first born, and that he thanked God because her pain was over.

An instant's strained looking, and, sinking back into her arms, he gave two or three gasping breaths, and died.

Five days later Flaxman and Rose brought Catherine home. It was supposed that she would return to her mother at Burwood. Instead, she settled down again in London, and not one of those whom Robert Elsmere had loved was forgotten by his widow. Every Sunday morning, with her child beside her, she worshipped in the old ways; every Sunday afternoon saw her black-veiled figure sitting motionless in a corner of the Elgood Street Hall. In the week she gave all her time and money to the various works of charity which he had started. But she held her peace. Many were grateful to her; some loved her; none understood her. She lived for one hope only; and the years passed all too slowly.

The New Brotherhood still exists, and grows. There are many who imagined that as it had been raised out of the earth by Elsmere's genius, so it would sink with him. Not so! He would have fought the struggle to victory with surpassing force, with a brilliancy and rapidity none after him could rival. But the struggle was not his. His effort was but a fraction of the effort of the race. In that effort, and in the Divine force behind it, is our trust, as was his.

Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; And (they forgotten and unknown) Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown.

THE END


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Publication Date: 08-19-2009

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Dedication:
Dedicated to the memory Of MY TWO FRIENDS SEPARATED, IN MY THOUGHT OF THEM, BY MUCH DIVERSITY OF CIRCUMSTANCE AND OPINION; LINKED, IN MY FAITH ABOUT THEM, TO EACH OTHER, AND TO ALL THE SNINING ONES OF THE PAST, BY THE LOVE OF GOD AND THE SERVICE OF MAN: THOMAS HILL GREEN (LAYE PROFESSOR OF MORAL PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD) Died March 26, 1882 AND