CHAPTER XLII.
And after this little scene, through the busy exciting weeks of the season which followed, Robert taxed to the utmost on all sides, yielded to the impulse of silence more and more.
Society was another difficulty between them. Robert delighted in it so far as his East End life allowed him to have it. No one was ever more ready to take other men and women at their own valuation than he. Nothing was so easy to him as to believe in other people’s goodness, or cleverness, or super-human achievement. On the other hand, London is kind to such men as Robert Elsmere. His talk, his writing, were becoming known and relished; and even the most rigid of the old school found it difficult to be angry with him. His knowledge of the poor and of social questions attracted the men of action; his growing historical reputation drew the attention of the men of thought. Most people wished to know him and to talk to him, and Catherine, smiled upon for his sake, and assumed to be his chief disciple, felt herself more and more bewildered and antagonistic as the season rushed on.
For what pleasure could she get out of these dinners and these evenings, which supplied Robert with so much intellectual stimulus? With her all the moral nerves were jarring and out of tune. At any time Richard Leyburn’s daughter would have found it hard to tolerate a society where everything is an open question and all confessions of faith are more or less bad taste. But now, when there was no refuge to fall back upon in Robert’s arms, no certainty of his sympathy—nay, a certainty, that, however tender and pitiful he might be, he would still think her wrong and mistaken! She went here and there obediently because he wished; but her youth seemed to be ebbing, the old Murewell gayety entirely left her, and people in general wondered why Elsmere should have married a wife older than himself, and apparently so unsuited to him in temperament.
Especially was she tried at Madame de Netteville’s. For Robert’s sake she tried for a time to put aside her first impression and to bear Madame de Netteville’s evenings—little dreaming, poor thing, all the time that Madame de Netteville thought her presence at the famous ‘Fridays’ an incubus only to be put up with because her husband was becoming socially an indispensable.
But after two or three Fridays Catherine’s endurance failed her. On the last occasion she found herself late in the evening hemmed in behind Madame de Netteville and a distinguished African explorer, who was the lion of the evening. Eugénie de Netteville had forgotten her silent neighbor, and presently, with some biting little phrase or other, she asked the great man his opinion on a burning topic of the day, the results of Church missions in Africa. The great man laughed, shrugged his shoulders, and ran lightly through a string of stories in which both missionaries and converts played parts which were either grotesque or worse. Madame de Netteville thought the stories amusing, and as one ceased she provoked another, her black eyes full of a dry laughter, her white hand lazily plying her great ostrich fan.
Suddenly a figure rose behind them.
‘Oh, Mrs. Elsmere!’ said Madame de Netteville, starting, and then coolly recovering herself, ‘I had no idea you were there all alone. I am afraid our conversation has been disagreeable to you. I am afraid you are a friend of missions!’
And her glance, turning from Catherine to her companion, made a little malicious signal to him which only he detected, as though bidding him take note of a curiosity.
‘Yes, I care for them, I wish for their success,’ said Catherine, one hand, which trembled slightly, resting on the table beside her, her great gray eyes fixed on Madame de Netteville. ‘No Christian has any right to do otherwise.’
Poor brave goaded soul! She had a vague idea of ‘bearing testimony’ as her father would have borne it in like circumstances. But she turned very pale. Even to her the word ‘Christian’ sounded like a bombshell in that room. The great traveller looked up astounded. He saw a tall woman in white with a beautiful head, a delicate face, a something indescribably noble and unusual in her whole look and attitude. She looked like a Quaker prophetess—like Dinah Morris in society—like—but his comparisons failed him. How did such a being come there? He was amazed; but he was a man of taste, and Madame de Netteville caught a certain Aesthetic approbation in his look.
She rose, her expression hard and bright as usual.
‘May one Christian pronounce for all?’ she said, with a scornful affectation of meekness. ‘Mrs. Elsmere, please find some chair more comfortable than that ottoman; and Mr. Ansdale, will you come and be introduced to Lady Aubrey?’
After her guests had gone Madame de Netteville came back to the fire flushed and frowning. It seemed to her that in that strange little encounter she had suffered, and she never forgot or forgave the smallest social discomfiture.
‘Can I put up with that again?’ she asked herself with a contemptuous hardening of the lip. ‘I suppose I must if he cannot be got without her. But I have an instinct that it is over—that she will not appear here again. Daudet might make use of her. I can’t. What a specimen! A boy and girl match, I suppose. What else could have induced that poor wretch to cut his throat in such fashion? He, of all men.’
And Eugénie de Netteville stood thinking—not, apparently, of the puritanical wife; the dangerous softness which over-spread the face could have had no connection with Catherine.
Madame de Netteville’s instinct was just. Catherine Elsmere never appeared again in her drawing-room.
But, with a little sad confession of her own invincible distaste, the wife pressed the husband to go without her. She urged it at a bitter moment, when it was clear to her that their lives must of necessity, even in outward matters, be more separate than before. Elsmere resisted for a time; then, lured one evening toward this end of February by the prospect conveyed in a note from Madame de Netteville, wherein Catherine was mentioned in the most scrupulously civil terms, of meeting one of the most eminent of French critics, he went, and thenceforward went often. He had, so far, no particular liking for the hostess; he hated some of her habitués; but there was no doubt that in some ways she made an admirable holder of a salon, and that round about her there was a subtle mixture of elements, a liberty of discussion and comment, to be found nowhere else. And how bracing and refreshing was that free play of equal mind to the man weary sometimes of his leader’s rôle and weary of himself!
As to the woman, his social naïveté, which was extraordinary, but in a man of his type most natural, made him accept her exactly as he found her. If there were two or three people in Paris or London who knew or suspected incidents of Madame de Netteville’s young married days which made her reception at some of the strictest English houses a matter of cynical amusement to them, not the remotest inkling of their knowledge was ever likely to reach Elsmere. He was not a man who attracted scandals. Nor was it anybody’s interest to spread them. Madame de Netteville’s position in London society was obviously excellent. If she had peculiarities of manner and speech they were easily supposed to be French. Meanwhile she was undeniably rich and distinguished, and gifted with a most remarkable power of protecting herself and her neighbors from boredom. At the same time, though Elsmere was, in truth, more interested in her friends than in her, he could not possibly be insensible to the consideration shown for him in her drawing-room. Madame de Netteville allowed herself plenty of jests with her intimates as to the young reformer’s social simplicity, his dreams, his optimisms. But those intimates were the first to notice that as soon as he entered the room those optimisms of his were adroitly respected. She had various delicate contrivances for giving him the lead; she exercised a kind of surveillance over the topics introduced; or in conversation with him she would play that most seductive part of the cynic shamed out of cynicism by the neighborhood of the enthusiast.
Presently she began to claim a practical interest in his Street work. Her offers were made with a curious mixture of sympathy and mockery. Elsmere could not take her seriously. But neither could he refuse to accept her money, if she chose to spend it on a library for Elgood Street, or to consult with her about the choice of books. This whim of hers created a certain friendly bond between them which was not present before. And on Elsmere’s side it was strengthened when, one evening, in a corner of her inner drawing-room, Madame de Netteville suddenly, but very quietly, told him the story of her life—her English youth, her elderly French husband, the death of her only child, and her flight as a young widow to England during the war of 1870. She told the story of the child, as it seemed to Elsmere, with a deliberate avoidance of emotion, nay, even with a certain hardness. But it touched him profoundly. And everything else that she said, though she professed no great regret for her husband, or for the break-up of her French life and though everything was reticent and measured, deepened the impression of a real forlornness behind all the outward brilliance and social importance. He began to feel a deep and kindly pity for her, coupled with an earnest wish that he could help her to make her life more adequate and satisfying. And all this he showed in the look of his frank gray eyes, in the cordial grasp of the hand with which, he said good-by to her.
Madame de Netteville’s gaze followed him out of the room—the tall boyish figure, the nobly carried head. The riddle of her flushed cheek and sparkling eye was hard to read. But there were one or two persons living who could have read it, and who could have warned you that the true story of Eugénie de Netteville’s life was written, not in her literary studies or her social triumphs, but in various recurrent outbreaks of unbridled impulse—the secret, and in one or two cases the shameful landmarks of her past. And, as persons of experience, they could also have warned you that the cold intriguer, always mistress of herself, only exists in fiction, and that a certain poisoned and fevered interest in the religious leader, the young and pious priest, as such, is common enough among the corrupter women of all societies.
Toward the end of May she asked Elsmere to dine ‘en petit comité, a gentleman’s dinner—except for my cousin, Lady Aubrey Willert’—to meet an eminent Liberal Catholic, a friend of Montalembert’s youth.
It was a week or two after the failure of the Wardlaw experiment. Do what each would, the sore silence between the husband and wife was growing, was swallowing up more of life.
‘Shall I go, Catherine?’ he asked, handing her the note.
‘It would interest you,’ she said gently, giving it back to him scrupulously, as though she had nothing to do with it.
He knelt down before her, and put his arms round her, looking at her with eyes which had a dumb and yet fiery appeal written in them. His heart was hungry for that old clinging dependence, that willing weakness of love, her youth had yielded him so gladly, instead of this silent strength of antagonism. The memory of her Murewell self flashed miserably through him as he knelt there, of her delicate penitence toward him after her first sight of Newcome, of their night walks during the Mile End epidemic. Did he hold now in his arms only the ghost and shadow of that Murewell Catherine?
She must have read the reproach, the yearning of his look, for she gave a little shiver, as though bracing herself with a kind of agony to resist.
‘Let me go, Robert!’ she said gently, kissing him on the forehead and drawing back. ‘I hear Mary calling, and nurse is out.’
The days went on and the date of Madame de Netteville’s dinner party had come round. About seven o’clock that evening Catherine sat with the child in the drawing-room, expecting Robert. He had gone off early in the afternoon to the East End with Hugh Flaxman to take part in a committee of workmen organized for the establishment of a choral union in R——, the scheme of which had been Flaxman’s chief contribution so far to the Elgood Street undertaking.
It seemed to her as she sat there working, the windows open on to the bit of garden, where the trees are already withered and begrimed, that the air without and her heart within were alike stifling and heavy with storm. Something must put an end to this oppression, this misery! She did not know herself. Her whole inner being seemed to her lessened and degraded by this silent struggle, this fever of the soul, which made impossible all those serenities and sweetnesses of thought in which her nature had always lived of old. The fight into which fate had forced her was destroying her. She was drooping like a plant cut off from all that nourishes its life.
And yet she never conceived it possible that she should relinquish that fight. Nay, at times there sprang up in her now a dangerous and despairing foresight of even worse things in store. In the middle of her suffering, she already began to feel at moments the ascetic’s terrible sense of compensation. What, after all, is the Christian life but warfare? ‘I came not to send peace, but a sword!’
Yes, in these June days Elsmere’s happiness was perhaps nearer wreck than it had ever been. All strong natures grow restless under such a pressure as was now weighing on Catherine. Shock and outburst become inevitable.
So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by vague terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, with a ceaseless energy, like her father.
The outer door opened and she heard Robert’s step and apparently Mr. Flaxman’s also. There was a hurried rushed word or two in the hall, and the two entered the room where she was sitting.
Robert came, pressing back the hair from his eyes with a gesture which with him was the invariable accompaniment of mental trouble. Catherine sprang up.
‘Robert, you look so tired! and how late you are!’ Then as she came nearer to him: ‘And your coat—torn—blood!’
‘There is nothing wrong with me, dear,’ he said hastily, taking her hands ‘nothing! But it has been an awful afternoon. Flaxman will tell you. I must go to this place, I suppose, though I hate the thought of it! Flaxman, will you tell her all about it?’ And, loosing his hold, he went heavily out of the room and upstairs.
‘It has been an accident,’ said Flaxman gently, coming forward, ‘to one of the men of his class. May we sit down, Mrs. Elsmere? Your husband and I have gone through a good deal these last two hours.’
He sat down with, a long breath, evidently to regain, his ordinary even manner. His clothes, too, were covered with dust, and his hand shook. Catherine stood before him in consternation, while a nurse came for the child.
‘We had just begun our committee at four o’clock,’ he said at last, ‘though only about half of the men had arrived when there was a great shouting and commotion outside, and a man rushed in calling for Elsmere. We ran out, found a great crowd, a huge brewer’s dray standing in the street and a man run over. Your husband pushed his way in. I followed, and, to my horror, I found him kneeling by—Charles Richards!’
‘Charles Richards?’ Catherine repeated vacantly.
Flaxman looked up at her, as though puzzled; then a flash of astonishment passed over his face.
‘Elsmere has never told you of Charles Richards the little gas-fitter, who has been his right hand for the past three months?’
‘No—never,’ she said slowly.
Again he looked astonished; then he went on sadly: ‘All this spring he has been your husband’s shadow, never saw such devotion. We found him lying in the middle of the road. He had only just left work, a man said, who had been with him, and was running to the meeting. He slipped and fell, crossing the street, which was muddy from last night’s rain. The dray swung round the corner—the driver was drunk or careless—and they went right over him. One foot was a sickening sight. Your husband and I luckily know how to lift him for the best. We sent off for doctors. His home was in the next street, as it as it happened—nearer than any hospital; so we carried him there. The neighbors were around the door.’
Then he stopped himself.
‘Shall I tell you the whole story?’ he said kindly, ‘it has been a tragedy! I won’t give you details if you had rather not.’
‘Oh, no!’ she said hurriedly; ‘no—tell me.’
And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his chivalry, should treat her as though she were a girl with nerves.
‘Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When we got to the house, an old woman rushed at me, “His wife’s in there, but ye’ll not find her in her senses; she’s been at it from eight o’clock this morning. We’ve took the children away.” I didn’t know what she meant exactly till we got into the little front room. There, such a spectacle! A young woman on a chair by the fire sleeping heavily, dead drunk; the breakfast things on the table, the sun blazing in on the dust and the dirt, and on the woman’s face. I wanted to carry him into the room on the other side—he was unconscious; but a doctor had come up with us, and made us put him down on a bed there was in the corner. Then we got some brandy and poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his foot, threw something over it. “Nothing to be done,” he said—“internal injuries—he can’t live half an hour.” The next minute the poor fellow opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed from the wall. Your husband was on the further side, knelling. When he opened his eyes, clearly the first thing he saw was his wife. He half sprang up—Elsmere caught him—and gave a horrible cry—indescribably horrible. “At it again, at it again! My God!” Then he fell back fainting. They got the wife out of the room between them—a perfect log—you could hear her heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We gave him more brandy and he came to again. He looked up in your husband’s face. “She hasn’t broke out for two months,” he said, so piteously, “two months—and now—I’m done—I’m done—and she’ll just go straight to the devil!” And it comes out, so the neighbors told us, that for two years or more he had been patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a word of complaint to anybody, though his life must have been a dog’s life. And now, on his death-bed, what seemed to be breaking his heart was, not that he was dying, but that his task was snatched from him!’
Flaxman paused, and looked away out of the window. He told his story with difficulty.
‘Your husband tried to comfort him—promised that the wife and children should be his special case, that everything that could be done to save and protect them should be done. And the poor little fellow looked up at him, with the tears running down his cheeks, and—and—blessed him. “I cared about nothing,” he said, “when you came. You’ve been—God—to me—I’ve seen Him—in you.” Then he asked us to say something. Your husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of the Gospels, of St. Paul. His eyes grew filmy but he seemed every now and then to struggle back to, life, and as soon as he caught Elsmere’s face his look lightened. Toward the last he said something we none of us caught; but your husband thought it was a line from Emily Brontë’s “Hymn,” which he said to them last Sunday in lecture.’
He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in her face.
‘I asked him about it,’ the speaker went on, ‘as we came home. He said Grey of St. Anselm’s once quoted it to him, and he has had a love for it ever since.’
‘Did he die while you were there?’ asked Catherine presently after a silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He thought her a strange woman.
‘No,’ said Flaxman, almost sharply-’but by now, it must be over. The last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his children’s names. They brought them in, but his hands had to be guided to them. A few minutes after it seemed to me that he was really gone, though he still breathed. The doctor was certain there would be no more consciousness. We stayed nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other relations, and we left him. Oh, it is over now!’
Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London garden. Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of Elsmere’s pale, silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How could she, receive such a story in such a way?
The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly.
‘Good-night, Catherine—he has told you?’
He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully looking at her, the face full of signs of what he had gone through.
‘Yes, it was terrible!’ she said, with an effort.
His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and went away.
When he was gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leant against the open French window, looking keenly down on his companion. A new idea had stirred in him.
And presently, after more talk of the incident of the afternoon, and when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped gradually into the subject of his own experiences in North R—— during the last six months. He assumed all through that she knew as much as there was to be known of Elsmere’s work, and that she was as much interested as the normal wife is in her husband’s doings. His tact, his delicacy, never failed him for a moment. But he spoke of his own impressions, of matters within his personal knowledge. And since the Easter sermon he had been much on Elsmere’s track; he had been filled with curiosity about him.
Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in long folds about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed on her lap. Sometimes she gave him a startled look, sometimes she shaded her eyes, while her other hand played silently with her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching her closely, however little he might seem to do so, was struck by her austere and delicate beauty as he had never been before.
She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger. He went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any excitement, in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now and then, expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and not always favorably. But gradually the whole picture emerged, began to live before them. At last he hurriedly looked at his watch.
‘What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you.’
‘You have not had dinner!’ she said, looking up at him with a sudden nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his impression of her.
‘No matter. I will got some at home. Good-night!’
When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterward in the drawing-room, where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on the chair.
The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with God. It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known—greater even than that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.
CHAPTER XLIII.
Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westward by the recurrent memory of that miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying face.
In Madame de Netteville’s drawing-room he found a small number of people assembled. M. de Quérouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of ‘a beastly set of tenants;’ Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private secretary with a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a general air of superlativeness which demanded, and secured attention; a famous journalist, whose smiling, self-repressive look assured you that he carried with him the secrets of several empires; and one Sir John Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man with a limp—an ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted in London as an amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of society as he was popular with the other.
‘Purely for talk, you see, not for show!’ said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood waiting for the commencement of dinner.
‘I shall hardly do my part,’ he said with a little sigh. ‘I have just come from a very different scene.’
She looted at him with inquiring eyes.
‘A terrible accident in the East End,’ he said briefly. ‘We won’t talk of it. I only mention it to propitiate you before-hand. Those things are not forgotten at once.’
She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart, physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle consideration for him at dinner. M. de Quérouelle was made to talk. His hostess wound him up and set him going, tune after tune. He played them all and, by dint of long practice, to perfection, in the French way. A visit of his youth to the Island grave of Chateaubriand; his early memories, as a poetical aspirant, of the magnificent flatteries by which Victor Hugo made himself the god of young romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in the days of L’Avenir; his memories of Lamennais’ sombre figure, of Maurice de Guérin’s feverish ethereal charm; his account of the opposition salons under the Empire—they had all been elaborated in the course of years, till every word fitted and each point led to the next with the ‘inevitableness’ of true art. Robert, at first silent and distraut, found it impossible after a while not to listen with interest. He admired the skill, too, of Madame de Netteville’s second in the duet, the finish, the alternate sparkle and melancholy of it; and at last he too was drawn in, and found himself listened to with great benevolence by the French man, who had been informed about him, and regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of English religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addlestone, who had won a European reputation for wisdom by a great scantiness of speech in society, coupled with the look of Minerva’s owl, attached himself to them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr. Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party at the other end.
‘Are you still in your old quarters?’ Lady Aubrey asked Sir John Headlam, turning his old, roguish face upon her. ‘That house of Well Gwynne’s, wasn’t it, in Meade Street?’
‘Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then they made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten years. There is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and wants to live in it. I could have left a train of gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so cross!’
‘Ah,—“Reculer pour mieux faire sauter!”’ said Sir John, mincing out his pun as though he loved it.
‘Not bad, Sir John,’ she said, looking at him calmly, ‘but you have way to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner, that positively——’
‘You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the “Société de Londres,”’ he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen an angry flash in his little eyes. ‘My dear Lady Aubrey, it was simply because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but one we meet, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the way, have you read the “Princesse de——“’
He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.
‘I haven’t,’ she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a rapier-glance at him, ‘but if I had, I should say precisely the same. Lord Rupert will you kindly keep Sir John in order?’
Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge mot, invariably assumed that all ‘the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in adorning his person.’ Not at all! The tenue of a dandy was never more cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top rungs.
It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the whole scene—the dainty oval room, the lights, the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the tapestried wall—would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream never has.
The hard self-confidence of these people—did it belong to the same world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone on him that afternoon from Charles Richards’ begrimed and blood-stained face? ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit,’ he said to himself once with an inward groan. ‘Why am I here? Why am I not at home with Catherine?’
But Madame de Netteville was pleasant to him. He had never seen her so womanly, never felt more grateful for her delicate social skill. As she talked to him, or to the Frenchman, of literature, or politics, or famous folk, flashing her beautiful eyes from one to the other, Sir John Headlam would, every now and then, turn his odd puckered face observantly toward the farther end of the table.
‘By Jove!’ he said afterward to Wharncliffe as they walked away from the door together, ‘she was inimitable to-night; she has more rôles than Desforêts!’ Sir John and his hostess were very old friends.
Upstairs, smoking began, Lady Aubrey and Madame de Netteville joining in. M. de Quérouelle, having talked the best of his repertoire at dinner, was now inclined for amusement, and had discovered that Lady Aubrey could amuse him, and was, moreover, une belle personne. Madame de Netteville, was obliged to give some time to Lord Rupert. The other men stood chatting politics and the latest news, till Robert, conscious of a complete failure of social energy, began to took at his watch. Instantly Madame de Netteville glided up to him.
‘Mr. Elsmere, you have talked no business to me, and I must know how nay affairs in Elgood Street are getting on. Come into my little writing-room.’ And she led him into a tiny panelled room at the far end of the drawing-room and shut off from it by a heavy curtain, which she now left half-drawn.
‘The latest?’ said Fred Wharncliffe to Lady Aubrey, raising his eyebrows with the slightest motion of the head toward the writing-room.
‘I suppose so,’ she said indifferently; ‘She is East-Ending, for a change. We all do it nowadays. It is like Dizzy’s young man who “liked bad wine, he was so bored with good.”’
Meanwhile, Madame de Netteville was leaning against the open window of the fantastic little room, with Robert beside her.
‘You look as if you had had a strain,’ she said to him, abruptly, after they had talked business for a few minutes. ‘What has been the matter?’
He told her Richards’ story, very shortly. It would have been impossible to him to give more than the dryest outline of it in that room. His companion listened gravely. She was an epicure in all things, especially in moral sensation, and she liked his moments of reserve and strong self-control. They made his general expansiveness more distinguished.
Presently there was a pause, which she broke by saying,—
‘I was at your lecture last Sunday—you didn’t see me!’
‘Were you? Ah! I remember a person in black, and veiled, who puzzled me. I don’t think we want you there, Madame de Netteville.’
His look was pleasant, but his tone had some decision in it.
‘Why not? Is it only the artisans who have souls? A reformer should refuse no one.’
‘You have your own opportunities,’ he said quietly; ‘I think the men prefer to have it to themselves for the present. Some of them are dreadfully in earnest.’
‘Oh, I don’t pretend to be in earnest,’ she said with a little wave of her hand; ‘or, at any rate, I know better than to talk of earnestness to you.’
‘Why to me?’ he asked, smiling.
‘Oh, because you and your like have your fixed ideas of the upper class and the lower. One social type fills up your horizon. You are not interested in any other.’
She looked at him defiantly. Everything about her to-night was splendid and regal—her dress of black and white brocade, the diamonds at her throat, the carriage of her head, nay, the marks of experience and living on the dark subtle face.
‘Perhaps not,’ he replied; ‘it is enough for one life to try and make out where the English working class is tending to.’
‘You are quite wrong, utterly wrong. The man who keeps his eye only on the lower class will achieve nothing. What can the idealist do without the men of action—the men who can take his beliefs and make them enter by violence into existing institutions? And the men of action are to be found with us.’
‘It hardly looks just now as if the upper class was to go on enjoying a monopoly of them,’ he said, smiling.
‘Then appearances are deceptive, The populace supplies mass and weight—nothing else. What you want is to touch the leaders, the men and women whose voices carry, and then your populace would follow hard enough, For instance’—and she dropped her aggressive tone and spoke with a smiling kindness—‘come down next Saturday to my little Surrey cottage; you shall see some of these men and women there, and I will make you confess when you go away that you have profited your workmen more by deserting them than by staying with them. Will you come?’
‘My Sundays are too precious to me just now, Madame de Netteville. Besides, my firm conviction is that the upper class can produce a Brook Farm, but nothing more. The religious movement of the future will want a vast effusion of feeling and passion to carry it into action, and feeling and passion are only to be generated in sufficient volume among the masses, where the vested interests of all kinds are less tremendous. You upper-class folk have your part, of course. Woe betide you if you shirk—but——’
‘Oh, let us leave it alone,’ she said with a little shrug. ‘I knew you would give us all the work and refuse us all the profits. We are to starve for your workman, to give him our hearts and purses and everything we have, not that we may hoodwink him—which might be worth doing—but that he may rule us. It is too much!’
‘Very well,’ he said dryly, his color rising. ‘Very well, let it be too much.’
And, dropping his lounging attitude, he stood erect, and she saw that he meant to be going. Her look swept over him from head to foot—over the worn face with its look of sensitive refinement and spiritual force, the active frame, the delicate but most characteristic hand. Never had any man so attracted her for years; never had she found it so difficult to gain a hold. Eugénie de Netteville, poseuse, schemer, woman of the world that she was, was losing command of herself.
‘What did you really mean by “worldliness” and the “world” in your lecture last Sunday?’ she asked him suddenly, with a little accent of scorn. ‘I thought your diatribes absurd. What you religious people call the “world” is really only the average opinion of sensible people which neither you nor your kind could do without for a day.’
He smiled, half amused by her provocative tone, and defended himself not very seriously. But she threw all her strength into the argument, and he forgot that he had meant to go at once. When she chose she could talk admirably, and she chose now. She had the most aggressive ways of attacking, and then, in the same breath, the most subtle and softening ways of yielding and, as it were, of asking pardon. Directly her antagonist turned upon her he found himself disarmed he knew not how. The disputant disappeared, and he felt the woman, restless, melancholy, sympathetic, hungry for friendship and esteem, yet too proud to make any direct bid for either. It was impossible not to be interested and touched.
Such at least was the woman whom Robert Elsmere felt. Whether in his hours of intimacy with her twelve months before, young Alfred Evershed had received the same impression, may be doubted. In all things Eugénie de Netteville was an artist.
Suddenly the curtain dividing them from the larger drawing-room was drawn back, and Sir John Headlam stood in the doorway. He had the glittering amused eyes of a malicious child as he looked at them.
‘Very sorry, Madame,’ he began in his high cracked voice, ‘but Wharncliffe and I are off to the New Club to see Desforéts. They have got her there to-night.’
‘Go,’ she said, waving her hand to him, ‘I don’t envy you. She is not what she was.’
‘No, there is only one person,’ he said, bowing with grotesque little airs of gallantry, ‘for whom time stands still.’
Madame de Netteville looked at him with smiling, half-contemptuous serenity. He bowed again, this time with ironical emphasis, and disappeared.
‘Perhaps I had better go and send them off,’ she said, rising. ‘But you and I have not had our talk out yet.’
She led the way into the drawing-room. Lady Aubrey was lying back on the velvet sofa, a little green paroquet that was accustomed to wander tamely about the room was perching on her hand. She was holding the field against Lord Rupert and Mr. Addlestone in a three-cornered duel of wits, while M. de Quérouelle sat by, his plump hands on his knees, applauding.
They all rose as their hostess came in.
‘My dear,’ said Lady Aubrey, ‘it is disgracefully early, but my country before pleasure. It is the Foreign Office to-night, and since James took office I can’t with decency absent myself. I had rather be a scullery-maid than a minister’s wife. Lord Rupert, I will take you on if you want a lift.’
She touched Madame de Netteville’s cheek with her lips, nodding to the other men present, and went out, her fair stag-like head well in the air, ‘chaffing’ Lord Rupert, who obediently followed her, performing marvellous feats of agility in his desire to keep out of the way of the superb train sweeping behind her. It always seemed as if Lady Aubrey could have had no childhood, as if she must always have had just that voice and those eyes. Tears she could never have shed, not even as a baby over a broken toy. Besides, at no period of her life could she have looked upon a lost possession as anything else than the opportunity for a new one.
The other men took their departure for one reason or another. It was not late, but London was in full swing, and M. de Quérouelle talked with gusto of four ‘At homes’ still to be grappled with.
As she dismissed Mr. Wharncliffe, Robert too held out his hand.
‘No,’ she said, with a quick impetuousness, ‘no: I want my talk out. It is barely half-past ten, and neither one of us wants to be racing about London to-night.’
Elsmere had always a certain lack of social decision, and he lingered rather reluctantly for another ten minutes, as he supposed.
She threw herself into a low chair. The windows were open to the back of the house, and the roar of Piccadilly and Sloane Street came borne in upon the warm night air. Her superb dark head stood out against a stand of yellow lilies close behind her, and the little paroquet, bright with all the colors of the tropics, perched now on her knee, now on the back of her chair, touched every now and then by quick unsteady fingers.
Then an incident followed which Elsmere remembered to his dying day with shame and humiliation.
In ten minutes from the time of their being left alone, a woman who was five years his senior had made him what was practically a confession of love—had given him to understand that she know what were the relations between himself and his wife—and had implored him with the quick breath of an indescribable excitement to see what a woman’s sympathy and a woman’s unique devotion could do for the causes he had at heart.
The truth broke upon Elsmere very slowly, awakening in him, when at last it was unmistakable, a swift agony of repulsion, which his most friendly biographer can only regard with a kind of grim satisfaction. For after all there is an amount of innocence and absentmindedness in matters of daily human life, which is not only niaiserie, but comes very near to moral wrong. In this crowded world a man has no business to walk about with his eyes always on the stars. His stumbles may have too many consequences. A harsh but a salutary truth! If Elsmere needed it, it was bitterly taught him during a terrible half-hour. When the half-coherent enigmatical sentences, to which he listened at first with a perplexed surprise, began gradually to define themselves; when he found a woman roused and tragically beautiful between him and escape; when no determination on his part not to understand; when nothing he could say availed to protect her from her-self; when they were at last face to face with a confession and an appeal which were a disgrace to both—then at last Elsmere paid ‘in one minute glad life’s arrears’—the natural penalty of an optimism, a boundless faith in human nature, with which life, as we know it, is inconsistent.
How he met the softness, the grace, the seduction of a woman who was an expert in all the arts of fascination he never knew. In memory afterward it was all a ghastly mirage to him. The low voice, the splendid dress, the scented room came back to him, and a confused memory of his own futile struggle to ward off what she was bent on saying—little else. He had been maladroit, he thought, had lost his presence of mind. Any man of the world of his acquaintance, he believed, trampling on himself, would have done better.
But when the softness and the grace were all lost in smart and humiliation, when the Madame de Netteville of ordinary life disappeared, and something took her place which was like a coarse and malignant underself suddenly brought into the light of day,—from that point onward, in after days, he remembered it all.
‘... I know,’ cried Eugénie de Netteville at last, standing at bay before him, her hands locked before her, her white lips quivering, when her cup of shame was full, and her one impulse left was to strike the man who had humiliated her-’I know that you and your puritanical wife are miserable—miserable. What is the use of denying facts that all the world can see, that you have taken pains,’ and she laid a fierce, deliberate emphasis on each word, ‘all the world shall see? There,—let your wife’s ignorance and bigotry, and your own obvious relation to her, be my excuse, if I wanted any; but’—and she shrugged her white shoulders passionately—‘I want none! I am not responsible to your petty codes. Nature and feeling are enough for me. I saw you wanting sympathy and affection——’
‘My wife!’ cried Robert, hearing nothing but that one word. And then, his glance sweeping over the woman before him, he made a stern step forward.
‘Let me go, Madame de Netteville, let me go, or I shall forget that you are a woman, and I a man, and that in some way I cannot understand my own blindness and folly——’
‘Must have led to this most undesirable scene,’ she said with mocking suddenness, throwing, herself, however, effectually in his way. Then a change came over her, and erect, ghastly white, with frowning brow and shaking limbs, a baffled and smarting woman from whom every restraint had fallen away, let loose upon him a torrent of gall and bitterness which he could not have cut short without actual violence.
He stood proudly enduring it, waiting for the moment when what seemed to him an outbreak of mania should have spent itself. But suddenly he caught Catherine’s name coupled with some contemptuous epithet or other, and his self-control failed him. With flashing eyes he went close up to her and took her wrists in a grip of iron.
‘You shall not,’ he said; beside himself, ‘You shall not! What have I done—what has she done—that you should allow yourself such words? My poor wife!’
A passionate flood of self-reproachful love was on his lips. He choked it back. It was desecration that her name should be mentioned in that room. But he dropped the hand he held. The fierceness died out of his eyes. His companion stood beside him panting, breathless, afraid.
‘Thank God,’ he said slowly, ‘thank God for yourself and me that I love my wife! I am not worthy of her—doubly unworthy, since it has been possible for any human being to suspect for one instant that I was ungrateful for the blessing of her love, that I could ever forget and dishonor her! But worthy or not——No!—no matter! Madame de Netteville, let me go, and forget that such a person exists.’
She looked at him steadily for a moment, at the stern manliness of the face which seemed in this half-hour to have grown older, at the attitude with its mingled dignity and appeal. In that second she realized what she had done and what she had forfeited; she measured the gulf between herself and the man before her. But she did not flinch. Still holding him, as it were, with menacing defiant eyes, she moved aside, she, waved her hand with a contemptuous gesture of dismissal. He bowed, passed her, and the door shut.
For nearly an hour afterward Elsmere wandered blindly and aimlessly through the darkness and silence of the park.
The sensitive optimist nature was all unhinged, felt itself wrestling in the grip of dark, implacable things, upheld by a single thread above that moral abyss which yawns beneath us all, into which the individual life sinks so easily to ruin and nothingness. At such moments a man realizes within himself, within the circle of consciousness, the germs of all things hideous and vile. ‘Save for the grace of God,’ he says to himself, shuddering, ‘save only for the grace of God——’
Contempt for himself, loathing for life and its possibilities, as he had just beheld them; moral tumult, pity, remorse, a stinging self-reproach—all these things wrestled within him. What, preach to others, and stumble himself into such mire as this? Talk loudly of love and faith, and make it possible all the time that a fellow human creature should think you capable at a pinch of the worst treason against both?
Elsmere dived to the very depths of his own soul that night. Was it all the natural consequence of a loosened bond, of a wretched relaxation of effort—a wretched acquiescence in something second best? Had love been cooling? Had it simply ceased to take the trouble love must take to maintain itself? And had this horror been the subtle inevitable Nemesis?
All at once, under the trees of the park, Elsmere stopped for a moment in the darkness, and bared his head, with the passionate reverential action of a devotee before his saint. The lurid image which had been pursuing him gave way, and in its place came the image of a new-made mother, her child close within her sheltering arm. Ah! it was all plain to him now. The moral tempest had done its work.
One task of all tasks had been set him from the beginning—to keep his wife’s love! If she had slipped away from him, to the injury and moral lessening of both, on his cowardice, on his clumsiness, be the blame! Above all, on his fatal power of absorbing himself in a hundred outside interests, controversy, literature, society. Even his work seemed to have lost half its sacredness. If there be a canker at the root, no matter how large the show of leaf and blossom overhead, there is but the more to wither! Of what worth is any success, but that which is grounded deep on the rock of personal love and duty?
Oh! let him go back to her!—wrestle with her, open his heart again, try new ways, make new concessions. How faint the sense of her trial has been growing within him of late! hers which had once been more terrible to him than his own! He feels the special temptations of his own nature; he throws himself, humbled, convicted, at her feet. The woman, the scene he has left, is effaced, blotted out by the natural intense reaction of remorseful love.
So he sped homeward at last through the noise of Oxford Street, hearing nothing. He opened, his own door, and let himself into the dim, silent house. How the moment recalled to him that other supreme moment of his life at Murewell! No light in the drawing-room. He went upstairs and softly turned the handle of her room.
Inside the room seemed to him nearly dark. But the window was wide open. The free, loosely growing branches of the plane trees made a dark, delicate network against the luminous blue of the night. A cool air came to him laden with an almost rural scent of earth and leaves. By the window sat a white motionless figure. As he closed the door it rose and walked toward him without a word. Instinctively Robert felt that something unknown to him had been passing here. He paused, breathless, expectant.
She came to him. She linked her cold, trembling fingers round his neck.
‘Robert, I have been waiting so long—it was so late! I thought’—and she choked down a sob-’perhaps something has happened to—him, we are separated forever, and I shall never be able to tell him. Robert, Mr. Flaxman talked to me; he opened my eyes; I have been so cruel to you, so hard! I have broken my vow. I don’t deserve it; but—Robert!——’
She had spoken with extraordinary self-command till the last word, which fell into a smothered cry for pardon. Catherine Elsmere had very little of the soft clingingness which makes the charm of a certain type of woman. Each phrase she had spoken had seemed to take with it a piece of her life. She trembled and tottered in her husband’s arms.
He bent over her with half-articulate words of amazement, of passion. He led her to her chair, and kneeling before her, he tried, so far as the emotion of both would let him, to make her realize what was in his own heart, the penitence and longing which had winged his return to her. Without a mention of Madame de Netteville’s name, indeed! That horror she should never know. But it was to it, as he held his wife, he owed his poignant sense of something half-jeopardized and wholly recovered; it was that consciousness in the background of his mind, ignorant of it as Catherine was then and always, which gave the peculiar epoch-making force to this sacred and critical hour of their lives. But she would hear nothing of his self-blame—nothing. She put her hand across his lips.
‘I have seen things as they are, Robert,’ she said very simply; ‘while I have been sitting here, and downstairs, after Mr. Flaxman left me. You were right—I would not understand. And, in a sense, I shall never understand. I cannot change,’ and her voice broke into piteousness. ‘My Lord is my Lord always—, but He is yours too. Oh, I know it, say what you will! That is what has been hidden from me; that is what my trouble has taught me; the powerlessness, the worthlessness, of words. It is the spirit that quickeneth. I should never have felt it so, but for this fiery furnace of pain. But I have been wandering in strange places, through strange thoughts. God has not one language, but many. I have dared to think He had but one, the one I know. I have dared’—and she faltered—‘to condemn your faith as no faith. Oh! I lay there so long in the dark downstairs, seeing you by that bed; I heard your voice, I crept to your side. Jesus was there, too. Ah, He was—He was! Leave me that comfort! What are you saying? Wrong—you? unkind? Your wife knows nothing of it. Oh, did you think when you came in just now before dinner that I didn’t care, that I had a heart of stone? Did you think I had broken my solemn promise, my vow to you that day at Murewell? So I have, a hundred times over. I made it in ignorance; I had not counted the cost—how could I? It was all so new, so strange. I dare not make it again, the will is so weak, circumstances so strong. But oh! take me back into your life! Hold me there! Remind me always of this night; convict me out of my own mouth! But I will learn my lesson; I will learn to hear the two voices, the voice that speaks to you and the voice that speaks to me—I must. It is all plain to me now. It has been appointed me.’
Then she broke down into a kind of weariness, and fell back in her chair, her delicate fingers straying with soft childish touch over his hair.
‘But I am past thinking. Let us bury it all, and begin again. Words are nothing.’
Strange ending to a day of torture! As she towered above him in the dimness, white and pure and drooping, her force of nature all dissolved, lost in this new heavenly weakness of love, he thought of the man who passed through the place of sin, and the place of expiation, and saw, at last the rosy light creeping along the East; caught the white moving figures, and that sweet distant melody rising through the luminous air, which announced to him the approach of Beatrice and the nearness of those ‘shining tablelands whereof our God Himself is moon and sun.’ For eternal life, the ideal state, is not something future and distant. Dante knew it when he talked of ‘quella que imparadisa la mia mente.’ Paradise is here, visible and tangible by mortal eyes and hands, whenever self is lost in loving, whenever the narrow limits of personality are beaten down by the inrush of the Divine Spirit.