‘We shall find a cab at once in Park Lane,’ he said. ‘Are you warm?’
‘Perfectly.’
A fur hood fitted round her face, to which the color was coming back. She held her cloak tightly round her, and her little feet, fairly well shod, slipped in and out on the dry frosty pavement.
Suddenly they passed a huge unfinished house, the building of which was being pushed on by electric light. The great walls, ivory white in the glare, rose into the purply-blue of the starry February sky, and as they passed within the power of the lamps each saw with noonday distinctness every line and feature in the other’s face. They swept on-the night, with its alternations of flame and shadow, an unreal and enchanted world about them. A space of darkness succeeded the space of daylight. Behind them in the distance was the sound of hammers and workmen’s voices; before them the dim trees of the park. Not a human being was in sight. London seemed to exist to be the mere dark friendly shelter of this wandering of theirs.
A blast of wind blew her cloak out of her grasp. But before she could close it again, an arm was flung around her. Should not speak or move, she stood passive, conscious only of the strangeness of the wintry wind, and of this warm breast against which her cheek was laid.
‘Oh, stay there!’ a voice said close to her ear. ‘Rest there—pale tired child—pale tired little child!’
That moment seemed to last an eternity. He held her close, cherishing and protecting her from the cold—not kissing her—till at length she looked up with bright eyes, shining through happy tears.
‘Are you sure at last?’ she said, strangely enough, speaking out of the far depths of her own thought to his.
‘Sure!’ he said, his expression changing. ‘What can I be sure of? I am sure that I am not worth your loving, sure that I am poor, insignificant, obscure, that if you give yourself to me you will be miserably throwing yourself away!’
She looked at him, still smiling, a white sorceress weaving spells about him in the darkness. He drew her lightly gloved hand through his arm, holding the fragile fingers close in his, and they moved on.
‘Do you know,’ he repeated—a tone of intense melancholy replacing the tone of passion-’how little I have to give you?’
‘I know,’ she answered, her face turned shly away from him, her words coming from under the fur hood which had fallen forward a little. ‘I know that-that—you are not rich, that you distrust yourself, that——’
‘Oh, hush,’ he said, and his voice was full of pain. ‘You know so little; let me paint myself. I have lived alone, for myself, in myself, till sometimes there seems to be hardly anything left in me to love or be loved; nothing but a brain, a machine that exists only for certain selfish ends. My habits are the tyrants of years; and at Murewell, though I loved you there, they were strong enough to carry me away from you. There is something paralyzing in me, which is always forbidding me to feel, to will. Sometimes I think it is an actual physical disability—the horror that is in me of change, of movement, of effort. Can you bear with me? Can you be poor? Can you live a life of monotony? Oh, impossible!’ he broke out, almost putting her hand away from him. ‘You, who ought to be a queen of this world, for whom everything bright and brilliant is waiting if you will but stretch out your hand to it. It is a crime—an infamy—that I should be speaking to you like this!’
Rose raised her head. A passing light shone upon her. She was trembling and pale again, but her eyes were unchanged.
‘No, no,’ she said wistfully; ‘not if you love me.’
He hung above her, an agony of feeling in the fine rigid face, of which the beautiful features and surfaces were already worn and blanched by the life of thought. What possessed him was not so much distrust of circumstance as doubt, hideous doubt, of himself, of this very passion beating within him. She saw nothing, meanwhile, but the self-depreciation which she knew so well in him, and against which her love in its rash ignorance and generosity cried out.
‘You will not say you love me!’ she cried, with hurrying breath. ‘But I know—I know—you do.’
Then her courage sinking, ashamed, blushing, once more turning away from him—‘At least, if you don’t, I am very—very—unhappy.’
The soft words flew through his blood. For an instant he felt himself saved, like Faust,—saved by the surpassing moral beauty of one moment’s impression. That she should need him, that his life should matter to hers! They were passing the garden wall of a great house. In the deepest shadow of it, he stooped suddenly and kissed her.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Langham parted with Rose at the corner of Martin Street. She would not let him take her any farther.
‘I will say nothing,’ she whispered to him, as he put her into a passing hansom, wrapping her cloak warmly round her, ‘till I see you again. To-morrow?’
‘To-morrow morning,’ he said, waving his hand to her, and in another instant he was facing the north wind alone.
He walked on fast toward Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where the fire was still smouldering, and striking a light, sank into his large reading chair, beside which the volumes used in the afternoon lay littered on the floor.
He was suddenly penetrated with the cold of the night, and hung shivering over the few embers which still glowed. What had happened to him? In this room, in this chair, the self-forgetting excitement of that walk, scarcely half an hour old, seems to him already long past—incredible almost.
And yet the brain was still full of images, the mind still full of a hundred new impressions. That fair head against his breast, those soft confiding words, those yielding lips. Ah! it is the poor, silent, insignificant student that has conquered. It is he, not the successful man of the world, that has held that young and beautiful girl in his arms, and heard from her the sweetest and humblest confession of love. Fate can have neither wit nor conscience to have ordained it so; but fate has so ordained it. Langham takes note of his victory, takes dismal note also, that the satisfaction of it has already half departed.
So the great moment has come and gone! The one supreme experience which life and his own will had so far rigidly denied him, is his. He has felt the torturing thrill of passion—he has evoked such an answer as all men might envy him,—and fresh from Rose’s kiss, from Rose’s beauty, the strange maimed soul falls to a pitiless analysis of his passion, her response! One moment he is at her feet in a voiceless trance of gratitude and tenderness; the next—is nothing what it promises to be?—and has the boon already, now that he has it in his grasp, lost some of its beauty, just as the sea-shell drawn out of the water, where its lovely iridescence tempted eye and hand, loses half its fairy charm?
The night wore on. Outside an occasional cab or cart would rattle over the stones of the street, an occasional voice or step would penetrate the thin walls of the house, bringing a shock of sound into that silent upper room. Nothing caught Langham’s ear. He was absorbed in the dialogue which was to decide his life.
Opposite to him, as it seemed, there sat a spectral reproduction of himself, his true self, with whom he held a long and ghastly argument.
‘But I love her!—I love her! A little courage—a little effort—and I too can achieve what other men achieve. I have gifts, great gifts. Mere contact with her, the mere necessities of the situation, will drive me back to life, teach me how to live normally, like other men. I have not forced her love—it has been a free gift. Who can blame me if I take it, if I cling to it, as the man freezing in a crevasse clutches the rope thrown to him?’
To which the pale spectre self said scornfully—
‘Courage and effort may as well be dropped out of your vocabulary. They are words that you have no use for. Replace them by two others—habit and character. Slave as you are of habit, of the character you have woven for yourself—out of years of deliberate living—what wild unreason to imagine that love can unmake, can re-create! What you are, you are to all eternity. Bear your own burden, but for God’s sake beguile no other human creature into trusting you with theirs!’
‘But she loves me! Impossible that I should crush and tear so kind, so warm a heart! Poor child—poor child! I have played on her pity. I have won all she had to give. And now to throw her gift back in her face—oh monstrous—oh inhuman!’ and the cold drops stood on his forhead.
But the other self was inexorable. ‘You have acted as you were bound to act—as any man may be expected to act in whom will and manhood and true human kindness are dying out, poisoned by despair and the tyranny of the critical habit. But at least do not add another crime to the first. What in God’s name have you to offer a creature of such claims, such ambitions? You are poor—you must go back to Oxford—you must take up the work your soul loathes—grow more soured, more embittered—maintain a useless degrading struggle, till her youth is done, her beauty wasted, and till you yourself have lost every shred of decency and dignity, even that decorous outward life in which you can still wrap yourself from the world! Think of the little house—the children—the money difficulties—she, spiritually starved, every illusion gone,—you incapable soon of love, incapable even of pity, conscious only of a dull rage with her, yourself, the world! Bow the neck—submit—refuse that long agony for yourself and her, while there is still time. Kismet!—Kismet!’
And spread out before Langham’s shrinking soul there lay a whole dismal Hogarthian series, image leading to image, calamity to calamity, till in the last scene of all the maddened inward sight perceived two figures, two gray and withered figures, far apart, gazing at each other with old and sunken eyes across dark rivers of sordid irremediable regret.
The hours passed away, and in the end, the spectre self, cold and bloodless conqueror, slipped back into the soul which remorse and terror, love and pity, a last impulse of hope, a last stirring of manhood, had been alike powerless to save.
The February dawn was just beginning when he dragged himself to a table and wrote.
Then for hours afterward he sat sunk in his chair, the stupor of fatigue broken every now and then by a flash of curious introspection. It was a base thing which he had done—it was also a strange thing psychologically—and at intervals he tried to understand it—to track it to its causes.
At nine o’clock he crept out into the frosty daylight, found a commissionaire who was accustomed to do errands for him, and sent him with a letter to Lerwick Gardens.
On his way back he passed a gunsmith’s, and stood looking fascinated at the shining barrels. Then he moved away, shaking his head, his eyes gleaming as though the spectacle of himself had long ago passed the bounds of tragedy—become farcical even.
‘I should only stand a month—arguing—with my finger on the trigger.’
In the little hall his landlady met him, gave a start at the sight of him, and asked him if he ailed and if she could do anything for him. He gave her a sharp answer and went upstairs, where she heard him dragging books and boxes about as though he were packing.
A little later Rose was standing at the dining-room window of No. 27, looking on to a few trees bedecked with rime which stood outside. The ground and roofs were white, a promise of sun was struggling through the fog. So far everything in these unfrequented Campden Hill roads was clean, crisp, enlivening, and the sparkle in Rose’s mood answered to that of nature.
Breakfast had just been cleared away. Agnes was upstairs with Mrs. Leyburn. Catherine, who was staying in the house for a day or two, was in a chair by the fire, reading some letters forwarded to her from Bedford Square.
He would appear some time in the morning, she supposed. With an expression half rueful, half amused, she fell to imagining his interview, with Catherine, with her mother. Poor Catherine! Rose feels herself happy enough to allow herself a good honest pang of remorse for much of her behavior to Catherine this winter; how thorny she has been, how unkind often, to this sad changed sister. And now this will be a fresh blow! ‘But afterward, when she has got over it—when she knows that it makes me happy,—that nothing else would make me happy,—then she will be reconciled, and she and I perhaps will make friends, all over again, from the beginning. I won’t be angry or hard over it—poor Cathie!’
And with regard to Mr. Flaxman. As she stands there waiting idly for what destiny may send her, she puts herself through a little light catechism about this other friend of hers. He had behaved somewhat oddly toward her of late; she begins now to remember that her exit from Lady Charlotte’s house the night before had been a very different matter from the royally attended leave takings, presided over by Mr. Flaxman, which generally befell her there. Had he understood? With a little toss of her head she said to herself that she did not care if it was so. ‘I have never encouraged Mr. Flaxman to think I was going to marry him.’
But of course Mr. Flaxman will consider she has done badly for herself. So will Lady Charlotte and all her outer world. They will say she is dismally throwing herself away, and her mother, no doubt influenced by the clamor, will take up very much the same line.
What matter! The girl’s spirit seemed to rise against all the world. There was a sort of romantic exaltation in her sacrifice of herself, a jubilant looking forward to remonstrance, a wilful determination to overcome it. That she was about to do the last thing she could have been expected to do, gave her pleasure. Almost all artistic faculty goes with a love of surprise and caprice in life. Rose had her full share of the artistic love for the impossible and the difficult.
Besides—success! To make a man hope and love, and live again—that shall be her success. She leaned against the window, her eyes filling, her heart very soft.
Suddenly she saw a commissionaire coming up the little flagged passage to the door. He gave in a note, and immediately afterward the dining-room door opened.
‘A letter for you, Miss,’ said the maid.
Rose took it—glanced at the hand-writing. A bright flush—a surreptitious glance at Catherine, who sat absorbed in a wandering letter from, Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and opened it.
Catherine read on, gathering up, the Murewell names and details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.
‘Rose,’ she said, looking up, ‘was that someone brought you a note?’
The girl turned with a start—a letter fell to the ground. She made a faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.
‘Rose—darling!’ cried Catherine, springing up, ‘are you ill?’
Rose looked at her with a perfectly colorless fixed face, made a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them.
Catherine stood over her aghast. ‘My darling—what is it? Come and lie down—take this water.’
She put some close to her sister’s hand, but Rose pushed it away. ‘Don’t talk to me, ‘she said, with difficulty.
Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek resting against her sister’s shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once recognized Langham’s handwriting. But before she could combine any rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister’s arm.
‘I was startled,’ she said, a forced smile on her white lips. ‘Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him—I expected him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me that—he made a mistake—and he was very sorry! So am I! It is so—so—bewildering!’
She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though shivering with cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The older sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her pressed the slim irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips quivering.
‘That he should dare!’ she cried. ‘Rose—my poor little Rose?’
‘Don’t blame him!’ said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while Catherine fell into the arm-chair again. ‘It doesn’t seem to count, from you—you have always been so ready to blame him!’
Her brow contracted—she looked frowning into the fire—her still colorless mouth working painfully.
Catherine was cut to the heart. ‘Oh Rose!’ she said, holding out her hands, ‘I will blame no one, dear, I seem hard—but I love you so. Oh, tell me—you would have told we everything once!’
There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless right hand and put it into her sister’s out-stretched palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell toward Catherine.
‘Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him—he kissed me—I could kill myself and him.’
Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour that followed—the little familiar morning sounds in and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells ringing—and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose—a sense of shook, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation—and a strange intervening passion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question filling her own indignant heart, ‘Does she love him?’
At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a white ghost of herself, pushing back the bright encroaching hair from eyes that were dry and feverish.
‘If I could only be angry,—downright angry,’ she said, more to herself than Catherine—‘it would do one good.’
‘Give others leave to be angry for you!’ cried Catherine.
‘Don’t!’ said Rose, almost fiercely drawing herself away. ‘You don’t know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you must—you misjudge him—you always have. No, no’—and she nervously crushed the letter in her hand—‘not yet. But you shall read it some time—you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is due to him, perhaps due to me too,’ and a hot flush transfigured her paleness for an instant. ‘Oh, my head! Why does one’s mind effect one’s body like this? It shall not—it is humiliating! “Miss Leyburn has been jilted and cannot see visitors,”—that is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have finished that document, will you kindly come and hear me practise my last Raff?—I am going. Good-by.’
She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.
‘Miserable!’ she said, dashing a tear from her eyes, ‘I must go and lie down then in the proper missish fashion. Mind, on your peril, Catherine, not a word to anyone but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not to speak to me! No, don’t come—I will go alone.’
And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the letter in her hand,—the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished sentence pleaded with her,—even in the first smart of her wrong—for pardon, for compassion, as toward something maimed and paralyzed from birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over her cheeks.
‘I was not good enough,—I was not good enough—God would not let me!’
And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what! To save?
How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that shakes her as she kneels and weeps,—nor is it mere wounded woman’s pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she is—more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive—he could not have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of character stir within her. She feels herself judged,—and with a righteous judgement-issuing inexorably from the facts of life and circumstance.
Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert who had come over early to see how the household fared.
Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonishment and dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had gone out of his mind for some time. He had been busy in his East End work. Catherine had been silent. Over how many matters they would once have discussed with open heart was she silent now?
‘I ought to have been warned,’ he said, with quick decision—‘if you knew this was going on. I am the only man, among you, and I understand Langham better than the rest of you. I might have looked after the poor child a little.’
Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart the more. However, what had she known? She had seen nothing unusual of late, nothing to make her think a crisis was approaching. Nay, she had flattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, whom she liked, was gaining ground.
Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be done. Could anything be done?
‘I must go and see him,’ he said presently. ‘Yes, dearest, I must. Impossible the thing should be left so! I am his old friend,—almost her guardian. You say she is in great trouble—why it may shadow her whole life! No—he must explain things to us—he is bound to—he shall. It may be something comparatively trivial in the way after all—money or prospects or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you say? It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for her—but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him——’
He turned to her—appealing, remonstrating. Catherine stood pale and rigid. Incredible that he should think it right to intermeddle—to take the smallest step toward reversing so plain a declaration of God’s will! She could not sympathize—she would not consent. Robert watched her in painful indecision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to her true reason for finding some comfort even in her sister’s trouble—that he seemed to her mindful only of the passing human misery, indifferent to the eternal risk.
They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he snatched up his hat.
‘I must go,’ he said in a low voice; ‘it is right.’
And he went—stepping, however, with the best intentions in the world, into a blunder.
Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had left her. Then someone came into the room—someone with pale looks and flashing eyes. It was Agnes.
‘She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,’ said the girl—her whole, even cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. ‘What are such creatures made for, Catherine—why do they exist?’
Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty morning streets to Langham’s lodgings. His mood was very hot by the time he reached his destination, and he climbed the staircase to Langham’s room in some excitement. When he tried to open the door after the answer to his knock biding him enter, he found something barring the way. ‘Wait a little,’ said the voice inside, ‘I will move the case.’
With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. Seeing his visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre astonishment. The room was littered with books and packing-cases with which he had been busy.
‘Come in,’ he said, not offering to shake hands.
Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, stood leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to him. Langham paused opposite to him, his waving jet-black hair falling forward over the marble-pale face which had been Robert’s young ideal of manly beauty.
The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong is old association, that Robert’s feeling toward his friend had always remained in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate toward the don. His sense of it now filled him with a curious awkwardness.
‘I know why you are come,’ said Langham slowly, after a scrutiny of his visitor.
‘I am here by a mere accident,’ said the other, thinking perfect frankness best. ‘My wife was present when her sister received your letter. Rose gave her leave to tell me. I had gone up to ask after them all, and came on to you,—of course on my own responsibility entirely! Rose knows nothing of my coming—nothing of what I have to say.’
He paused, struck against his will by the looks of the man before him. Whatever he had done during the past twenty-four hours he had clearly had the grace to suffer in the doing of it.
‘You can have nothing to say!’ said Langham, leaning against the chimney-piece and facing him with black, darkly-burning eyes. ‘You know me.’
Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the despair, all the bitterness hidden under the languid student’s exterior of every day had, as it were, risen to the surface. He stood at bay, against his friend, against himself.
‘No!’ exclaimed Robert, stoutly, ‘I do not know you in the sense you mean. I do not know you as the man who could beguile a girl on to a confession of love, and then tell her that for you marriage was too great a burden to be faced!’
Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. Robert repented him a little. Langham’s strange individuality always impressed him against his will.
‘I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,’ he went on, ‘though I confess to being very hot! I came to try and find out—for myself only, mind—whether what prevents you from following up what I understand happened last night is really a matter of feeling, or a matter of outward circumstance. If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling for Rose is not what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion about your conduct:—but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply afraid of yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities of practical married life, I cannot help be begging you to talk the matter over with me, and let us face it together. Whether Rose would ever, under any circumstances, got over the shock of this morning—I have not the remotest idea. But—’ and he hesitated, ‘it seems the feeling you appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well what havoc a thing of this kind may make in a girl’s life. I don’t say it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!’
There was a moment’s dead silence.
‘You cannot pretend to believe,’ said Langham, at last, with the same sombre self-containedness, ‘that a marriage with me would be for your sister-in-law’s happiness?’
‘I don’t know what to believe!’ cried Robert. ‘No,’ he added frankly, ‘no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; á priori, I never thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when a thing is wholly in the air, looks very different when a man has committed himself and another, as you have done.’
Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.
‘Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even greater fiend and weakling than you think me, if, in cold blood, I could let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust myself—you may think of the statement as you like—I should make her miserable. Last night I had not parted from her an hour, before I was utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are any masters. I believe,’—he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond Robert, ‘I could even grow to hate what came between me and them!’
Was it the last word of the man’s life? It struck Robert with a kind of shiver.
‘Pray heaven,’ he said with a groan, getting up to go, you may not have made her miserable already!’
‘Did it hurt her so much?’ asked Langham, almost inaudibly, turning away, Robert’s tone meanwhile calling up a new and scorching image in the subtle brain tissue.
‘I have not seen her,’ said Robert abruptly; ‘but when I came in, I found my wife—who has no light tears—weeping for her sister.’
His voice dropped as though what he were saying were in truth too pitiful and too intimate for speech.
Langham said no more. His face had become a marble mask again.
‘Good-by!’ said Robert, taking up his hat with a dismal sense of having got foolishly through a fool’s errand. ‘As I said to you before, what Rose’s feeling is at this moment I cannot even guess. Very likely she would be the first to repudiate half of what I have been saying. And I see that you will not talk to me—you will not take me into your confidence and speak to me not only as her brother but as your friend. And—and—are you going? What does this mean?’
He looked interrogatively at the open packing-cases.
‘I am going back to Oxford,’ said the other briefly. ‘I cannot stay in these rooms, in these streets.’
Robert was sore perplexed. What real—nay, what terrible suffering—in the face and manner, and yet how futile, how needless! He felt himself wrestling with something intangible and phantom-like, wholly unsubstantial, and yet endowed with a ghastly indefinite power over human life.
‘It is very hard—’ he said hurriedly, moving nearer—‘that our old friendship should be crossed like this. Do trust me a little! You are always undervaluing yourself. Why not take a friend into council sometimes when you sit in judgment on yourself and your possibilities? Your own perceptions are all warped!’
Langham, looking at him, thought his smile one of the most beautiful and one of the most irrelevant things he had ever seen.
‘I will write to you, Elsmere,’ he said, holding out his hand, ‘speech is impossible to me. I never had any words except through my pen.’
Robert gave it up. In another minute Langham was left alone.
But he did no more packing for hours. He spent the day sitting dumb and immovable in his chair. Imagination was at work again more feverishly than ever. He was tortured by a fixed image of Rose, suffering and paling.
And after a certain number of hours he could no more bear the incubus of this thought than he could put up with the flat prospects of married life the night before. He was all at sea, barely sane, in fact. His life had been so long purely intellectual, that this sudden strain of passion and fierce practical interests seemed to unhinge him, to destroy his mental balance.
He bethought him. This afternoon he knew she had a last rehearsal at Searle House. Afterward her custom was to come back from St. James’s Park to High Street, Kensington, and walk up the hill to her own home. He knew it, for on two occasions after these rehearsals he had been at Lerwick Gardens, waiting for her, with Agnes and Mrs. Leyburn. Would she go this afternoon? A subtle instinct told him that she would.
It was nearly six o’clock that evening when Rose, stepping out from the High Street station, crossed the main road and passed into the darkness of one of the streets leading up the hill. She had forced herself to go and she would go alone. But as she toiled along she felt weary and bruised all over. She carried with her a heart of lead—a sense of utter soreness—a longing to hide herself from eyes and tongues. The only thing that dwelt softly in the shaken mind was a sort of inconsequent memory of Mr. Flaxman’s manner at the rehearsal. Had she looked so ill? She flushed hotly at the thought, and then realized again, with a sense of childish comfort, the kind look and voice, the delicate care shown in shielding her from any unnecessary exertion, the brotherly grasp of the hand with which he had put her into the cab that took her to the Underground.
Suddenly, where the road made a dark turn to the right, she saw a man standing. As she came nearer she saw that it was Langham.
‘You!’ she cried, stopping.
He came up to her. There was a light over the doorway of a largo detached, house not far off, which threw a certain illumination over him, though it left her in the shadow. He said nothing, but he held out both his hands mutely. She fancied rather than saw the pale emotion of his look.
‘What?’ she said, after a pause. ‘You think to-night is last night! You and I have nothing to say to each other, Mr. Langham.’
‘I have every thing to say,’ he answered, under his breath; ‘I have committed a crime—a villainy.’
‘And it is not pleasant to you?’ she said, quivering. ‘I am sorry—I cannot help you. But you are wrong—it was no crime—it was necessary and profitable like the doses of one’s childhood! Oh! I might have guessed you would do this! No, Mr. Langham, I am in no danger of an interesting decline. I have just played my concerto very fairly. I shall not disgrace myself at the concert to-morrow night. You may be at peace—I have learnt several things to-day that have been salutary—very salutary.’
She paused. He walked beside her while she pelted him—unresisting, helplessly silent.
‘Don’t come any farther,’ she said resolutely after a minute, turning to face him. ‘Let us be quits! I was a tempting easy prey. I bear you no malice. And do not let me break your friendship with Robert; that began before this foolish business—it should outlast it. Very likely we shall be friends again, like ordinary people, some day. I do not imagine your wound is very deep, and——’
But no! Her lips closed; not even for pride’s sake, and retort’s sake, will she desecrate the past, belittle her own first love.
She held out her hand. It was very dark. He could see nothing among her furs but the gleaming whiteness of her face. The whole personality seemed centred in the voice—the half-mocking, vibrating voice. He took her hand and dropped it instantly.
‘You do not understand,’ he said, hopelessly—feeling as though every phrase he uttered, or could utter, were equally fatuous, equally shameful. ‘Thank heaven you never will understand.’
‘I think I do,’ she said with a change of tone, and paused. He raised his eyes involuntarily, met hers, and stood bewildered. What was the expression in them? It was yearning—but not the yearning of passion. ‘If things had been different—if one could change the self—if the past were nobler!—was that the cry of them? A painful humility—a boundless pity—the rise of some moral wave within her he could neither measure nor explain—these were some of the impressions which passed from her to him. A fresh gulf opened between them, and he saw her transformed on the farther side, with, as it were, a loftier gesture, a nobler stature, than had ever yet been hers.
He bent forward quickly, caught her hands, held them for an instant to his lips in a convulsive grasp, dropped them, and was gone.
He gained his own room again. There lay the medley of his books, his only friends, his real passion. Why had he ever tampered with any other?
‘It was not love—not love!’ he said to himself, with an accent of infinite relief as he sank into his chair. ‘Her smart will heal.’
BOOK VI. NEW OPENINGS.
CHAPTER XXXVII.
Ten days after Langham’s return to Oxford, Elsmere received a characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to be considered as still existing or at an end. The calm and even proud melancholy of the letter showed a considerable subsidence of that state of half-frenzied irritation and discomfort in which Elsmere had last seen him. The writer, indeed, was clearly settling down into another period of pessimistic quietism such as that which had followed upon his first young efforts at self-assertion years before. But this second period bore the marks of an even profounder depression of all the vital forces than the first, and as Elsmere, with a deep sigh, half-angry, half-relenting, put down the letter, he felt the conviction that no fresh influence from the outside world would ever again be allowed to penetrate the solitude of Langham’s life. In comparison with the man who had just addressed him, the tutor of his undergraduate recollections was a vigorous and sociable human being.
The relenting grew upon him, and he wrote a sensible, affectionate letter in return. Whatever had been his natural feelings of resentment, he said, he could not realize, now that the crisis was past, that he cared less about his old friend. ‘As far as we two are concerned, lot us forget it all. I could hardly say this, you will easily imagine, if I thought you had done serious or irreparable harm. But both my wife and I agree now in thinking that by a pure accident, as it were, and to her own surprise, Rose has escaped either. It will be some time, no doubt, before she will admit it. A girl is not so easily disloyal to her past. But to us it is tolerably clear. At any rate, I send you our opinion for what it is worth, believing that it will and must be welcome to you.’
Rose, however was not so long in admitting it. One marked result of that now vulnerableness of soul produced in her by the shock of that February morning was a great softening toward Catherine. Whatever might have been Catherine’s intense relief when Robert returned from his abortive mission, she never afterward let a disparaging word toward Langham escape her lips to Rose. She was tenderness and sympathy itself, and Rose, in her curious reaction against her old self, and against the noisy world of flattery and excitement in which she had been living, turned to Catherine as she had never done since she was a tiny child. She would spend hours in a corner of the Bedford Square drawing-room pretending to read, or play with little Mary, in reality recovering, like some bruised and trodden plant, under the healing influence of thought and silence.
One day when they were alone in the firelight, she startled Catherine by saying with one of her old, odd smiles,—
‘Do you know, Cathie, how I always see myself nowadays? It is a sort of hullucination. I see a girl at the foot of a precipice. She has had a fall, and she is sitting up, feeling all her limbs. And, to her great astonishment, there is no bone broken!’
And she held herself back from Catherine’s knee lest her sister should attempt to caress her, her eyes bright and calm. Nor would she allow an answer, drowning all that Catherine might have said in a sudden rush after the child, who was wandering round them in search of a playfellow.
In truth, Rose Leyburn’s girlish passion for Edward Langham had been a kind of accident unrelated to the main forces of character. He had crossed her path in a moment of discontent, of aimless revolt and lounging when she was but fresh emerged from the cramping conditions of her childhood and trembling on the brink of new and unknown activities. His intellectual prestige, his melancholy, his personal beauty, his very strangenesses and weaknesses, had made a deep impression on the girl’s immature romantic sense. His resistance had increased the charm, and the interval of angry, resentful separation had done nothing to weaken it. As to the months in London, they had been one long duel between herself and him—a duel which had all the fascination of difficulty and uncertainty, but in which pride and caprice had dealt and sustained a large portion of the blows. Then, after a moment of intoxicating victory, Langham’s endangered habits and threatened individuality had asserted themselves once for all. And from the whole long struggle—passion, exultation, and crushing defeat—it often seemed to her that she had gained neither joy nor irreparable grief, but a new birth of character, a soul!
It may easily be imagined that Hugh Flaxman felt a peculiarly keen interest in Langham’s disappearance. On the afternoon of the Searle House rehearsal he had awaited Rose’s coming in a state of extraordinary irritation. He expected a blushing fiancée, in a fool’s paradise, asking by manner, if not by word, for his congratulations, and taking a decent feminine pleasure perhaps in the pang she might suspect in him. And he had already taken his pleasure in the planning of some double-edged congratulations.
Then up the steps of the concert platform there came a pale, tired girl who seemed specially to avoid his look, who found a quiet corner and said hardly a word to anybody till her turn came to play.
His revulsion of feeling was complete. After her piece he made his way up to her, and was her watchful, unobtrusive guardian for the rest of the afternoon.
He walked home after he had put her into her cab in a whirl of impatient conjecture.
‘As compared to last night, she looks this afternoon as if she had had an illness! What on earth has that philandering ass been about? If he did not propose to her last night, he ought to be shot—and if he did, a fortiori, for clearly she is miserable. But what a brave child! How she played her part! I wonder whether she thinks that I saw nothing, like all the rest! Poor little cold hand!’
Next day in the street he met Elsmere, turned and walked with him, and by dint of leading the conversation a little discovered that Langham had left London.
Gone! But not without a crisis—that was evident. During the din of preparation for the Searle House concert, and during the meetings which it entailed, now at the Varleys’, now at the house of some other connection of his—for the concert was the work of his friends, and given in the town house of his decrepit great-uncle, Lord Daniel—he had many opportunities of observing Rose. And he felt a soft, indefinable change in her which kept him in a perpetual answering vibration of sympathy and curiosity. She seemed to him for the moment to have lost her passionate relish for living, that relish which had always been so marked with her. Her bubble of social pleasure was pricked. She did everything she had to do, and did it admirably. But all through she was to his fancy absent and distraite, pursuing, through the tumult of which she was often the central figure, some inner meditations of which neither he or anyone else knew anything. Some eclipse had passed over the girl’s light, self-satisfied temper; some searching thrill of experience had gone through the whole nature. She had suffered, and she was quietly fighting down her suffering without a word to anybody.
Flaxman’s guesses as to what had happened came often very near the truth, and the mixture of indignation and relief with which he received his own conjectures amused himself.
‘To think,’ he said to himself once with a long breath ‘that that creature was never at a public school, and will go to his death without any one of the kickings due to him!’
Then his very next impulse, perhaps, would be an impulse of gratitude toward this same ‘creature,’ toward the man who had released a prize he had had the tardy sense to see was not meant for him. Free again—to be loved, to be won! There was the fact of facts after all.
His own future policy, however, gave him much anxious thought. Clearly at present the one thing to be done was to keep his own ambitions carefully out of sight. He had the skill to see that she was in a state of reaction, of moral and mental fatigue. What she mutely seemed to ask of her friends was not to be made to feel.
He took his cue accordingly. He talked to his sister. He kept Lady Charlotte in order. After all her eager expectation on Hugh’s behalf, Lady Helen had been dumfounded by the sudden emergence of Langham at Lady Charlotte’s party for their common discomfiture. Who was the man?—why?—what did it all mean? Hugh had the most provoking way of giving you half his confidence. To tell you he was seriously in love, and to omit to add the trifling item that the girl in question was probably on the point of engaging herself to somebody else! Lady Helen made believe to be angry, and it was not till she had reduced Hugh to a whimsical penitence and a full confession of all he knew or suspected, that she consented, with as much loftiness as the physique of an elf allowed her, to be his good friend again, and to play those cards for him which at the moment he could not play for himself.
So in the cheeriest, daintiest way Rose was made much of by both brother and sister. Lady Helen chatted of gowns and music and people, whisked Rose and Agnes off to this party and that, brought fruit and flowers to Mrs. Leyburn, made pretty deferential love to Catherine, and generally, to Mrs. Pierson’s disgust, became the girls’ chief chaperon in a fast filling London. Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman was always there to befriend or amuse his sister’s protégées—always there, but never in the way. He was bantering, sympathetic, critical, laudatory, what you will; but all the time he preserved a delicate distance between himself and Rose, a bright nonchalance and impersonality of tone toward her which made his companionship a perpetual tonic. And, between them, he and Helen coerced Lady Charlotte. A few inconvenient inquiries after Rose’s health, a few unexplained stares and ‘humphs’ and grunts, a few irrelevant disquisitions on her nephew’s merits of head and heart, were all she was able to allow herself. And yet she was inwardly seething with a mass of sentiments, to which it would have been pleasant to give expression—anger with Rose for having been so blind and so presumptuous as to prefer some one else to Hugh; terror with Hugh for his persistent disregard of her advice and the Duke’s feelings; and a burning desire to know the precise why and wherefore of Langham’s disappearance. She was too lofty to become Rose’s aunt without a struggle, but she was not too lofty to feel the hungriest interest in her love affairs.
But, as we have said, the person who for the time profited most by Rose’s shaken mood was Catherine. The girl coming over, restless under her own smart, would fall to watching the trial of the woman and the wife, and would often perforce forget herself and her smaller woes in the pity of it. She stayed in Bedford Square once for a week, and then for the first time she realized the profound change which had passed over the Elsmeres’ life. As much tenderness between husband and wife as ever—perhaps more expression of it even than before, as though from an instinctive craving to hide the separateness below from each other and from the world. But Robert went his way, Catherine hers. Their spheres of work lay far apart; their interests were diverging fast; and though Robert at any rate was perpetually resisting, all sorts of fresh invading silences were always coming in to limit talk, and increase the number of sore points which each avoided. Robert was hard at work in the East End. under Murray Edwardes’ auspices. He was already known to certain circles as a seceder from the Church who was likely to become both powerful and popular. Two articles of his in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ on disputed points of Biblical criticism, had distinctly made their mark, and several of the veterans of philosophical debate had already taken friendly and flattering notice of the new writer. Meanwhile Catherine was teaching in Mr. Clarendon’s Sunday-school, and attending his prayer-meetings. The more expansive Robert’s energies became, the more she suffered, and the more the small daily opportunities for friction multiplied. Soon she could hardly bear to hear him talk about his work, and she never opened the number of the ‘Nineteenth Century’ which contained his papers. Nor had he the heart to ask her to read them.
Murray Edwardes had received Elsmere, on his first appearance in R——, with a cordiality and a helpfulness of the most self-effacing kind. Robert had begun with assuring his new friend that he saw no chance, at any rate for the present, of his formally joining the Unitarians.
‘I have not the heart to pledge myself again just yet! And I own I look rather for a combination from many sides than for the development of any now existing sect. But, supposing,’ he added, smiling, ‘supposing I do in time set up a congregation and a service of my own, is there really room for you and me? Should I not be infringing on a work I respect a great deal too much for anything of the sort?’
Edwardes laughed the notion to scorn.
The parish, as a whole, contained 20,000 persons. The existing churches, which, with the exception of St. Wilfrid’s, were miserably attended, provided accommodation at the out-side for 3,000. His own chapel held 400, and was about half full.
‘You and I may drop our lives here,’ he said, his pleasant friendliness darkened for a moment by the look of melancholy which London work seems to develop even in the most buoyant of men, ‘and only a few hundred persons, at the most, be ever the wiser. Begin with us—then make your own circle.’
And he forthwith carried off his visitor to the point from which, as it seemed to him, Elsmere’s work might start, viz., a lecture-room half a mile from his own chapel, where two helpers of his had just established an independent venture.
Murray Edwardes had at the time an interesting and miscellaneous staff of lay-curates. He asked no questions as to religious opinions, but in general the men who volunteered under him—civil servants, a young doctor, a briefless barrister or two—were men who had drifted from received beliefs, and found pleasure and freedom in working for and with him they could hardly have found elsewhere. The two who had planted their outpost in what seemed to them a particularly promising corner of the district were men of whom Edwardes knew personally little. ‘I have really not much concern with what they do,’ he explained to Elsmere, ‘except that they got a small share of our funds. But I know they want help, and if they will take you in, I think you will make something of it.’
After a tramp through the muddy winter streets, they came upon a new block of warehouses, in the lower windows of which some bills announced a night-school for boys and men. Here, to judge from the commotion round the doors, a lively scene was going on. Outside, a gang of young roughs were hammering at the doors, and shrieking witticisms through the keyhole. Inside, as soon as Murray Edwardes and Elsmere, by dint of good humor and strong shoulders, had succeeded in shoving their way through and shutting the door behind them, they found a still more animated performance in progress. The schoolroom was in almost total darkness; the pupils, some twenty in number, were racing about, like so many shadowy demons, pelting each other and their teachers with the ‘dips’ which, as the buildings were new, and not yet fitted for gas, had been provided to light them through their three R’s. In the middle stood the two philanthropists they were in search of, freely bedaubed with tallow, one employed in boxing a boy’s ears, the other in saving a huge ink-bottle whereon some enterprising spirit had just laid hands by way of varying the rebel ammunition. Murray Edwardes, who was in his element, went to the rescue at once, helped by Robert. The boy-minister, as he looked, had been, in fact, ‘bow’ of the Cambridge eight, and possessed muscles which men twice his size might have envied. In three minutes he had put a couple of ringleaders into the street by the scruff of the neck, relit a lamp which had been turned out, and got the rest of the rioters in hand. Elsmere backed him ably, and in a very short time they had cleared the premises.
Then the four looked at each other, and Edwardes went off into a shout of laughter.
‘My dear Wardlaw, my condolences to your coat! But I don’t believe if I were a rough myself I could resist “dips.” Let me introduce a friend—Mr. Elsmere—and if you will have him, a recruit for your work. It seems to me another pair of arms will hardly come amiss to you!’
The short red-haired man addressed shook hands with Elsmere, scrutinizing him from under bushy eyebrows. He was panting and beplastered with tallow, but the inner man was evidently quite unruffled, and Elsmere liked the shrewd Scotch face and gray eyes.
‘It isn’t only a pair of arms we want,’ he remarked dryly, ‘but a bit of science behind them. Mr. Elsmere, I observed, can use his.’
Then he turned to a tall, affected-looking youth with a large nose and long fair hair, who stood gasping with his hands upon his sides, his eyes, full of a moody wrath, fixed on the wreck and disarray of the schoolroom.
‘Well, Mackay, have they knocked the wind out of you? My friend and helper,—Mr. Elsmere. Come and sit down, won’t you, a minute? They’ve left us the chairs, I perceive, and there’s a spark or two of fire. Do you smoke? Will you light up?’
The four men sat on chatting some time, and then Wardlaw and Elsmere walked home together. It had been all arranged. Mackay, a curious, morbid fellow, who had thrown himself into Unitarianism and charity mainly out of opposition to an orthodox and bourgeois family, and who had a great idea of his own social powers, was somewhat grudging and ungracious through it all. But Elsmere’s proposals were much too good to be refused. He offered to bring to the undertaking his time, his clergyman’s experience, and as much money as might be wanted. Wardlaw listened to him cautiously for an hour, took stock of the whole man physically and morally, and finally said, as he very quietly and deliberately knocked the ashes out of his pipe,—
‘All right, I’m your man, Mr. Elsmere. If Mackay agrees, I vote we make you captain of this venture.’
‘Nothing of the sort,’ said Elsmere. ‘In London I am a novice; I come to learn, not to lead.’
Wardlaw shook his head with a little shrewd smile. Mackay faintly endorsed his companion’s offer, and the party broke up.
That was in January. In two months from that time, by the natural force of things, Elsmere, in spite of diffidence and his own most sincere wish to avoid a premature leadership, had become the head and heart of the Elgood Street undertaking, which had already assumed much larger proportions. Wardlaw was giving him silent approval and invaluable help, while young Mackay was in the first uncomfortable stages of a hero-worship which promised to be exceedingly good for him.