Robert Elsmere

The lines dropped with low vibrating force from lips unaccustomed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it seemed to Robert, gazing at him with fixed eyes, that the man’s whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, was charged with benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing and consecration had been laid upon him. The fiery soul beside him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own. So the torch of God passes on its way, hand reaching out to hand.

He bent forward, stammering incoherent words of assent and gratitude, he knew not what. Mr. Grey, who had sunk into his chair, gave him time to recover himself. The intensity of the tutor’s own mood relaxed; and presently he began to talk to his guest, in a wholly different tone, of the practical detail of the step before him, supposing it to be taken immediately, discussing the probable attitude of Robert’s bishop, the least conspicuous mode of withdrawing from the living, and so on—all with gentleness and sympathy indeed, but with an indefinable change of manner, which showed that he felt it well both for himself and Elsmere to repress any further expression of emotion. There was something, a vein of stoicism perhaps, in Mr. Grey’s temper of mind, which, while it gave a special force and sacredness to his rare moments of fervent speech, was wont in general to make men more self-controlled than usual in his presence. Robert felt now the bracing force of it.

‘Will you stay with us to dinner?’ Mr. Grey asked when at last Elsmere got up to go. ‘There are one or two lone Fellows coming, asked before your telegram came, of course. Do exactly as you like.’

‘I think not,’ said Robert, after a pause. ‘I longed to see you, but I am—not fit for general society.’

Mr. Grey did not press him. He rose and went with his visitor to the door.

‘Good-by, good-by! Let me always know what I can do for you. And your wife—poor thing, poor thing! Go and tell her, Elsmere: don’t lose a moment you can help. God help her and you!’

They grasped each other’s hands. Mr. Grey followed him down the stairs and along the narrow hall. He opened the hall door, and smiled a last smile of encouragement and sympathy into the eyes that expressed such a young moved gratitude. The door closed. Little did Elsmere realize that never, in this life, would he see that smile or hear that voice again!

CHAPTER XXVIII.

In half an hour from the time Mr. Grey’s door closed upon him, Elsmere had caught a convenient cross-country train, and had left the Oxford towers and spires, the shrunken summer Isis, and the flat, hot, river meadows far behind him. He had meant to stay at Merton, as we know, for the night. Now, his one thought was to get back to Catherine. The urgency of Mr. Grey’s words was upon him, and love had a miserable pang that it should have needed to be urged.

By eight o’clock he was again at Churton. There were no carriages waiting at the little station, but the thought of the walk across the darkening common through the August moonrise, had been a refreshment to him in the heat and crowd of the train. He hurried through the small town, where the streets were full of simmer idlers, and the lamps were twinkling in the still balmy air, along a dusty stretch of road, leaving man and his dwellings, farther and farther to the rear of him, till at last he emerged on a boundless tract of common, and struck to the right into a cart-track leading to Murewell.

He was on the top of a high sandy ridge, looking west and north, over a wide evening world of heather, and wood and hill. To the right, far ahead, across the misty lower grounds into which he was soon to plunge, rose the woods of Murewell, black and massive in the twilight distance. To the left, but on a nearer plane, the undulating common stretching downward from where he stood, rose suddenly toward a height crowned with a group of gaunt and jagged firs—land-marks for all the plain—of which every ghostly bough and crest was now sharply outlined against a luminous sky. For the wide heaven in front of him was still delicately glowing in all its under parts with soft harmonies of dusky red or blue, while in its higher zone the same tract of sky was closely covered with the finest network of pearl-white cloud, suffused at the moment with a silver radiance so intense, that a spectator might almost have dreamed the moon had forgotten its familiar place of rising, and was about to mount into a startled expectant west. Not a light in all the wide expanse, and for a while not a sound of human life, save the beat of Robert’s step, or the occasional tap of his stick against the pebbles of the road.

Presently he reached the edge of the ridge, whence the rough track he was following sank sharply to the lower levels. Here was a marvellous point of view, and the Rector stood a moment, beside a bare weather-blasted fir, a ghostly shadow thrown behind him. All around the gorse and heather seemed still radiating light, as though the air had been so drenched in sunshine that even long after the sun had vanished the invading darkness found itself still unable to win firm possession of earth and sky. Every little stone in the sandy road was still weirdly visible: the color of the heather, now in lavish bloom, could be felt though hardly seen.

Before him melted line after line of woodland, broken by hollow after hollow, filled with vaporous wreaths of mist. About him were the sounds of a wild nature. The air was resonant with the purring of the night-jars, and every now and then he caught the loud clap of their wings as they swayed unsteadily through the furze and bracken. Overhead a trio of wild ducks flew across, from pond to pond, their hoarse cry descending through the darkness. The partridges on the hill called to each other, and certain sharp sounds betrayed to the solitary listener the presence of a flock of swans on a neighboring pool.

The Rector felt himself alone on a wide earth. It was almost with a sort of pleasure that he caught at last the barking of dogs on a few distant farms, or the dim thunderous rush of a train through the wide wooded landscape beyond the heath. Behind that frowning, mass of wood lay the rectory. The lights must be lit in the little drawing-room; Catherine must be sitting by the lamp, her fine head bent over book or work, grieving for him perhaps, her anxious expectant heart going out to him through the dark. He thinks of the village lying wrapped in the peace of the August night, the lamp rays from shop-front or casement streaming out on to the green; he thinks of his child, of his dead mother feeling heavy and bitter within him all the time the message of separation and exile.

But his mood was no longer one of mere dread, of helpless pain, of miserable self-scorn. Contact with Henry Grey had brought him that rekindling of the flame of conscience, that medicinal stirring of the soul’s waters, which is the most precious boon that man can give to man. In that sense which attaches to every successive resurrection of our best life from the shades of despair or selfishness, he had that day, almost that hour, been born again. He was no longer filled mainly with the sense of personal failure, with scorn for his own blundering, impetuous temper, so lacking in prescience and in balance; or, in respect to his wife, with such an anguished impotent remorse. He was nerved and braced; whatever oscillations the mind might go through in its search for another equilibrium, to-night there was a moment of calm. The earth to him was once more full of God, existence full of value.

‘The things I have always loved, I love still!’ he had said to Mr. Grey. And in this healing darkness it was as if the old loves, the old familiar images of thought, returned to him new-clad, re-entering the desolate heart in a white-winged procession of consolation. On the heath beside him Christ stood once more, and as the disciple felt the sacred presence, he could bear for the first time to let the chafing, pent-up current of love flow into the new channels, so painfully prepared for it by the toil of thought. ‘Either God or an impostor.’ What scorn the heart, the intellect, threw on the alternative! Not in the dress of speculations which represent the product of long past, long superseded looms of human thought, but in the guise of common manhood, laden like his fellows with the pathetic weight of human weakness and human ignorance, the Master moves toward him—

‘Like you, my son, I struggled and I prayed. Like you, I had my days of doubt and nights of wrestling. I had my dreams, my delusions, with my fellows. I was weak; I suffered; I died. But God was in me, and the courage, the patience, the love He gave to me; the scenes of the poor human life He inspired; have become by His will the world’s eternal lesson—man’s primer of Divine things, hung high in the eyes of all, simple and wise, that all may see and all may learn. Take it to your heart again—that life, that pain, of mine! Use it to new ends; apprehend it in new ways; but knowledge shall not take it from you; love, instead of weakening or forgetting, if it be but faithful, shall find ever fresh power of realizing and renewing itself.’

So said the vision; and carrying the passion of it deep in his heart the Rector went his way, down the long stony hill, past the solitary farm amid the trees at the foot of it, across the grassy common beyond, with its sentinel clumps of beeches, past an ethereal string of tiny lakes just touched by the moonrise, beside some of the first cottages of Murewell, up the hill, with pulse beating and step quickening, and round into the stretch of road leading to his own gate.

As soon as he had passed the screen made by the shrubs on the lawn, he saw it all as he had seen it in his waking dream on the common—the lamp-light, the open windows, the white muslin curtains swaying a little in the soft evening air, and Catherine’s figure seen dimly through them.

The noise of the gate, however—of the steps on the drive—had startled her. He saw her rise quickly from her low chair, put some work down beside her, and move in haste to the window.

‘Robert!’ she cried in amazement.

‘Yes,’ he answered, still some yards from her, his voice coming strangely to her out of the moonlit darkness. ‘I did my errand early; I found I could get back; and here, I am.’

She flew to the door, opened it, and felt herself caught in his arms.

‘Robert, you are quite damp!’ she said, fluttering and shrinking, for all her sweet habitual gravity of manner—was it the passion of that yearning embrace? ‘Have you walked?’

‘Yes. It is the dew on the common I suppose. The grass was drenched.’

‘Will you have some food? They can bring back the supper directly.’

‘I don’t want any food now,’ he said banging up his hat; I got some lunch in town, and a cup of soup at Reading coming back. Perhaps you will give me some tea soon—not yet.’

He came up to her, pushing back the thick disordered locks of hair from his eyes with one hand, the other held out to her. As he came under the 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 paler and paler.

‘So to you,’ she said presently in the same strange altered voice, ‘my father—when I saw that light on his face before he died, when I heard him cry, “Master, I come!” was dying—deceived—deluded. Perhaps even,’ and she trembled, ‘you think it ends here—our life—our love?’

It was agony to him to see her driving herself through this piteous catechism. The lantern of memory flashed a moment on to the immortal picture of Faust and Margaret. Was it not only that winter they had read the scene together?

Forcibly he possessed himself once more of those closely locked hands, pressing their coldness on his own burning eyes and forehead in hopeless silence.

‘Do you, Robert?’ she repeated insistently.

‘I know nothing,’ he said, his eyes still hidden. ‘I know nothing! But I trust God with all that is clearest to me, with our love, with the soul that is His breath, His work in us!’

The pressure of her despair seemed to be wringing his own faith out of him, forcing into definiteness things and thoughts that had been lying in an accepted, even a welcomed, obscurity.

She tried again to draw her hands away, but he would not let them go. ‘And the end of it all, Robert?’ she said—‘the end of it?’

Never did he forget the note of that question, the desolation of it, the indefinable change of accent. It drove him into a harsh abruptness of reply—

‘The end of it—so far—must be, if I remain an honest man, that I must give up my living, that I must cease to be a minister of the Church of England. What the course of our life after that shall be, is in your hands—absolutely.’

She caught her breath painfully. His heart was breaking for her, and yet there was something in her manner now which kept down caresses and repressed all words.

Suddenly, however, as he sat there mutely watching her, he found her at his knees, her dear arms around him, her face against his breast.

‘Robert, my husband, my darling, it cannot be! It is a madness—a delusion. God is trying you, and me! You cannot be planning so to desert Him, so to deny Christ—you cannot, my husband. Come away with me, away from books and work, into some quiet place where He can make Himself heard. You are overdone, overdriven. Do nothing now—say nothing—except to me. Be patient a little and He will give you back himself! What can books and arguments matter to you or me? Have we not known and felt Him as He is—have we not, Robert? Come!’

She Pushed herself backward, smiling at him with an exquisite tenderness. The tears were streaming down her cheeks. They were wet on his own. Another moment and Robert would have lost the only clew which remained to him through the mists of this bewildering world. He would have yielded again as he had many times yielded before, for infinitely less reason, to the urgent pressure of another’s individuality, and having jeopardized love for truth, he would now have murdered—or tried to murder—in himself, the sense of truth, for love.

But he did neither.

Holding her close pressed against him, he said in breaks of intense speech: ‘If you wish, Catherine, I will wait—I will wait till you bid me speak—but I warn you—there is something dead in me—something gone and broken. It can never live again—except in forms which now it would only pain you more to think of. It is not that I think differently of this point or that point—but of life and religion altogether.—I see God’s purposes in quite other proportions as it were.—Christianity seems to me something small and local.—Behind it, around it—including it—I see the great drama of the world, sweeping on—led by God—from change to change, from act to act. It is not that Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect human reflection of a part of truth. Truth has never been, can never be, contained in any one creed or system!’

She heard, but through her exhaustion, through the bitter sinking of hope, she only half understood. Only she realized that she and he were alike helpless—both struggling in the grip of some force outside of themselves, inexorable, ineluctable.

Robert felt her arms relaxing, felt the dead weight of her form against him. He raised her to her feet, he half carried her to the door, and on to the stairs. She was nearly fainting, but her will held her at bay. He threw open the door of their room, led her in, lifted her—unresisting—on to the bed. Then her head fell to one side, and her lips grew ashen. In an instant or two he had done for her all that his medical knowledge could suggest with rapid, decided hands. She was not quite unconscious; she drew up round her, as though with a strong vague sense of chill the shawl he laid over her, and gradually the slightest shade of color came back to her lips. But as soon as she opened her eyes and met those of Robert fixed upon her, the heavy lids dropped again.

‘Would you rather be alone?’ he said to her, kneeling beside her.

She made a faint affirmative movement of the head and the cold hand he had been chafing tried feebly to withdraw itself. He rose at once, and stood a moment beside her, looking down at her. Then he went.

CHAPTER XXIX.

He shut the door softly, and went downstairs again. It was between ten and eleven. The lights in the lower passage were just extinguished; everyone else in the house had gone to bed. Mechanically he stooped and put away the child’s bricks, he pushed the chairs back into their places, and then he paused awhile before the open window. But there was not a tremor on the set face. He felt himself capable of no more emotion. The fount of feeling, of pain, was for the moment dried up. What he was mainly noticing was the effect of some occasional gusts of night wind on the moonlit cornfield; the silver ripples they sent through it; the shadows thrown by some great trees in the western corners of the field; the glory of the moon itself in the pale immensity of the sky.

Presently he turned away, leaving one lamp still burning in the room, softly unlocked the hall door, took his hat and went out. He walked up and down the wood-path or sat on the bench there for some time, thinking indeed, but thinking with a certain stern practical dryness. Whenever he felt the thrill of feeling stealing over him again, he would make a sharp effort at repression. Physically he could not bear much more, and he knew it. A part remained for him to play, which must be played with tact, with prudence, and with firmness. Strength and nerves had been sufficiently weakened already. For his wife’s sake, his people’s sake, his honorable reputation’s sake, he must guard himself from a collapse which might mean far more than physical failure.

So in the most patient, methodical way he began to plan out the immediate future. As to waiting, the matter was still in Catherine’s hands; but he knew that finely tempered soul; he knew that when she had mastered her poor woman’s self, as she had always mastered it from her childhood, she would not bid him wait. He hardly took the possibility into consideration. The proposal had had some reality in his eyes when he went to see Mr. Grey; now it had none, though he could hardly have explained why.

He had already made arrangements with an old Oxford friend to take his duty during his absence on the Continent. It had been originally suggested that this Mr. Armitstead should come to Murewell on the Monday following the Sunday they were now approaching, spend a few days with them before their departure, and be left to his own devices in the house and parish, about the Thursday or Friday. An intense desire now seized Robert to get hold of the man at once, before the next Sunday. It was strange how the interview with his wife seemed to have crystallized, precipitated everything. How infinitely more real the whole matter looked to him since the afternoon! It had passed—at any rate for the time—out of the region of thought, into the hurrying evolution of action, and as soon as action began it was characteristic of Robert’s rapid energetic nature to feel this thirst to make it as prompt, as complete, as possible. The fiery soul yearned for a fresh consistency, though it were a consistency of loss and renunciation.

To-morrow he must write to the Bishop. The Bishop’s residence was only eight or ten miles from Murewell; he supposed his interview with him would take place about Monday or Tuesday. He could see the tall stooping figure of the kindly old man rising to meet him—he knew exactly the sort of arguments that would be brought to bear upon him. Oh, that it were done with—this wearisome dialectical necessity! His life for months had been one long argument. If he were but left free to feel and live again.

The practical matter which weighed most heavily upon him was the function connected with the opening of the new Institute, which had been fixed for the Saturday-the next day but one. How was he—but much more how was Catherine—to get through it? His lips would be sealed as to any possible withdrawal from the living, for he could not by then have seen the Bishop. He looked forward to the gathering, the crowds, the local enthusiasm, the signs of his own popularity, with a sickening distaste. The one thing real to him through it all would be Catherine’s white face, and their bitter joint consciousness.

And then he said to himself, sharply, that his own feelings counted for nothing. Catherine should be tenderly shielded from all avoidable pain, but for himself there must be no flinching, no self-indulgent weakness. Did he not owe every last hour he had to give to the people among whom he had planned to spend the best energies of life, and from whom his own act was about to part him in this lame, impotent fashion.

Midnight! The sounds rolled silverly out, effacing the soft murmurs of the night. So the long interminable day was over, and a new morning had begun. He rose, listening to the echoes of the bell, and—as the tide of feeling surged back upon him—passionately commending the new-born day to God.

Then he turned toward the house, put the light out in the drawing-room, and went upstairs, stepping cautiously. He opened the door of Catherine’s room. The moonlight was streaming in through the white blinds. Catherine, who had undressed, was lying now with her face hidden in the pillow, and one white-sleeved arm flung across little Mary’s cot. The night was hot, and the child would evidently have thrown off all its coverings had it not been for the mother’s hand, which lay lightly on the tiny shoulder, keeping one thin blanket in its place.

‘Catherine,’ he whispered, standing beside her.

She turned, and by the light of the candle he held shaded from her, he saw the austere remoteness of her look, as of one who had been going through deep waters of misery, alone with God. His heart sank. For the first time that look seemed to exclude him from her inmost life.

He sank down beside her, took the hand lying on the child, and laid down his head upon it, mutely kissing it. But he said nothing. Of what further avail could words be just then to either of them? Only he felt through every fibre the coldness, the irresponsiveness of those fingers lying in his.

‘Would it prevent your sleeping,’ he asked her presently, ‘if I came to read here, as I used to when you were ill? I could shade the light from you, of course.’

She raised her head suddenly.

‘But you—you ought to sleep.’

Her tone was anxious, but strangely quiet and aloof.

‘Impossible!’ he said, pressing his hand over his eyes as he rose. ‘At any rate I will read first.’

His sleeplessness at any time of excitement or strain was so inveterate, and so familiar to them both by now, that she could say nothing. She turned away with a long sobbing breath which seemed to go through her from head to foot. He stood a moment beside her, fighting strong impulses of remorse and passion, and ultimately maintaining silence and self-control.

In another minute or two he was sitting beside her feet, in a low chair drawn to the edge of the bed, the light arranged so as to reach his book without touching either mother or child. He had run over the book-shelf in his own room, shrinking painfully from any of his common religious favorites as one shrinks from touching a still sore and throbbing nerve, and had at last carried off a volume of Spenser.

And so the night began to wear away. For the first hour or two, every now and then, a stifled sob would make itself just faintly heard. It was a sound to wring the heart for what it meant was that not even Catherine Elsmere’s extraordinary powers of self-suppression could avail to chock the outward expression of an inward torture. Each time it came and went, it seemed to Elsmere that a fraction of his youth went with it.

At last exhaustion brought her a restless sleep. As soon as Elsmere caught the light breathing which told him she was not conscious of her grief, or of him, his book slipped on to his knee.

The leaves fell over as the book dropped, and these lines, which had been to him, as to other lovers, the utterance of his own bridal joy, emerged. They brought about him a host of images—a little gray church penetrated everywhere by the roar of a swollen river; outside, a road filled with empty farmers’ carts, and shouting children carrying branches of mountain-ash—winding on and up into the heart of wild hills dyed with reddening fern, the sun-gleams stealing from crag to crag, and shoulder to shoulder; inside, row after row of intent faces, all turned toward the central passage, and, moving toward him, a figure ‘clad all in white, that seems a virgin best,’ whose every step brings nearer to him the heaven of his heart’s desire. Everything is plain to him—Mrs. Thornburgh’s round checks and marvellous curls and jubilant airs,—Mrs. Leyburn’s mild and tearful pleasure, the Vicar’s solid satisfaction. With what confiding joy had those who loved her given her to him! And he knows well that out of all griefs, the grief he has brought upon her in two short years is the one which will seem to her hardest to bear. Very few women of the present day could feel this particular calamity as Catherine Elsmere must feel it.

‘Was it a crime to love and win you, my darling?’ he cited to her in his heart. ‘Ought I to have had more self-knowledge, could I have guessed where I was taking you? Oh how could I know—how could I know!’

But it was impossible to him to sink himself wholly in the past. Inevitably such a nature as Elsmere’s turns very quickly from despair to hope; from the sense of failure to the passionate planning of new effort. In time will he not be able to comfort her, and, after a miserable moment of transition, to repair her trust in him and make their common life once more rich toward God and man? There must be painful readjustment and friction no doubt. He tries to see the facts as they truly are, fighting against his own optimist tendencies, and realizing as best he can all the changes which his great change must introduce into their most intimate relations. But after all can love, and honesty, and a clear conscience do nothing to bridge over, nay, to efface, such differences as theirs will be?

Oh to bring her to understand him! At this moment he shrinks painfully from the thought of touching her faith—his own sense of loss is too heavy, too terrible. But if she will only be still open with him—still give him her deepest heart, any lasting difference between them will surely be impossible. Each will complete the other, and love knit, up the ravelled strands again into a stronger unity.

Gradually he lost himself in half-articulate prayer, in the solemn girding of the will to this future task of a re-creating love. And by the time the morning light had well established itself sleep had fallen on him. When he became sensible of the longed-for drowsiness, he merely stretched out a tired hand and drew over him a shawl hanging at the foot of the bed. He was too utterly worn out to think of moving.

When he woke the sun was streaming into the room, and behind him sat the tiny Mary on the edge of the bed, the rounded apple cheeks and wild-bird eyes aglow with mischief and delight. She had climbed out of her cot, and, finding no check to her progress, had crept on, till now she sat triumphantly, with one diminutive leg and rosy foot doubled under her, and her father’s thick hair at the mercy of her invading fingers, which, however, were as yet touching him half timidly, as though something in his sleep had awed the baby sense.

But Catherine was gone.

He sprang up with a start. Mary was frightened by the abrupt movement, perhaps disappointed by the escape of her prey, and raised a sudden wail.

He carried her to her nurse, even forgetting to kiss the little wet cheek, ascertained that Catherine was not in the house, and then came back, miserable, with the bewilderment of sleep still upon him. A sense of wrong rose high within him. How could she have left him thus without a word?

It had been her way sometimes, during the summer, to go out early to one or other of the sick folk who were under her especial charge. Possibly she had gone to a woman just confined, on the further side of the village, who yesterday had been in danger.

But, whatever explanation he could make for himself, he was none the less irrationally wretched. He bathed, dressed, and sat down to his solitary meal in a state of tension and agitation indescribable. All the exaltation, the courage of the night, was gone.

Nine o’clock, ten o’clock, and no sign of Catherine.

‘Your mistress must have been detained somewhere,’ he said as quietly and carelessly as he could to Susan, the parlor-maid, who had been with them since their marriage. ‘Leave breakfast things for one.’

‘Mistress took a cup of milk when she went out, cook says,’ observed the little maid with a consoling intention, wondering the while at the Rector’s haggard mien and restless movements.

‘Nursing other people, indeed!’ she observed severely downstairs, glad, as we all are at times, to pick holes in excellence which is inconveniently high. ‘Missis had a deal better stay at home and nurse him!’

The day was excessively hot. Not a leaf moved in the garden; over the cornfield the air danced in long vibrations of heat; the woods and hills beyond were indistinct and colorless. Their dog Dandy, lay sleeping in the sun, waking up every now and then to avenge himself on the flies. On the far edge of the cornfield reaping was beginning. Robert stood on the edge of the sunk fence, his blind eyes resting on the line of men, his ear catching the shouts of the farmer directing operations from his gray horse. He could do nothing. The night before in the wood-path, he had clearly mapped out the day’s work. A mass of business was waiting, clamoring to be done. He tried to begin on this or that, and gave up everything with a groan, wandering out again to the gate on the wood-path to sweep the distances of road or field with hungry, straining eyes.

The wildest fears had taken possession of him. Running in his head was a passage from The Confessions, describing Monica’s horror of her son’s heretical opinions. ‘Shrinking from and detesting the blasphemies of his error, she began to doubt whether it was right in her to allow her son to live in her house and to eat at the same table with her;’ and the mother’s heart, he remembered, could only be convinced of the lawfulness of its own yearning by a prophetic vision of the youth’s conversion. He recalled, with a shiver, how, in the Life of Madame Guyon, after describing the painful and agonizing death of a kind but comparatively irreligious husband, she quietly adds, ‘As soon as I heard that my husband had just expired, I said to Thee, O my God, Thou hast broken my bonds, and I will offer to Thee a sacrifice of praise!’ He thought of John Henry Newman, disowning all the ties of kinship with his younger brother because of divergent views on the question of baptismal regeneration; of the long tragedy of Blanco White’s life, caused by the slow dropping-off of friend after friend, on the ground of heretical belief. What right had he, or any one in such a strait as his, to assume that the faith of the present is no longer capable of the same stern self-destructive consistency as the faith of the past? He knew that to such Christian purity, such Christian inwardness as Catherine’s, the ultimate sanction and legitimacy of marriage rest, both in theory and practice, on a common acceptance of the definite commands and promises of a miraculous revelation. He had had a proof of it in Catherine’s passionate repugnance to the idea of Rose’s marriage with Edward Langham.

Eleven o’clock striking from the distant tower. He walked desperately along the wood-path, meaning to go through the copse at the end of it toward the park, and look there. He had just passed into the copse, a thick interwoven mass of young trees, when he heard the sound of the gate which on the further side of it led on to the road. He hurried on; the trees closed behind him; the grassy path broadened; and there, under an arch of young oak and hazel, stood Catherine, arrested by the sound of his step. He, too, stopped at the sight of her; he could not go on. Husband and wife looked at each other one long, quivering moment. Then Catherine sprang forward with a sob and threw herself on his breast.

They clung to each other, she in a passion of tears—tears of such self-abandonment as neither Robert nor any other living soul had ever seen Catherine Elsmere shed before. As for him he was trembling from head to foot, his arms scarcely strong enough to hold her, his young worn face bent down over her.

‘Oh, Robert!’ she sobbed at last, putting up her hand and touching his hair, ‘you look so pale, so sad.’

‘I have you again!’ he said simply.

A thrill of remorse ran through her.

‘I went away,’ she murmured, her face still hidden—‘I went away because when I woke up it all seemed to me, suddenly, too ghastly to be believed; I could not stay still and bear it. But, Robert, Robert, I kissed you as I passed! I was so thankful you could sleep a little and forget. I hardly know where I have been most of the time—I think I have been sitting in a corner of the park, where no one ever comes. I began to think of all you said to me last night—to put it together—to try and understand it, and it seemed to me more and more horrible! I thought of what it would be like to have to hide my prayers from you—my faith in Christ—my hope of heaven. I thought of bringing up the child—how all that was vital to me would be a superstition to you, which you would bear with for my sake. I thought of death,’ and she shuddered—‘your death, or my death, and how this change in you would cleave a gulf of misery between us. And then I thought of losing my own faith, of, denying Christ. It was a nightmare—I saw myself on a long road, escaping with Mary in my arms, escaping from you! Oh, Robert! it wasn’t only for myself,’—and she clung to him as though she were a child, confessing, explaining away, some grievous fault, hardly to be forgiven. ‘I was agonized by the thought that I was not my own—I and my child were Christ’s. Could I risk what was His? Other men and women had died, had given up all for His sake. Is there no one now strong enough to suffer torment, to kill even love itself rather than deny Him—rather than crucify Him afresh?’

She paused, struggling for breath. The terrible excitement of that bygone moment had seized upon her again and communicated itself to him.

‘And then—and then,’ she said sobbing, ‘I don’t know how it was. One moment I was sitting up looking straight before me, without a tear, thinking of what was the least I must do, even—even—if you and I stayed together—of all the hard compacts and conditions I must make—judging you all the while from a long, long distance, and feeling as though I had buried the old self—sacrificed the old heart—for ever! And the next I was lying on the ground crying for you, Robert, crying for you! Your face had come back to me as you lay there in the early morning light. I thought how I had kissed you—how pale and gray and thin you looked. Oh, how I loathed myself! That I should think it could be God’s will that I should leave you, or torture you, my poor husband! I had not only been wicked toward you—I had offended Christ. I could think of nothing as I lay there—again and again’—but “Little children, love one another; Little children, love one another.” Oh, my beloved’—and she looked up with the solemnest, tenderest smile, breaking on the marred, tear-stained face—‘I will never give up hope, I will pray for you night and day. God will bring you back. You cannot lose yourself so. No, no! His grace is stronger than our wills. But I will not preach to you—I will not persecute you—I will only live beside you—in your heart—and love you always. Oh how could I—how could I have such thoughts!’

And again she broke off, weeping, as if to the tender, torn heart the only crime that could not be forgiven was its own offence against love. As for him he was beyond speech. If he had ever lost his vision of God, his wife’s love would that moment have given it back to him.

‘Robert,’ she said presently, urged on by the sacred yearning to heal, to atone, ‘I will not complain—I will not ask you to wait. I take your word for it that it is best not, that it would do no good. The only hope is in time—and prayer. I must suffer, dear, I must be weak sometimes; but oh, I am so sorry for you! Kiss me, forgive me, Robert; I will be your faithful wife unto our lives’ end.’

He kissed her, and in that kiss, so sad, so pitiful, so clinging, their new life was born.