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

light of the hall lamp she was so startled by the gray pallor of the face that she caught hold of his outstretched hand with both hers. What she said he never knew--her look was enough. He put his arm round her, and as he opened the drawing-room door holding her pressed against him, she felt the desperate agitation in him penetrating, beating against an almost iron self-control of manner. He shut the door behind them.

'Robert! dear Robert,' she said, clinging to him--'there is bad news,--tell me--there is something to tell me! Oh! what is it--what is it?'

It was almost like a child's wail. His brow contracted still more painfully.

'My darling,' he said; 'my darling--my dear, dear wife!' and he bent his head down to her as she lay against his breast, kissing her hair with a passion of pity, of remorse, of tenderness, which seemed to rend his whole nature.

'Tell me--tell me--Robert!'

He guided her gently across the room, past the sofa over which her work lay scattered, past the flower-table, now a many-colored mass of roses, which was her especial pride, past the remains of a brick castle which had delighted Mary's wondering eyes and mischievous fingers an hour or two before, to a low chair by the open window looking on the wide moonlit expanse of cornfield. He put her into it, walked to the window on the other side of the room, shut it, and drew down the blind. Then he went back to her, and sank down beside her, kneeling, her hands in his--

'My dear wife--you have loved me--you do love me?'

She could not answer, she could only press his hands with her cold fingers, with a look and gesture that implored him to speak.

'Catherine'--he said, still kneeling before her--'you remember that night you came down to me in the study, the night I told you I was in trouble and you could not help me. Did you guess from what I said what the trouble was?'

'Yes,' she answered trembling, 'yes, I did, Robert; I thought you were depressed--troubled--about religion.'

'And I know,'--he said with an outburst of feeling, kissing her hands as they lay in his--'I know very well that you went up stairs and prayed for me, my white-souled angel! But Catherine, the trouble grew--it got blacker and blacker. You were there beside me, and you could not help me. I dared not tell you about it; I could only struggle on alone, so terribly alone, sometimes; and now I am beaten, beaten. And I come to you to ask you to help me in the only thing that remains to me. Help me, Catherine, to be an honest man--to follow conscience--to say and do the truth!'

'Robert,' she said piteously, deadly pale; 'I don't understand.'

'Oh, my poor darling!' he cried, with a kind of moan of pity and misery. Then still holding her, he said, with strong deliberate emphasis, looking into the gray-blue eyes--the quivering face so full of austerity and delicacy,--

'For six or seven months, Catherine--really for much longer, though I never knew it--I have been fighting with _doubt_--doubt of orthodox Christianity--doubt of what the Church teaches--of what I have to say and preach every Sunday. First it crept on me I knew not how. Then the weight grew heavier, and I began to struggle with it. I felt I must struggle with it. Many men, I suppose, in my position would have trampled on their doubts--would have regarded them as sin in themselves, would have felt it their duty to ignore them as much as possible, trusting to time and God's help. I _could_ not ignore them. The thought of questioning the most sacred beliefs that you and I--' and his voice faltered a moment--'held in common, was misery to me. On the other hand, I knew myself. I knew that I could no more go on living to any purpose, with a whole region of the mind shut up, as it were, barred away from the rest of me, than I could go on living with a secret between myself and You. I could not hold my faith by a mere tenure of tyranny and fear. Faith that is not free--that is not the faith of the whole creature, body, soul, and intellect--seemed to me a faith worthless both to God and man!'

Catherine looked at him stupefied. The world seemed to be turning round her. Infinitely more terrible than his actual words was the accent running through words and tone and gesture--the accent of irreparableness, as of something dismally _done_ and _finished_. What did it all mean? For what had he brought her there? She sat stunned, realizing with awful force the feebleness, the inadequacy, of her own fears.

He, meanwhile, had paused a moment, meeting her gaze with those yearning, sunken eyes. Then he went on, his voice changing a little.

'But if I had wished it ever so much, I could not have helped myself. The process, so to speak, had gone too far by the time I knew where I was. I think the change must have begun before the Mile End time. Looking back, I see the foundations were laid in--in--the work of last winter.'

She shivered. He stooped and kissed her hands again passionately. 'Am I poisoning even the memory of our past for you?' he cried. Then, restraining himself at once, he hurried on again--'After Mile End you remember I began to see much of the Squire. Oh, my wife, don't look at me so! It was not his doing in any true sense. I am not such a weak shuttlecock as that! But being where I was before our intimacy began, his influence hastened everything. I don't wish to minimize it. I was not made to stand alone!'

And again that bitter, perplexed, half-scornful sense of his own pliancy at the hands of circumstance as compared with the rigidity of other men, descended upon him. Catherine made a faint movement as though to draw her hands away.

'Was it well,' she said, in a voice which sounded like a harsh echo of her own, 'was it right for a clergyman to discuss sacred things--with such a man?'

He let her hands go, guided for the moment by a delicate imperious instinct which bade him appeal to something else than love. Rising, he sat down opposite to her on the low window seat, while she sank back into her chair, her fingers clinging to the arm of it, the lamp-light far behind deepening all the shadows of the face, the hollows in the cheeks, the line of experience and will about the mouth. The stupor in which she had just listened to him was beginning to break up. Wild forces of condemnation and resistance were rising in her; and he knew it. He knew, too, that as yet she only half realized the situation, and that blow after blow still remained to him to deal.

'Was it right that I should discuss religious matters with the Squire?' he repeated, his face resting on his hands. 'What are religious matters, Catherine, and what are not?'

Then still controlling himself rigidly, his eyes fixed on the shadowy face of his wife, his ear catching her quick uneven breath, he went once more through the dismal history of the last few months, dwelling on his state of thought before the intimacy with Mr. Wendover began, on his first attempts to escape the Squire's influence, on his gradual pitiful surrender. Then he told the story of the last memorable walk before the Squire's journey, of the moment in the study afterward, and of the months of feverish reading and wrestling which had followed. Half-way through it a new despair seized him. What was the good of all he was saying? He was speaking a language she did not really understand. What were all these critical and literary considerations to her?

The rigidity of her silence showed him that her sympathy was not with him, that in comparison with the vibrating protest of her own passionate faith which must be now ringing through her, whatever he could urge must seem to her the merest culpable trifling with the soul's awful destinies. In an instant of tumultuous speech he could not convey to her the temper and results of his own complex training, and on that training, as he very well knew, depended the piercing, convincing force of all that he was saying. There were gulfs between them--gulfs which as it seemed to him in a miserable insight, could never be bridged again. Oh! the frightful separateness of experience!

Still he struggled on. He brought the story down to the conversation at the Hall, described--in broken words of fire and pain--the moment of spiritual wreck which had come upon him in the August lane, his night of struggle, his resolve to go to Mr. Grey. And all through he was not so much narrating as pleading a cause, and that not his own, but Love's. Love was at the bar, and it was for love that the eloquent voice, the pale varying face, were really pleading, through all the long story of intellectual change.

At the mention of Mr. Grey, Catherine grew restless, she sat up suddenly, with a cry of bitterness.

'Robert, why did you go away from me? It was cruel. I should have known first. He had no right--no right!'

She clasped her hands round her knees, her beautiful mouth set and stern. The moon had been sailing westward all this time, and as Catherine bent forward the yellow light caught her face, and brought out the haggard change in it. He held out his hands to her with a low groan, helpless against her reproach, her jealousy. He dared not speak of what Mr. Grey had done for him, of the tenderness of his counsel toward her specially. He felt that everything he could say would but torture the wounded heart still more.

But she did not notice the outstretched hands. She covered her face in silence a moment as though trying to see her way more clearly through the maze of disaster; and he waited. At last she looked up.

'I cannot follow all you have been saying,' she said, almost harshly. 'I know so little of books, I cannot give them the place you do. You say you have convinced yourself the Gospels are like other books, full of mistakes, and credulous, like the people of the time; and therefore you can't take what they say as you used to take it. But what does it all quite mean? Oh, I am not clever--I cannot see my way clear from thing to thing as you do. If there are mistakes, does it matter so--so--terribly to you?' and she faltered. 'Do you think _nothing_ is true because something may be false? Did not--did not--Jesus still live, and die, and rise again?--_can_ you doubt--_do_ you doubt--that He rose--that He is God--that He is in heaven--that we shall see Him?'

She threw an intensity into every word, which made the short, breathless questions thrill through him, through the nature saturated and steeped as hers was in Christian association, with a bitter accusing force. But he did not flinch from them.

'I can believe no longer in an incarnation and resurrection,' he said slowly, but with a resolute plainness. 'Christ is risen in our hearts, in the Christian life of charity. Miracle is a natural product of human feeling and imagination and God was in Jesus--pre-eminently, as He is in all great souls, but not otherwise--not otherwise in kind than He is in me or you.'

His voice dropped to a whisper. She grow