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

/> 'Miss Leyburn,' he said, gazing at her, his olive face singularly pale, 'don't waste your pity on me, for Heaven's sake. Some madness made me behave as I did just now. Years ago the same sort of idiocy betrayed me to your brother; never before or since. I ask your pardon, humbly,' and his tone seemed to scorch her, 'that this second fit of ranting should have seized me in your presence.'

But he could not keep it up. The inner upheaval had gone too far. He stopped and looked at her--piteously, the features quivering. It was as though the man's whole nature had for the moment broken up, become disorganized. She could not bear it. Some ghastly infirmity seemed to have been laid bare to her. She held out both her hands. Swiftly he caught them, stooped, kissed them, let them go. It was an extraordinary scene--to both a kind of lifetime.

Then he gathered himself together by a mighty effort.

'That was _adorable_ of you,' he said with a long breath. 'But I stole it--I despise myself. Why should you pity me? What is there to pity me for? My troubles, such as I have, are my own making--every one.'

And he laid a sort of vindictive emphasis on the words. The tears of excitement were in her eyes.

'Won't you let me be your friend?' she said, trembling, with a kind of reproach. 'I thought--the other night--we were to be friends. Won't you tell me--'

'--more of yourself?' her eyes said, but her voice failed her. And as for him, as he gazed at her, all the accidents of circumstance, of individual character, seemed to drop from her. He forgot the difference of years; he saw her no longer as she was--a girl hardly out of the schoolroom, vain, ambitious, dangerously responsive, on whose crude romantic sense he was wantonly playing; she was to him pure beauty, pure woman. For one tumultuous moment the cold, critical instinct which had been for years draining his life of all its natural energies was powerless. It was sweet to yield, to speak, as it had never been sweet before.

So, leaning over the gate, he told her the story of his life, of his cramped childhood and youth, of his brief moment of happiness and success at college, of his first attempts to make himself a power among younger men, of the gradual dismal failure of all his efforts, the dying down of desire and ambition. From the general narrative there stood out little pictures of individual persons or scenes, clear cut and masterly--of his father, the Gainsborough churchwarden; of his Methodistical mother, who had all her life lamented her own beauty as a special snare of Satan, and who since her husband's death had refused to see her son on the ground that his opinions 'had vexed his father;' of his first ardent worship of knowledge, and passion to communicate it; and of the first intuitions in lecture, face to face with an undergraduate, alone in college rooms, sometimes alone on Alpine heights, of something cold, impotent, and baffling in himself, which was to stand for ever between him and action, between him and human affection; the growth of the critical pessimist sense which laid the axe to the root of enthusiasm after enthusiasm, friendship after friendship--which made other men feel him inhuman, intangible, a skeleton at the feast; and the persistence through it all of a kind of hunger for life and its satisfactions, which the will was more and more powerless to satisfy: all those Langham put into words with an extraordinary magic and delicacy of phrase. There was something in him which found a kind of pleasure in the long analysis, which took pains that it should be infinitely well done.

Rose followed him breathlessly. If she had known more of literature she would have realized that she was witnessing a masterly dissection of one of those many morbid growths of which our nineteenth-century psychology is full. But she was anything but literary, and she could not analyze her excitement. The man's physical charm, his melancholy, the intensity of what he said, affected, unsteadied her as music was apt to affect her. And through it all there was the strange, girlish pride that this should have befallen _her_; a first crude intoxicating sense of the power over human lives which was to be hers, mingled with a desperate anxiety to be equal to the occasion, to play her part well.

'So you see,' said Langham at last, with a great effort (to do him justice) to climb back on to some ordinary level of conversation; 'all these transcendentalisms apart, I am about the most unfit man in the world for a college tutor. The undergraduates regard me as a shilly-shallying pedant. On my part,' he added dryly, 'I am not slow to retaliate. Every term I live I find the young man a less interesting animal. I regard the whole university system as a wretched sham. Knowledge! It has no more to do with knowledge than my boots.'

And for one curious instant he looked out over the village, his fastidious scholar's soul absorbed by some intellectual irritation, of which Rose understood absolutely nothing. She stood bewildered, silent, longing childishly to speak, to influence him, but not knowing what cue to take.

'And then--' he went on presently (but was the strange being speaking to her?)--'so long as I stay there, worrying those about me, and eating my own heart out, I am out off from the only life that might be mine, that I might find the strength to live.'

The words were low and deliberate. After his moment of passionate speech, and hers of passionate sympathy, she began to feel strangely remote from him.

'Do you mean the life of the student?' she asked him after a pause, timidly.

Her voice recalled him. He turned and smiled at her.

'Of the dreamer, rather.'

And as her eyes still questioned, as he was still moved by the spell of her responsiveness, he let the new wave of feeling break in words. Vaguely at first, and then with a growing flame and force he fell to describing to her what the life of thought may be to the thinker, and those marvellous moments which belong to that life when the mind which has divorced itself from desire and sense sees spread out before it the vast realms of knowledge, and feels itself close to the secret springs and sources of being. And as he spoke, his language took an ampler turn, the element of smallness which attaches to all more personal complaint vanished, his words flowed, became eloquent, inspired--till the bewildered child beside him, warm through and through as she was with youth and passion, felt for an instant by sheer fascinated sympathy the cold spell, the ineffable prestige, of the thinker's voluntary death in life.

But only, for an instant. Then the natural sense of chill smote her to the heart.

'You make me shiver,' she cried, interrupting him. 'Have those strange things--I don't understand them--made you happy? Can they make anyone happy? Oh no, no! Happiness is to be got from living, seeing, experiencing, making friends, enjoying nature! Look at the world, Mr. Langham!' she, said with bright cheeks, half smiling at her own magniloquence, her hand waving over the view before them. 'What has it done that you should hate it so? If you can't put up with people you might love nature. I--I can't be content with nature, because I want some life first. Up in Whindale there is too much nature, not enough life. But if I had got through life--if it had disappointed me--then I should love nature. I keep saying to the mountains at home: "Not _now_, not _now_; I want something else, but afterward if I can't get it, or if I get too much of it, why then I will love you, live with you. You are my second string, my reserve. You--and art--and poetry."'

'But everything depends on feeling,' he said softly, but lightly, as though to keep the conversation from slipping back into those vague depths it had emerged from; 'and if one has forgotten how to feel--if when one sees or bears something beautiful that used to stir one, one can only say "I remember it moved me once!"--if feeling dies, like life, like physical force, but prematurely, long before the rest of the man?'

She gave a long quivering sigh of passionate antagonism.

'Oh, I cannot imagine it!' she cried. 'I shall feel to my last hour.' Then after a pause, in another tone, 'But, Mr. Langham, you say music excites you, Wagner excites you?'

'Yes, a sort of strange second life I can still get out of music,' he admitted, smiling.

'Well, then,' and she looked at him persuasively, 'why not give yourself up to music? It is so easy--so little trouble to oneself--it just takes you and carries you away.'

Then, for the first time, Langham became conscious--probably through these admonitions of hers--that the situation had absurdity in it.

'It is not my _metier_,' he said hastily. 'The self that enjoys music is an outer self, and can only bear with it for a short time. No, Miss Leyburn, I shall leave Oxford, the college will sing a _Te Deum_, I shall settle down in London, I shall keep a bit book going, and cheat the years after all, I suppose, as well as most people.'

'And you will know, you will remember,' she said faltering, reddening, her womanliness forcing the words out of her, 'that you have friends: Robert--my sister--all of us?'

He faced her with a little quick movement. And as their eyes met each was struck once more with the personal beauty of the other. His eyes shone--their black depths seemed all tenderness.

'I will never forget this visit, this garden, this hour,' he said slowly, and they stood looking at each other. Rose felt herself swept off her feet into a world of tragic mysterious emotion. She all but put her hand into his again, asking him childishly to hope, to be consoled. But the maidenly impulse restrained her, and once more he leant on the gate, burying his face in his hands.

Suddenly he felt himself utterly tired, relaxed. Strong nervous reaction set in. What had all this scene, this tragedy been about? And then in another instant was that sense of the ridiculous again clamoring to be heard. He--the man of thirty-five--confessing himself, making a tragic scene, playing Manfred or Cain to this adorable, half-fledged creature, whom he had known five days! Supposing Elsmere had been there to hear--Elsmere with his sane eye, his laugh! As he leant over the gate, he found himself quivering with impatience to be away--by himself--out of reach--the critic in him making the most bitter, remorseless mock of all these heroics and despairs the other self had been indulging in. But for the life of him he could not find a word to say--a move to make. He stood hesitating, _gauche_, as usual.

'Do you know, Mr. Langham,' said Rose lightly, by his side, 'that there is no time at all left for _you_ to give _me_ good advice in? That is an obligation still hanging over you. I don't mean to release you from it, but if I don't go in now, and finish the covering of those library books, the youth of Murewell will be left without any literature till Heaven knows when!'

He could have blessed her for the tone, for the escape into common mundanity.

'Hang literature--hang the parish library!' he said with a laugh as he moved after her. Yet his real inner