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

worms, that we should defy the Most High, that we should set our wretched faculties against His Omnipotence? Submit--submit--humble yourself, my brother! Fling away the freedom which is your ruin. There is no freedom for man. Either a slave to Christ, or a slave to his own lusts--there is no other choice. Go away; exchange your work here for a time for work in London. You have too much leisure here: Satan has too much opportunity. I foresaw it--I foresaw it when you and I first met. I felt I had a message for you, and here I deliver it. In the Lord's Name, I bid you fly; I bid you yield in time. Better to be the Lord's captive than _the Lord's betrayer!_'

The wasted form was drawn up to its full height, the arm was outstretched, the long cloak fell back from it in long folds--voice and eye were majesty itself. Robert had a tremor of responsive passion. How easy it sounded, how tempting--to cut the knot, to mutilate and starve the rebellious intellect which would assert itself against the soul's purest instincts! Newcome had done it--why not he?

And then, suddenly, as he stood gazing at his companion, the spring sun, and murmur all about them--another face, another life another message, flashed on his inmost sense, the face and life of Henry Grey. Words torn from their context, but full for him of intensest meaning, passed rapidly through his mind: '_God is not wisely trusted when declared unintelligible.' 'Such honor rooted in dishonor stands; such unfaithful makes us falsely true.' 'God is for ever reason: and His communication, His revelation, is reason_.'

He turned away with a slight, sad shake of the head. The spell was broken. Mr. Newcome's arm dropped, and he moved sombrely on beside Robert--the hand, which held a little book of Hours against his cloak, trembling slightly.

At the rectory gate he stopped.

'Good-by--I must go home.'

'You won't come in?--No, no, Newcome; believe me, I am no rash careless egotist, risking wantonly the most precious things in life! But the call is on me, and I must follow it. All life is God's, and all thought--not only a fraction of it. He cannot let me wander very far!'

But the cold fingers he held so warmly dropped from his, and Newcome turned away.

A week afterward, or thereabout, Robert had in some sense followed Newcome's counsel. Admonished perhaps by sheer physical weakness, as much as by anything else, he had for the moment laid down his arms; he had yielded to an invading feebleness of the will, which refused, as it were, to carry on the struggle any longer, at such a life-destroying pitch of intensity. The intellectual oppression of itself brought about wild reaction and recoil, and a passionate appeal to that inward witness of the soul which holds its own long after the reason has practically ceased to struggle.

It came about in this way. One morning he stood reading in the window of the library the last of the Squire's letters. It contained a short but masterly analysis of the mental habits and idiosyncrasies of St. Paul, _a propos_ of St. Paul's witness to the Resurrection. Every now and then, as Elsmere turned the pages, the orthodox protest would assert itself, the orthodox arguments make themselves felt as though in mechanical involuntary protest. But their force and vitality were gone. Between the Paul of Anglican theology and the fiery, fallible man of genius--so weak logically, so strong in poetry, in rhetoric, in moral passion, whose portrait has been drawn for us by a free and temperate criticism--the Rector knew, in a sort of dull way, that his choice was made. The one picture carried reason and imagination with it; the other contented neither.

But as he put down the letter something seemed to snap within him. Some chord of physical endurance gave way. For five months he had been living intellectually at a speed no man maintains with impunity, and this letter of the Squire's, with its imperious demands upon the tired irritable bran, was the last straw.

He sank down on the oriel seat, the letter dropping from his hands. Outside, the little garden, now a mass of red and pink roses, the hill and the distant stretches of park were wrapped in a thick, sultry mist, through which a dim, far-off sunlight struggled on to the library floor, and lay in ghostly patches on the polished boards and lower ranges of books.

The simplest religious thoughts began to flow over him--the simplest, childish words of prayer were on his lips. He felt himself delivered, he knew not how or why.

He rose deliberately, laid the Squire's letter among his other papers, and tied them up carefully; then he took up the books which lay piled on the Squire's writing-table: all those volumes of German, French, and English criticism, liberal or apologetic, which he had been accumulating round him day, by day with a feverish toilsome impartiality, and began rapidly and methodically to put them back in their places on the shelves.

'I have done too much thinking, too much reading,' he was saying to himself as he went through his task. 'Now let it be the turn of something else!'

And still as he handled the books, it was as though Catherine's figure glided backward and forward beside him, across the smooth floor, as though her hand were on his arm, her eyes shining into his. Ah--he knew well what it was had made the sharpest sting of this wrestle through which he had been passing! It was not merely religious dread, religious shame; that terror of disloyalty to the Divine Images which have filled the soul's inmost shrine since its first entry into consciousness, such as every good man feels in a like strait. This had been strong indeed; but men are men, and love is love! Ay, it was to the dark certainty of Catherine's misery, that every advance in knowledge and intellectual power had brought him nearer. It was from that certainty, that he now, and for the last time, recoiled. It was too much. It could not be borne.

He walked home, counting up the engagements of the next few weeks--the school-treat, two club field-days, a sermon in the county town, the probable opening of the new Workmen's Institute, and so on. Oh! to be through them all and away, away amid Alpine scents and silences. He stood a moment beside the gray, slowly-moving river, half bidden beneath the rank flower-growth, the tensy and willow-herb, the luxuriant elder and trailing brambles of its August banks--and thought with hungry passion of the clean-swept Alpine pasture, the fir-woods, and the tameless mountain streams. In three weeks or less he and Catherine should be climbing the Jaman or the Dent du Midi. And till then he would want all his time for men and women. Books should hold him no more.

Catherine only put her arms round his neck in silence when he told her. The relief was too great for words. He, too, held her close, saying nothing. But that night, for the first time for weeks, Elsmere's wife slept in peace and woke without dread of the day before her.


BOOK IV. CRISIS.


CHAPTER XXVI.

The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new institute--sometimes fishing, sometimes passing long summer hours on the commons with his club boys, hunting the ponds for caddises, newts, and water-beetles, peering into the furze-bushes for second broods, or watching the sand-martins in the gravel-pits, and trudging home at night in the midst of an escort of enthusiasts, all of them with pockets as full and, miry as his own, to deposit the treasures of the day in the club-room. Once more the Rector, though physically perhaps less ardent than of yore, was the life of the party, and a certain awe and strangeness which had developed in his boys' minds toward him, during the last few weeks, passed away.

It was curious that in these days he would neither sit nor walk alone if he could help it. Catherine or a stray parishioner was almost always with him. All the while, vaguely, in the depth of consciousness, there was the knowledge that behind this piece of quiet water on which his life was now sailing, there lay storm and darkness, and that in front loomed fresh possibilities of tempest. He knew, in a way, that it was a treacherous peace which had overtaken him. And yet it was peace. The pressure exerted by the will had temporarily given way, and the deepest forces of the man's being had reasserted themselves. He could feel and love and pray again; and Catherine, seeing the old glow in the eyes, the old spring in the step, made the whole of life one thank-offering.

On the evening following that moment of reaction in the Murewell library Robert had written to the Squire. His letter had been practically a withdrawal from the correspondence.

'I find,' he wrote, 'that I have been spending too much time and energy lately on these critical matters. It seems to me that my work as a clergyman has suffered. Nor can I deny that your book and your letters have been to me a source of great trouble of mind.'

'My heart is where it was, but my head is often confused. Let controversy rest awhile. My wife says I want a holiday; I think so myself, and we are off in three weeks: not however, I hope, before we have welcomed you home again, and got you to open the new Institute, which is already dazzling the eyes of the village by its size and splendor, and the white paint that Harris the builder has been lavishing upon it.'

Ten days later, rather earlier than was expected, the Squire and Mrs. Darcy were at home again. Robert re-entered the great house the morning after their arrival with a strange reluctance. Its glory and magnificence, the warm perfumed air of the hall, brought back a sense of old oppressions, and he walked down the passage to the library with a sinking heart. There he found the Squire busy as usual with one of those fresh cargoes of books which always accompanied him on any homeward journey. He was more brown, more wrinkled, more shrunken; more full of force, of harsh epigram, of grim anecdote than ever. Robert sat on the edge of the table laughing over his stories of French Orientalists, or Roman cardinals or modern Greek professors, enjoying the impartial sarcasm which one of the greatest of savants was always ready to pour out upon his brethren of the craft.

The Squire, however, was never genial for a moment during the interview. He did not mention his book nor Elsmere's letter. But Elsmere suspected in him a good deal of suppressed irritability; and, as after a while he abruptly ceased to talk, the visit grew difficult.

The Rector walked home feeling restless and depressed. The mind had begun to work again. It was only by a great effort that he could turn his thoughts from the Squire, and all that the Squire had meant to him during the past year, and so woo back to himself 'the shy bird Peace.'

Mr. Wendover watched the door close behind him, and then went back to his work with a gesture of impatience.

'Once a priest, always a priest. What a fool I was to forget it! You think you make an impression on the mystic, and at the bottom there is always something which defies