Robert Elsmere

CHAPTER XXXVIII.

There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of Elsmere’s venture in North R—— one of which may just be noticed here. Wardlaw, his predecessor and colleague, had speculatively little or nothing in common with Elsmere or Murray Edwardes. He was a devoted and Orthodox Comtist, for whom Edwardes had provided an outlet for the philanthropic passion, as he had for many others belonging to far stranger and remoter faiths.

By profession, he was a barrister, with a small and struggling practice. On ibis practice, however, he had married, and his wife, who had been a doctor’s daughter and a national schoolmistress, had the same ardors as himself. They lived in one of the dismal little squares near the Goswell Road, and had two children. The wife, as a Positivist mother is bound to do, tended and taught her children entirely herself. She might have been seen any day wheeling their perambulator through the dreary streets of a dreary region; she was their Providence, their deity, the representative to them of all tenderness and all authority. But when her work with them was done, she would throw herself into charity organization cases, into efforts for the protection of workhouse servants, into the homeliest acts of ministry toward the sick, till her dowdy little figure and her face, which but for the stress of London, of labor, and of poverty, would have had a blunt fresh-colored dairymaid’s charm, became symbols of a divine and sacred helpfulness in the eyes of hundreds of straining men and women.

The husband also, after a day spent in chambers, would give his evenings to teaching or committee work. They never allowed themselves to breathe even to each other that life might have brighter things to show them than the neighborhood of the Goswell Road. There was a certain narrowness in their devotion; they had their bitternesses and ignorances like other people; but the more Robert knew of them the more profound became his admiration for that potent spirit of social help which in our generation Comtism has done so much to develop, even among those of us who are but moderately influenced by Comte’s philosophy, and can make nothing of the religion of Humanity.

Wardlaw has no large part in the story of Elsmere’s work in North R——. In spite of Robert’s efforts, and against his will, the man of meaner gifts and commoner clay was eclipsed by that brilliant and persuasive something in Elsmere which a kind genius had infused into him at birth. And we shall see that in time Robert’s energies took a direction which Wardlaw could not follow with any heartiness. But at the beginning Elsmere owed him much, and it was a debt he was never tired of honoring.

In the fast place, Wardlaw’s choice of the Elgood Street room as a fresh centre for civilizing effort had been extremely shrewd. The district lying about it, as Robert soon came to know, contained a number of promising elements.

Close by the dingy street which sheltered their school-room, rose the great pile of a new factory of artistic pottery, a rival on the north side of the river to Doulton’s immense works on the south. The old winding streets near it, and the blocks of workman’s dwellings recently erected under its shadow, were largely occupied by the workers in its innumerable floors, and among these workers was a large proportion of skilled artisans, men often of a considerable amount of cultivation, earning high wages, and maintaining a high standard of comfort. A great many of them, trained in the art school which Murray Edwardes had been largely instrumental in establishing within easy distance of their houses, were men of genuine artistic gifts and accomplishment, and as the development of one faculty tends on the whole to set others working, when Robert, after a few weeks’ work in the place, set up a popular historical lecture once a fortnight, announcing the fact by a blue and white poster in the school-room windows, it was the potters who provided him with his first hearers.

The rest of the parish was divided between a population of dock laborers, settled there to supply the needs of the great dock which ran up into the south-eastern corner of it, two or three huge breweries, and a colony of watchmakers, an offshoot of Clerkenwell, who lived together in two or three streets, and showed the same peculiarities of race and specialized training to be noticed in the more northerly settlement from which they had been thrown off like a swarm from a hive. Outside these well-defined trades there was, of course, a warehouse population, and a mass of heterogeneous cadging and catering which went on chiefly in the river-side streets at the other side of the parish from Elgood Street, in the neighborhood of St. Wilfrid’s.

St. Wilfrid’s at this moment seemed to Robert to be doing a very successful work among the lowest strata of the parish. From them at one end of the scale, and from the innumerable clerks and superintendents who during the daytime crowded the vast warehouses, of which the district was full, its Lenten congregations, now in full activity, were chiefly drawn.

The Protestant opposition, which had shown itself so brutally and persistently in old days, was now, so far as outward manifestations went, all but extinct. The cassocked monk-like clergy might preach and ‘process’ in the open air as much as they pleased. The populace, where it was not indifferent, was friendly, and devoted living had borne its natural fruits.

A small incident, which need not be recorded, recalled to Elsmere’s mind—after he had been working some six weeks in the district—the forgotten unwelcome fact that St. Wilfrid’s was the very church where Newcome, first as senior curate and then as vicar, had spent those ten wonderful years into which Elsmere at Murewell had been never tired of inquiring. The thought of Newcome was a very sore thought. Elsmere had written to him announcing his resignation of his living immediately after his interview with the Bishop. The letter had remained unanswered, and it was by now tolerably clear that the silence of its recipient meant a withdrawal from all friendly relations with the writer. Elsmere’s affectionate, sensitive nature took such things hardly, especially as he knew that Newcome’s life was becoming increasingly difficult end embittered. And it gave him now a fresh pang to imagine how Newcome would receive the news of his quondam friend’s ‘infidel propaganda,’ established on the very ground where he himself had all but died for those beliefs Elsmere had thrown over.

But Robert was learning a certain hardness in this London life which was not without its uses to character. Hitherto he had always swum with the stream, cheered by the support of all the great and prevailing English traditions. Here, he and his few friends were fighting a solitary fight apart from the organized system of English religion and English philanthropy. All the elements of culture and religion already existing in the place were against them. The clergy of St. Wilfrid’s passed there with cold averted eyes; the old and fainéant rector of the parish church very soon let it be known what he thought as to the taste of Elsmere’s intrusion on his parish, or as to the eternal chances of those who might take either him or Edwardes as guides in matters religious. His enmity did Elgood Street no harm, and the pretensions of the Church, in this Babel of 20,000 souls, to cover the whole field, bore clearly no relation at all to the facts. But every little incident in this new struggle of his life cost Elsmere more perhaps than it would have cost other men. No part of it came easily to him. Only a high Utopian vision drove him on from day to day, bracing him to act and judge, if need be, alone and for himself, approved only by conscience and the inward voice.

and it was that moment by the river which worked in him through all the prosaic and perplexing details of this hew attempt to carry enthusiasm into life.

It was soon plain to him that in this teeming section of London the chance of the religious reformer lay entirely among the upper working class. In London, at any rate, all that is most prosperous and intelligent among the working class holds itself aloof—broadly speaking—from all existing spiritual agencies, whether of Church or Dissent.

Upon the genuine London artisan the Church has practically no hold whatever; and Dissent has nothing like the hold which it has on similar material in the great towns of the North. Toward religion in general the prevailing attitude is, one of indifference tinged with hostility. ‘Eight hundred thousand people in South London, of whom the enormous proportion belong to the working class, and among them, Church and Dissent nowhere—Christianity not in possession. Such is the estimate of an Evangelical of our day; and similar laments come from all parts of the capital. The Londoner is on the whole more conceited, more prejudiced, more given over to crude theorizing, than his North-country brother, the mill-hand, whose mere position, as one of a homogeneous and tolerably constant body, subjects him to a continuous discipline of intercourse and discussion. Our popular religion, broadly speaking, means nothing to him. He is sharp enough to see through its contradictions and absurdities; he has no dread of losing what he never valued; his sense of antiquity, of history, is nil; and his life supplies him with excitement enough without the stimulants of ‘other-worldliness.’ Religion has been on the whole irrationally presented to him, and the result on his part has been an irrational breach with the whole moral and religious order of ideas.

But the race is quick-witted and imaginative. The Greek cities which welcomed and spread Christianity carried within them much the same elements as are supplied by certain sections of the London working class-elements of restlessness, of sensibility, of passion. The more intermingling of races, which a modern city shares with those old towns of Asia Minor, predisposes the mind to a greater openness and receptiveness, whether for good or evil.

As the weeks passed on, and after the first inevitable despondency produced by strange surroundings and an unwonted isolation had begun to wear off; Robert often found himself filled with a strange flame and ardor of hope! But his first steps had nothing to do with Religion. He made himself quickly felt in the night school, and as soon as he possibly could he hired a large room at the back of their existing room, on the same floor, where, on the recreation evenings, he might begin the storytelling which had been so great a success at Murewell. The story-telling struck the neighborhood as a great novelty. At first only a few youths straggled in from the front room, where dominoes and draughts and the illustrated papers held seductive sway. The next night the number was increased, and by the fourth or fifth evening the room was so well filled both by boys and a large contingent of artisans, that it seemed well to appoint a special evening in the week for story-telling, or the recreation room would have been deserted.

In these performances Elsmere’s aim had always been two-fold—the rousing of moral sympathy and the awakening of the imaginative power pure and simple. He ranged the whole world for stories. Sometimes it would be merely some feature of London life itself—the history of a great fire, for instance, and its hairbreadth escapes; a collision in the river; a string of instances as true and homely and realistic as they could be made of the way in which the poor help one another. Sometimes it would be stories illustrating the dangers and difficulties of particular trades—a colliery explosion and the daring of the rescuers; incidents from the life of the great Northern iron-works, or from that of the Lancashire factories; or stories of English country life and its humors, given sometimes in dialect—Devonshire, or Yorkshire, or Cumberland—for which he had a special gift. Or, again, he would take the sea and its terrors—the immortal story of the ‘Birkenhead;’ the deadly plunge of the ‘Captain;’ the records of the lifeboats, or the fascinating story of the ships of science, exploring step by step, through miles of water, the past, the inhabitants, the hills and valleys of that underworld, that vast Atlantic bed, in which Mount Blanc might be buried without showing even his top-most snow-field above the plain of waves. Then at other times it would be the simple frolic and fancy of fiction—fairy tale and legend, Greek myth or Icelandic saga, episodes from Walter Scott, from Cooper, from Dumas; to be followed perhaps on the next evening by the terse and vigorous biography of some man of the people—of Stephenson or Cobden, of Thomas Cooper or John Bright, or even of Thomas Carlyle.

One evening, some weeks after it had begun, Hugh Flaxman, hearing from Rose of the success of the experiment, went down to hear his new acquaintance tell the story of Monte Cristo’s escape from the Château d’If. He started an hour earlier than was necessary, and with an admirable impartiality he spent that hour at St. Wilfrid’s hearing vespers. Flaxman had a passion for intellectual or social novelty; and this passion was beguiling him into a close observation of Elsmere. At the same time he was crossed and complicated by all sorts of fastidious conservative fibres, and when his friends talked rationalism, it often gave him a vehement pleasure to maintain that a good Catholic or Ritualist service was worth all their arguments, and would outlast them. His taste drew him to the Church, so did a love of opposition to current ‘isms.’ Bishops counted on him for subscriptions, and High Church divines sent him their pamphlets. He never refused the subscriptions, but it should be added that with equal regularity he dropped the pamphlets into his waste-paper basket. Altogether a not very decipherable person in religious matters—as Rose had already discovered.

The change from the dim and perfumed spaces of St. Wilfrid’s to the bare warehouse room with its packed rows of listeners was striking enough. Here were no bowed figures, no recueillement. In the blaze of crude light every eager eye was fixed upon the slight elastic figure on the platform, each change in the expressive face, each gesture of the long arms and thin flexible hands, finding its response in the laughter, the attentive silence, the frowning suspense of the audience. At one point a band of young roughs at the back made a disturbance, but their neighbors had the offenders quelled and out in a twinkling, and the room cried out for a repetition of the sentences which had been lost in the noise. When Dantes, opening his knife with his teeth, managed to out the strings of the sack, a gasp of relief ran through the crowd; when at last he reached terra firma there was a ringing cheer.

‘What is he, d’ye know?’ Flaxman heard a mechanic ask his neighbor, as Robert paused for a moment to get breath, the man jerking a grimy thumb in the story-teller’s direction meanwhile. ‘Seems like a parson somehow. But he ain’t a parson.’

‘Not he,’ said the other laconically. ‘Knows better. Most of ‘em as comes down ‘ere stuffs all they have to say as full of goody-goody as an egg’s full of meat. If he wur that sort you wouldn’t catch me here. Never heard him say anything in the “dear brethren” sort of style, and I’ve been ‘ere most o’ these evenings and to his lectures besides.’

‘Perhaps he’s one of your d—d sly ones,’ said the first speaker dubiously. ‘Means to shovel it in by-and-by.’

‘Well, I don’t know as I couldn’t stand it if he did,’ returned his companion. ‘He’d let other fellows have their say, anyhow.’

Flaxman looked curiously at the speaker. He was a young man, a gas-fitter—to judge by the contents of the basket he seemed to have brought in with him on his way from work—with eyes like live birds, and small emaciated features. During the story Flaxman had noticed the man’s thin begrimed hand, as it rested on the bench in front of him, trembling with excitement.

Another project of Robert’s, started as soon as he had felt his way a little in the district, was the scientific Sunday-school. This was the direct result of a paragraph in Huxley’s Lay Sermons, where the hint of such a school was first thrown out. However, since the introduction of science teaching into the Board schools, the novelty and necessity of such a supplement to a child’s ordinary education is not what it was. Robert set it up mainly for the sake of drawing the boys out of the streets in the afternoons, and providing them with some other food for fancy and delight than larking and smoking and penny dreadfuls. A little simple chemical and electrical experiment went down greatly; so did a botany class, to which Elsmere would come armed with two stores of flowers, one to be picked to pieces, the other to be distributed according to memory and attention. A year before he had had a number of large colored plates of tropical fruit and flowers prepared for him by a Kew assistant. Those he would often set up on a large screen, or put up on the walls, till the dingy school-room became a bower of superb blossom and luxuriant leaf, a glow of red and purple and orange. And then—still by the help of pictures—he would take his class on a tour through strange lands, talking to them of China or Egypt or South America, till they followed him up the Amazon, or into the pyramids or through the Pampas, or into the mysterious buried cities of Mexico, as the children of Hamelin followed the magic of the Pied Piper.

Hardly any of those who came to him, adults or children, while almost all of the artisan class, were of the poorest class. He knew it, and had laid his plans for such a result. Such work as he had at heart has no chance with the lowest in the social scale, in its beginnings. It must have something to work upon, and must penetrate downward. He only can receive who already hath—there is no profounder axiom.

And meanwhile the months passed on, and he was still brooding, still waiting. At last the spark fell.

There, in the next street but one to Elgood Street rose the famous Workmen’s Club of North R——. It had been started by a former Liberal clergyman of the parish, whose main object however, had been to train the workmen to manage it for themselves. His training had been, in fact too successful. Not only was it now wholly managed by artisans, but it had come to be a centre of active, nay, brutal, opposition to the Church and faith which had originally fostered it. In organic connection with it was a large debating hall, in which the most notorious secularist lecturers held forth every Sunday evening; and next door to it, under its shadow and patronage, was a little dingy shop filled to overflowing with the coarsest freethinking publications, Colonel Ingersoll’s books occupying the place of honor in the window and the ‘Freethinker’ placard flaunting at the door. Inside there was still more highly seasoned literature even than the ‘Freethinker’ to be had. There was in particular a small half-penny paper which was understood to be in some sense the special organ of the North R—— Club; which was at any rate published close by, and edited by one of the workmen founders of the club. This unsavory sheet began to be more and more defiantly advertised through the parish as Lent drew on toward Passion week, and the exertions of St. Wilfrid’s and of the other churches, which were being spurred on by the Ritualists’ success, became more apparent. Soon it seemed to Robert that every bit of boarding and every waste wall was filled with the announcement:—

‘Read “Faith and Fools.” Enormous success. Our “Comic Life of Christ” now nearly completed. Quite the best thing of its kind going. Woodcut this week—Transfiguration.’

His heart grew fierce within him. One night in Passion week he left the night school about ten o’clock. His way led him past the club, which was brilliantly lit up, and evidently in full activity. Round the door there was a knot of workmen lounging. It was a mild moonlit April night, and the air was pleasant. Several of them had copies of ‘Faith and Fools,’ and were showing the week’s woodcut to those about them, with chuckles and spurts of laughter.

Robert caught a few words as he hurried past them, and stirred by a sudden impulse turned into the shop beyond, And asked for the paper. The woman handed it to him, and gave him his change with a business-like sang-froid, which struck on his tired nerves almost more painfully then the laughing brutality of the men he had just passed.

Directly he found himself in another street he opened the paper under a lamp-post. It contained a caricature of the Crucifixion, the scroll emanating from Mary Magdalene’s mouth, in particular, containing obscenities which cannot be quoted here.

Robert thrust it into his pocket and strode on, every nerve quivering.

‘This is Wednesday in Passion week,’ he said to himself. The day after to-morrow is Good Friday!’

He walked fast in a north-westerly direction, and soon found himself within the City, where the streets were long since empty and silent. But he noticed nothing around him. His thoughts were in the distant East, among the flat roofs and white walls of Nazareth, the olives of Bethany, the steep streets and rocky ramparts of Jerusalem. He had seen them with the bodily eye, and the fact had enormously quickened his historical perception. The child of Nazareth, the moralist and teacher of Capernaum and Gennesaret, the strenuous seer and martyr of the later Jerusalem preaching—all these various images sprang into throbbing poetic life within him. That anything in human shape should be found capable of dragging this life and this death through the mire of a hideous and befouling laughter! Who was responsible? To what cause could one trace such a temper of mind toward such an object—present and militant as that temper is in all the crowded centres of working life throughout modern Europe? The toiler of the world as he matures may be made to love Socrates or Buddha or Marcus Aurelius. It would seem often as though he could not be made to love Jesus! Is it the Nemesis that ultimately discovers and avenges the sublimest, the least conscious departure from simplicity and verity?—is it the last and most terrible illustration of a great axiom! ‘Faith has a judge—in truth?’

He went home and lay awake half the light pondering. If he could but pour out his heart! But though Catherine, the wife of his heart, of his youth, is there, close beside him, doubt and struggle and perplexity are alike frozen on his lips. He cannot speak without sympathy, and she will not bear except under a moral compulsion which he shrinks more and more painfully from exercising.

The next night was a storytelling night. He spent it in telling the legend of St. Francis. When it was over he asked the audience to wait a moment, and there and then—with the tender, imaginative Franciscan atmosphere, as it were, still about them—he delivered a short and vigorous protest, in the name of decency, good feeling, and common-sense against the idiotic profanities with which the whole immediate neighborhood seemed to be reeking. It was the first time he had approached any religious matter directly. A knot of workmen sitting together at the back of the room looked at each other with a significant grimace or two.

When Robert ceased speaking, one of them, an elderly watchmaker, got up and made a dry and cynical little speech, nothing moving but the thin lips in the shrivelled mahogany face. Robert knew the man well. He was a Genevese by birth, Calvinist by blood, revolutionist by development. He complained that Mr. Elsmere had taken his audience by surprise; that a good many of those present understood the remarks he had just made as an attack upon an institution in which many of them were deeply interested; and that he invited Mr. Elsmere to a more thorough discussion of the matter, in a place where he could be both heard and answered.

The room applauded with some signs of suppressed excitement. Most of the men there were accustomed to disputation of the sort which any Sunday visitor to Victoria Park may hear going on there week after week. Elsmere had made a vivid impression; and the prospect of a fight with him had an unusual piquancy.’

Robert sprang up. ‘When you will,’ he said. ‘I am ready to stand by what I have just said in the face of you all, it you care to hear it.’

Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval of the club committee, and Elsmere’s audience separated in a glow of curiosity and expection.

‘Didn’t I tell ye?’ the gas-fitter’s snarling friend said to him. ‘Scratch him and you find the parson. Then upper-class folk, when they come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls, as those Injuns he was talking about last week hunt for scalps. They can’t go to heaven without a certain number of ‘em slung about ‘em.’

‘Wait a bit!’ said the gas-fitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a certain raised inner temperature.

Next morning the North R—— Club was placarded with announcements that on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver a lecture in the Debating Hall on ‘The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life;’ to be followed, as usual, by general discussion.

CHAPTER XXXIX.

It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at St. Paul’s, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had accompanied her. Their mid-day meal was over, and Robert had been devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden Japanese dragon which wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils all round the cabinet at the end of the room. It was Mary’s weekly task to embrace this horror, and the performance went by the name of ‘kissing the Jabberwock.’ It had been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary was being carried round the room on her father’s shoulder, holding on mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the defeated monster.

At last Robert deposited her on a rug beside a fascinating farm-yard which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child but at his wife.

‘Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!’

She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion of the eyes, contradicted it.

‘I want courage,’ he went on—‘courage to tell you something that may hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it.’

Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But she waited quietly for what he had to say.

‘You know, I think,’ he said, looking away from her to the gray Museum outside, ‘that my work in R—— hasn’t been religious as yet at all. Oh, of course, I have said things here and there, but I haven’t delivered myself in any way. Now there has come an opening.’

And he described to her—while she shivered a little and drew herself together—the provocations which were leading him into a tussle with the North R—— Club.

‘They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the sort of men after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. Among their fellows, they are the men who think. One longs to help them to think to a little more purpose.’

‘What have you to give them, Robert?’ asked Catherine, after a pause, her eyes bent on the child’s stocking she was knitting. Her heart was full enough already, poor soul. Oh, the bitterness of this Passion week! He had been at her side often in church, but through all his tender silence and consideration she had divined the constant struggle in him between love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wrestle with herself as she would, there was constantly emerging in her now a note of anger, not with Robert, but, as it were, with those malign forces of which he was the prey.

‘What have I to give them?’ he repeated sadly. ‘Very little, Catherine, as it seems to me to-night. But come and see.’

His tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In reality, he was in that state of depression which often precedes a great effort. But she was startled by his suggestion.

‘Come with you, Robert? To the meeting of a secularist club!’

‘Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage to what both you and I hold dear. And the men are decent fellows. There will be no disturbance.’

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked in a low voice.

‘I have been trying to think it out,’ he said with difficulty. ‘I want simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image of Jesus of Nazareth which thought—and love—and reading—have left upon my own. I want to make them realize for themselves the historical character, so far as it can be, realized—to make them see for themselves the real figure, as it went in and out among men—so far as our eyes can now discern it.’

The words came quicker toward the end, while the voice sank—took the vibrating characteristic note the wife knew so well.

‘How can that help them?’ she said abruptly. ‘Your historical Christ, Robert, will never win souls. If he was God, every word you speak will insult him. If he was man, he was not a good man!’

‘Come and see,’ was all he said, holding out his hand to her. It was in some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, the inevitable renewal of an offer he felt bound to make, and she felt bound to resist.

She let her knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken, incessant baby-talk, and the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones of the parents.

‘Don’t ask me, Robert, don’t ask me! Do you want me to come and sit thinking of last year’s Easter Eve?’

‘Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve,’ he said slowly.

‘And now,’ she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden agitation of every feature, ‘now you are not miserable? You are quite confident and sure? You are going to devote your life to attacking the few remnants of faith that still remain in the world?

Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this accent of bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew his hand, and there was a silence.

‘I held once a wife in my arms,’ he said presently with a voice hardly audible, ‘who said to me that she would never persecute her husband. But what is persecution, if it is not the determination not to understand?’

She buried her face in her hands. ‘I could not understand,’ she said sombrely.

‘And rather than try,’ he insisted, ‘you will go on believing that I am a man without faith, seeking only to destroy.’

‘I know you think you have faith,’ she answered, ‘but how can it seem faith to me? “He that will not confess Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven.” Your unbelief seems to me more dangerous than these horrible things which shock you. For you can make it attractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith of Christ loved.’

He was silent She raised her face presently, whereon were the traces of some of those quiet, difficult tears which were characteristic of her, and went softly out of the room.

He stood awhile leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little Mary’s clamor, and to her occasional clutches at his knees, as she tried to raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A sense as though of some fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him. And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalpable truths which the optimist is always much too ready to forget.

Heredity, the moulding force of circumstance, the iron hold of the past upon the present—a man like Elsmere realizes the working of these things in other men’s lives with it singular subtlety and clearness, and is for ever overlooking them, running his head against them, in his own.

He turned and laid his arms on the chimney-piece, burying his head on them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, looking down, saw Mary peering up, her masses of dark hair streaming back from the straining little face, the grave open mouth, and alarmed eyes.

‘Fader, tiss! fader, tiss!’ she said imperatively.

He lifted her up and covered the little brown cheeks with kisses. But the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh dread—the like of something he had often divined of late in Catherine. Was she actually afraid now that he might feel himself bound in future to take her child spiritually from her? The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him a fresh anguish; it seemed a measure of the distance they had travelled from that old perfect unity.

‘She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and torturer,’ he said to himself with measureless pain, ‘and who knows—who can answer for himself? Oh, the puzzle of living!’

When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Catherine said nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after a while she opened his study door.

‘Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next week, and let me put out the pictures?’

It was the first time she had made any such offer. He sprang up with a flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip of paper with a list. She took it without looking at him. But he caught her in his arms, and for a moment in that embrace the soreness of both hearts passed away.

But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this critical occasion without auditors from his own immediate circle. On the evening of Good Friday Flaxman had found his way to Bedford Square, and as Catherine was out, was shown into Elsmere’s study.

‘I have come,’ he announced, ‘to try and persuade you and Mrs. Elsmere to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow. My Easter party has come to grief, and it would be a real charity on your part to come and resuscitate it. Do! You look abominably fagged, and as if some country would, do you good.’

‘But I thought—’ began Robert, taken aback.

‘You thought,’ repeated Flaxman coolly, ‘that, your two sisters-in-law were going down there with Lady Helen, to meet some musical folk. Well, they are not coming. Miss Leyburn thinks your mother-in-law not very well to-day, and doesn’t like to come. And your younger sister prefers also to stay in town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But—’ And he shrugged his shoulders.

Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His sisters-in-law were certainly inscrutable young women. This Easter party at Greenlaws, Mr. Flaxman’s country house, had been planned, he knew, for weeks. And certainly nothing could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine would have been warned.

‘I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,’ he said, with some embarrassment.

‘Of course they are,’ implied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He stood opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets.

‘Will you have a confidence?’ the bright eyes seemed to say. ‘I am quite ready. Claim it if you like.’

But Elsmere had no intention of offering it. The position of all Rose’s kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had the least knowledge of Rose’s mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had, she lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman’s absorption in her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated to make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet. Impossible for them, much as they liked him, to make any of the advances!

No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to take the responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took up his visitor’s invitation to themselves, and explained the engagement for Easter Eve, which tied them to London.

‘Whew!’ said Hugh Flaxman, ‘but that will be a shindy worth seeing, I must come!’

‘Nonsense!’ said Robert, smiling. ‘Go down to Greenlaws, and go to church. That will be much more in your line.’

‘As for church,’ said Flaxman meditatively. ‘If I put off may party altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further advantage, that, after hearing you on Saturday night, I can, with a blameless impartiality, spend the following day in St. Andrew’s, Wells Street. Yes! I telegraph to Helen—she knows my ways—and I come down to protect you against an atheistical mob to-morrow night!’

Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. Flaxman’s Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence of his youth had subsided, the man harbored and dallied with a dozen contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere. They were so now, just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which could not be made at all without the nobler sort of self-confidence.

But Flaxman was determined.

‘No,’ he said: ‘this one day we’ll give to heresy. Don’t look so forbidding! In the first place, you won’t see me; in the next, if you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in Sophocles—always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all for the Church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still are, you will admit, that she is the right of it. And if so, why should I cut myself off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be got outside her? But the next day—vive Elsmere and the Revolution! If only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually! But I never yet came across a religious novelty that seemed to me to have a leg of logic to stand on!’

He laid his hand on Robert’s shoulder, his eyes twinkling with a sudden energy. Robert made no answer. He stood erect, frowning a little, his hands thrust far into the pockets of his light gray coat. He was in no mood to disclose himself to Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with extraordinary intensity on quite another sort of antagonist with whom the mind was continuously grappling.

‘Ah, well—till to-morrow!’ said Flaxman, with a smile, shook hands, and went.

Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte’s.

He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room alone, one on either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was reading the latest political biography with an apparent profundity of attention; Mr. Wynnstay was lounging and caressing the cat. But both his aunt’s absorption and Mr. Wynnstay’s nonchalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a domestic breeze.

Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had come to propose that she should accompany him the following evening to hear Elsmere lecture.

‘I advise you to come,’ he said. ‘Elsmere will deliver his soul, and the amount of soul he has to deliver in these dull days is astounding. A dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I will go down beforehand and see some one on the spot, in case there should be difficulties about getting in. Perhaps Miss Leyburn, too, might like to hear her brother-in-law?’

‘Really, Hugh,’ cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, ‘I think you might take your snubbing with dignity. Her refusal this morning to go to Greenlaws was brusqueness itself. To my mind that young person gives herself airs!’ And the Duke of Sedbergh’s sister drew herself up with a rustle of all her ample frame.

‘Yes, I was snubbed,’ said Flaxman, unperturbed; ‘that, however, is no reason why she shouldn’t find it attractive to go to-morrow night.’

‘And you will let her see that, just because you couldn’t get hold of her, you have given up your Easter party and left your sister in the lurch?’

‘I never had excessive notions of dignity,’ he replied composedly. ‘You may make up any story you please. The real fact is that I want to hear Elsmere.’

‘You had better go, my dear!’ said her husband sardonically. ‘I cannot imagine anything more piquant than an atheistic slum on Easter Eve.’

‘Nor can I!’ she replied, her combativeness rousing at once. ‘Much obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my housekeeper’s dress, and be ready to leave here at half-past seven.’

‘Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxman knew that she would be asked, and let it alone.

‘Will his wife be there?’ asked Lady Charlotte.

‘Who? Elsmere’s? My dear aunt, when you happen to be the orthodox wife of a rising heretic, your husband’s opinions are not exactly the spectacular performance they are to you and me. I should think it most unlikely.’

‘Oh, she persecutes him does she?’

‘She wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t!’ observed Mr. Wynnstay, sotto voce. The small dark man was lost in a great arm-chair, his delicate painter’s hands playing with the fur of a huge Persian cat. Lady Charlotte threw him an eagle glance, and he subsided,—for the moment.

Flaxman, however, was perfectly right. There had been a breeze. It had been just announced to the master of the house by his spouse that certain Socialist celebrities—who might any day be expected to make acquaintance with the police—were coming to dine at his table, to finger his spoons, and mix their diatribes with his champagne, on the following Tuesday. Overt rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew perfectly well that when it came to the point he should smile more or less affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon others of the same sort before. But it had not yet come to the point and his intermediate state was explosive in the extreme.

Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Elsmeres. Dropping his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a very delicate, critical analysis of Catherine Elsmere’s temperament and position, as in the course of several months his intimacy with her husband had revealed them to him. He did it well, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure to draw it out in words.

Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew’s crisp phrases, but also gradually gaining a perception of the human reality behind this word-play of Hugh’s. That ‘good heart’ of hers was touched; the large imperious face began to frown.

‘Dear me!’ she said, with a little sob. ‘Don’t go on, Hugh! I suppose it’s because we all of us believe so little that the poor thing’s point of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, however,’ she added, regaining her usual rôle of magisterial common-sense, ‘a woman, in my opinion ought to go with her husband in religious matters.’

‘Provided, of course, she sets him at nought in all others,’ put in Mr. Wynnstay, rising and daintily depositing the cat. ‘Many men, however, my dear, might be willing to compromise it differently. Granted a certain modicum of worldly conformity, they would not be at all indisposed to a conscience clause.’

He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged her shoulders with a look at her nephew in which there was an irrepressible twinkle. Mr. Flaxman neither heard nor saw. Life would have ceased to be worth having long ago had he ever taken sides in the smallest degree in this ménage.

Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with himself and his manoeuvres. Very likely it was quite unwise of him to have devised another meeting between himself and Rose Leyburn so soon. Certainly she had snubbed him—there could be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much perplexity as to the reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting his rôle and the whole lie of the situation and if a man will be an idiot he must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a move.

The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months since Langham’s disappearance. During that time Rose Leyburn had been, to Flaxman’s mind, enchantingly dependent on him. He had played his part so well, and the beautiful high-spirited child had suited herself so naively to his acting! Evidently she had said to herself that his age, his former marriage, his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness to her and her sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make him her friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other male friend. And when once the situation had been so defined in her mind, how the girl’s true self had come out!—what delightful moments that intimacy had contained for him!

He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading some Browning to her and Helen, in Helen’s crowded, belittered drawing-room, which seemed all piano and photographs and lilies of the valley. He never could exactly trace the connection between the passage he had been reading and what happened. Probably it was merely Browning’s poignant, passionate note that had addicted her. In spite of all her proud, bright reserve, both he and Helen often felt through these weeks that just below this surface there was a heart which quivered at the least touch.

He finished the lines and laid down the book. Lady Helen heard her three-year-old boy crying upstairs, and ran up to see what was the matter. He and Rose were left alone in the scented, fire-lit room. And a jet of flame suddenly showed him the girl’s face turned away, convulsed with a momentary struggle for self-control. She raised a hand an instant to her eyes, not dreaming evidently that she could be seen in the dimness; and her gloves dropped from her lap.

He moved forward, stooped on one knee, and as she held out her hand for the gloves, he kissed the hand very gently, detaining it afterward as a brother might. There was not a thought of himself in his mind. Simply he could not bear that so bright a creature should ever be sorry. It seemed to him intolerable, against the nature of things. If he could have procured for her at that moment a coerced and transformed Langham, a Langham fitted to make her happy, he could almost have done it; and, short of such radical consolation, the very least he could do was to go on his knee to her, and comfort her in tender, brotherly fashion.

She did not say anything; she let her hand stay a moment, and then she got up, put on her veil, left a quiet message for Lady Helen, and departed. But as he put her into a hansom her whole manner to him was full of a shy, shrinking sweetness. And when Rose was shy and shrinking she was adorable.

Well, and now he had never again gone nearly so far as to kiss her hand, and yet because of an indiscreet moment everything was changed between them; she had turned resentful, stand-off, nay, as nearly rude as a girl under the restraints of modern manners can manage to be. He almost laughed as he recalled Helen’s report of her interview with Rose that morning, in which she had tried to persuade a young person outrageously on her dignity to keep an engagement she had herself spontaneously made.

‘I am very sorry, Lady Helen,’ Rose had said, her slim figure drawn up so stiffly that the small Lady Helen felt herself totally effaced beside her. ‘But I had rather not leave London this week. I think I will stay with mamma and Agnes.’

And nothing Lady Helen could say moved her, or modified her formula of refusal.

‘What have you been doing, Hugh?’ his sister asked him, half dismayed, half provoked.

Flaxman shrugged his shoulders and vowed he had been doing nothing. But, in truth, he knew very well that the day before he had overstepped the line. There had been a little scene between them, a quick passage of speech, a rash look and gesture on his part, which had been quite unpremeditated, but which had nevertheless transformed their relation. Rose had flushed up, and said a few incoherent words, which he had understood to be words of reproach, had left Lady Helen’s as quickly as possible, and next morning his Greenlaws party had fallen through.

‘Check, certainly,’ said Flaxman to himself ruefully, as he pondered these circumstances, ‘not mate, I hope, if one can but find out how not to be a fool in future.’

And over his solitary fire he meditated far into the night.

Next day, at half-past seven in the evening, he entered Lady Charlotte’s drawing-room, gayer, brisker, more alert than ever.

Rose started visibly at the sight of him, and shot a quick glance at the unblushing Lady Charlotte.

‘I thought you were at Greenlaws,’ she could not help saying to him, and she coldly offered him her hand. Why had Lady Charlotte never told her he was to escort them? Her irritation arose anew.

‘What can one do,’ he said lightly, ‘if Elsmere will fix such a performance for Easter Eve? My party was at its last gasp too; it only wanted a telegram to Helen to give it its coup de grâce.’

Rose flushed up, but he turned on his heel at once, and began to banter his aunt on the housekeeper’s bonnet and veil in which she had a little too obviously disguised herself.

And certainly, in the drive to the East End, Rose had no reason to complain of importunity on his part. Most of the way he was deep in talk with Lady Charlotte as to a certain loan exhibition in the East End, to which he and a good many of his friends were sending pictures; apparently his time and thoughts were entirely occupied with it. Rose, leaning back silent in her corner, was presently seized with a little shock of surprise that there should be so many interests and relations in his life of which she knew nothing. He was talking now as the man of possessions and influence. She saw a glimpse of him as he was in his public aspect, and the kindness, the disinterestedness, the quiet sense, and the humor of his talk insensibly affected her as she sat listening. The mental image of him which had been dominant in her mind altered a little. Nay, she grew a little hot over it. She asked, herself scornfully whether she was not as ready as any bread-and-buttery miss of her acquaintance to imagine every man she knew in love with her.

Very likely he had meant what he said quite differently, and she—oh! humiliation—had flown into a passion with him for no reasonable cause. Supposing he had meant, two days ago, that if they were to go on being friends she must let him be her lover too, it would of course have been unpardonable. How could she let any one talk to her of love yet?—especially Mr. Flaxman, who guessed, as she was quite sure, what had happened to her? He must despise her to have imagined it. His outburst had filled her with the oddest and most petulent resentment. Were all men self-seeking? Did all men think women shallow and fickle? Could a man and a woman never be honestly and simply friends? If he had made love to her, he could not possibly—and there was the sting of it—feel toward her maiden dignity that romantic respect which she herself cherished toward it. For it was incredible that any delicate-minded girl should go through such a crisis as she had gone through, and then fall calmly into another lover’s arms a few weeks later as though nothing had happened.

How we all attitudinize to ourselves! The whole of life often seems one long dramatic performance, in which one-half of us is forever posing to the other half.

But had he really made love to her?—had he meant what she had assumed him to mean? The girl lost herself in a torrent of memory and conjecture, and meanwhile Mr. Flaxman sat opposite, talking away, and looking certainly as little love sick as any man can well look. As the lamps flashed into the carriage her attention was often caught by his profile and finely-balanced head, by the hand lying on his knee, or the little gestures, full of life and freedom, with which he met some raid of Lady Charlotte’s on his opinions, or opened a corresponding one on hers. There was certainly power in the man, a bright human sort of power, which inevitably attracted her. And that he was good too she had special grounds for knowing.

But what an aristocrat he was after all! What an over-prosperous, exclusive set he belonged to! She lashed herself into anger as the other two chatted and sparred, with all these names of wealthy cousins and relations, with their parks and their pedigrees and their pictures! The aunt and nephew were debating how they could best bleed the family, in its various branches, of the art treasures belonging to it for the benefit of the East-enders; therefore the names were inevitable. But Rose curled her delicate lip over them. And was it the best breeding, she wondered, to leave a third person so ostentatiously outside the conversation?

‘Miss Leyburn, why are you coughing?’ said Lady Charlotte suddenly.

‘There is a great draught,’ said Rose, shivering a little.

‘So there is!’ cried Lady Charlotte. ‘Why, we have got both the windows open. Hugh, draw up Miss Leyburn’s.’

He moved over to her and drew it up.

‘I thought you liked a tornado,’ he said to her, smiling. ‘Will you have a shawl—there is one behind me.’

‘No, thank you,’ she replied rather stiffly, and he was silent—retaining his place opposite to her, however.

‘Have we reached Mr. Elsmere’s part of the world yet?’ asked Lady Charlotte, looking out.

‘Yes, we are not far off—the river is to our right. We shall pass St. Wilfrid’s soon.’

The coachman turned into a street where an open-air market was going on. The roadway and pavements were swarming; the carriage could barely pick its way through the masses of human beings. Flaming gas-jets threw it all into strong satanic light and shade. At this corner of a dingy alley Rose could see a fight going on; the begrimed, ragged children, regardless of the April rain, swooped backward and forward under the very hoofs of the horses, or flattened their noses against the windows whenever the horses were forced into a walk.

The young girl-figure, with the gray feathered hat, seemed especially to excite their notice. The glare of the street brought out the lines of the face, the gold of the hair. The Arabs outside made loutishly flattering remarks once or twice, and Rose, coloring, drew back as far as she could into the carriage. Mr. Flaxman seemed not to hear; his aunt, with that obtrusive thirst for information which is so fashionable now among all women of position, was cross-questioning him as to the trades and population of the district, and he was dryly responding. In reality his mind was full of a whirl of feeling, of a wild longing to break down a futile barrier and trample on a baffling resistance, to take that beautiful, tameless creature in strong coercing arms, scold her, crush her, love her! Why does she make happiness so difficult? What right has she to hold devotion so cheap? He too grows angry. ‘She was not in love with that spectral creature,’ the inner self declares with energy—‘I will vow she never was. But she is like all the rest—a slave to the merest forms and trappings of sentiment. Because he ought to have loved her, and didn’t, because she fancied she loved him, and didn’t, my love is to be an offence to her! Monstrous—unjust!’

Suddenly they swept past St. Wilfrid’s, resplendent with lights, the jewelled windows of the choir rising above the squalid walls and roofs into the rainy darkness, as the mystical chapel of the Graal, with its ‘torches glimmering fair,’ flashed out of the mountain storm and solitude on to Galahad’s seeking eyes.

Rose bent forward involuntarily. ‘What angel singing!’ she said, dropping the window again to listen to the retreating sounds, her artist’s eye Kindling. ‘Did you hear it? It was the last chorus in the St. Matthew Passion music.’

‘I did not distinguish it,’ he said—‘but their music is famous.’

His tone was distant; there was no friendliness in it. It would have been pleasant to her if he would have taken up her little remark and let bygones be bygones. But he showed no readiness to do so. The subject dropped, and presently he moved back to his former seat, and Lady Charlotte and he resumed their talk. Rose could not but see that his manner toward her was much changed. She herself had compelled it, but all the same she saw him leave her with a capricious little pang of regret, and afterward the drive seemed to her more tedious and the dismal streets more dismal than before.

She tried to forget her companions altogether. Oh! what would Robert have to say? She was unhappy, restless. In her trouble lately it had often pleased her to go quite alone to strange churches, where for a moment the burden of the self had seemed lightened. But the old things were not always congenial to her, and there were modern ferments at work in her. No one of her family, unless it were Agnes, suspected what was going on. But in truth the rich crude nature had been touched at last, as Robert’s had been long ago in Mr. Grey’s lecture-room, by the piercing under-voices of things—the moral message of the world. ‘What will he have to say?’ she asked herself again feverishly, and as she looked across to Mr. Flaxman she felt a childish wish to be friends again with him, with everybody. Life was too difficult as it was, without quarrels and misunderstandings to make it worse.