CHAPTER XLIV.
The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we have followed for so long, was over and done with. Henceforward to the end Elsmere and his wife were lovers as of old.
But that day and night left even deeper marks on Robert than on Catherine. Afterward she gradually came to feel, running all through his views of life, a note sterner, deeper, maturer than any present there before. The reasons for it were unknown to her, though sometimes her own tender, ignorant, remorse supplied them. But they were hidden deep in Elsmere’s memory.
A few days afterward he was casually told that Madame de Netteville had left England for some time. As a matter of fact he never set eyes on her again. After a while the extravagance of his self-blame abated. He saw things as they were—without morbidness. But a certain boyish carelessness of mood he never afterward quite recovered. Men and women of all classes, and not only among the poor, became more real and more tragic—moral truths more awful—to him. It was the penalty of a highly strung nature set with exclusive intensity toward certain spiritual ends.
On the first opportunity after that conversation with Hugh Flaxman which had so deeply affected her, Catherine accompanied Elsmere to his Sunday lecture. He tried a little, tenderly, to dissuade her. But she went, shrinking and yet determined.
She had not heard him speak in public since that last sermon of his in Murewell Church, every detail of which by long brooding had been burnt into her mind. The bare Elgood Street room, the dingy outlook on the high walls of a warehouse opposite, the lines of blanched, quick-eyed artisans, the dissent from what she loved, and he had once loved, implied in everything, the lecture itself, on the narratives of the Passion; it was all exquisitely painful to her, and, yet, yet she was glad to be there.
Afterward Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that ‘any fool could see he was getting done up,’ insisted on taking the children’s class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised a little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there after all?
Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously coddled, and that Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off to the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward, Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the river; that, or his wife’s hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart, with flashes of her old sweet gayety, as she had not talked for months.
Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life, in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile, the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them, the trees were green for them!
He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to him. For Mr. Grey’s illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it. Every day some old St. Anselm’s friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left Oxford, he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man of our time, Henry Grey’s influence was not primarily an influence of personal contact. His mere life, that he was there, on English soil, within a measurable distance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to conduct, every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales, nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintly life grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they have always clung to each other, to the visible, and the tangible; as the elders of Miletus, though the Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set their feet therein, ‘sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more.’
The accounts grew worse—all friends shut out, no possibility of last words—the whole of Oxford moved and sorrowing. Then at list, on a Friday, came the dreaded, expected letter: ‘He is gone! He died early this morning, without pain, conscious almost to the end. He mentioned several friends by name, you among them, during the night. The funeral is to be on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.’
Sad and memorable day! By an untoward chance it fell in Commemoration week, and Robert found the familiar streets teeming with life and noise, under a showery, uncertain sky, which every now and then would send the bevies of lightly gowned maidens, with their mothers, and their attendant squires, skurrying for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements glistening. He walked up to St. Anselm’s, found as he expected that the first part of the service was to be in the chapel, the rest in the cemetery, and then mounted the well-known staircase to Langham’s rooms. Langham was apparently in his bedroom. Lunch was on the table—the familiar commons, the familiar toast-and-water. There, in a recess, were the same splendid wall maps of Greece he had so often consulted after lecture. There was the little case of coins, with the gold Alexanders he had handled with so much covetous reverence at eighteen. Outside, the irregular quadrangle with its dripping trees stretched before him; the steps of the new Hall, now the shower was over, were crowded with gowned figures. It might have been yesterday that he had stood in that room, blushing with awkward pleasure under Mr. Grey’s first salutation.
The bedroom door opened and Langham came in.
‘Elsmere! But of course I expected you.’
His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was a flatness in it, an absence of positive cordiality which was new to him in any greeting of Langham’s to himself, and had a chilling effect upon him. The face, too, was changed. Tint and expression were both dulled; its marble-like sharpness and finish had coarsened a little, and the figure, which had never possessed the erectness of youth had now the pinched look and the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian.
‘I did not write to you, Elsmere,’ he said immediately, as though in anticipation of what the other would be sure to say; ‘I knew nothing but what the bulletins said, and I was told that Cathcart wrote to you. It is many years now since I have seen much of Grey. Sit down and have some lunch. We have time, but not too much time.’
Robert took a few mouthfuls. Langham was difficult, talked disconnectedly of trifles, and Robert was soon painfully conscious that the old sympathetic bond between them no longer existed. Presently, Langham, as though with an effort to remember, asked after Catherine, then inquired what he was doing in the way of writing, and neither of them mentioned the name of Leyburn. They left the table and sat spasmodically talking, in reality expectant. And at last the sound present already in both minds made itself heard—the first long solitary stroke of the chapel bell.
Robert covered his eyes.
‘Do you remember in this room, Langham, you introduced us first?’
‘I remember,’ replied the other abruptly. Then, with a half-cynical, half-melancholy scrutiny of his companion, he said, after a pause, ‘What a faculty of hero-worship you have always had, Elsmere!’
‘Do you know anything of the end?’ Robert asked him presently, as that tolling bell seemed to bring the strong feeling beneath more irresistibly to the surface.
‘No, I never asked!’ cried Langham, with sudden harsh animation. ‘What purpose could be served? Death should be avoided by the living. We have no business with it. Do what we will, we cannot rehearse our own parts. And the sight of other men’s performances helps us no more than the sight of a great actor gives the dramatic gift. All they do for us is to imperil the little nerve, break through the little calm, we have left.’
Elsmere’s hand dropped, and he turned round to him with a flashing smile.
‘Ah—I know it now—you loved him still.’
Langham, who was standing, looked down on him sombrely, yet more indulgently.
‘How much you always made of feeling’ he said after a little pause, ‘in a world where, according to me, our chief object should be not to feel!’
Then he began to hunt for his cap and gown. In another minute the two made part of the crowd in the front quadrangle, where the rain was sprinkling, and the insistent grief-laden voice of the bell rolled, from pause to pause, above the gowned figures, spreading thence in wide waves of mourning sound over Oxford.
The chapel service passed over Robert like a solemn pathetic dream. The lines of undergraduate faces the Provost’s white head, the voice of the chaplain reading, the full male unison of the voices replying—how they carried him back to the day when as a lad from school he had sat on one of the chancel benches beside his mother, listening for the first time to the subtle simplicity, if one may be allowed the paradox, of the Provost’s preaching! Just opposite to where he sat now with Langham, Grey had sat that first afternoon; the freshman’s curious eyes had been drawn again and again to the dark massive head, the face with its look of reposeful force, of righteous strength. During the lesson from Corinthians, Elsmere’s thoughts were irrelevantly busy with all sorts of mundane memories of the dead. What was especially present to him was a series of Liberal election meetings in which Grey had taken a warm part, and in which he himself had helped just before he took orders. A hundred, odd, incongruous details came back to Robert now with poignant force. Grey had been to him at one time primarily the professor, The philosopher, the representative of all that was best in the life of the University; now, fresh from his own grapple with London and its life, what moved him most was the memory of the citizen, the friend and brother of common man, the thinker who had never shirked action in the name of thought, for whom conduct had been from beginning to end the first reality.
The procession through the streets afterward which conveyed the body of this great son of modern Oxford to its last resting-place in the citizens’ cemetery on the western side of the town, will not soon be forgotten, even in a place which forgets notoriously soon. All the University was there, all the town was there side by side with men honorably dear to England, who had carried with them into one or other of the great English careers the memory of the teacher, were men who had known from day to day the cheery modest helper in a hundred local causes; side by side with the youth of Alma Mater went the poor of Oxford; tradesmen and artisans followed or accompanied the group of gowned and venerable figures, representing the Heads of Houses and the Professors, or mingled with the slowly pacing crowds of Masters; while along the route groups of visitors and merrymakers, young men in flannels or girls in light dresses, stood with suddenly grave faces here and there, caught by the general wave of mourning, and wondering what such a spectacle might mean.
Robert, losing sight of Langham as they left the chapel, found his arm grasped by young Cathcart, his correspondent. The man was a junior Fellow who had attached himself to Grey during the two preceding years with especial devotion. Robert had only a slight knowledge of him, but there was something in his voice and grip which made him feel at once infinitely more at home with him at this moment than he had felt with the old friend of his undergraduate years.
They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain came on again, and the long black crowd stretched before them was lashed by the driving gusts. As they went along, Cathcart told him all he wanted to know.
‘The night before the end he was perfectly calm and conscious. I told you he mentioned your name among the friends to whom he sent his good-by. He thought for everybody. For all those of his house he left the most minute and tender directions. He forgot nothing. And all with such extraordinary simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a journey! In the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a North-country woman whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was much attached, was sitting with him. I was there too. She was a beautiful old figure in her white cap and kerchief, and it seemed to please him to lie and look at her. “It’ll not be for long, Henry,” she said to him once “I’m seventy-seven this spring. I shall come to you soon.” He made no reply, and his silence seemed to disturb her. I don’t fancy she had known much of his mind of late years. “You’ll not be doubting the Lord’s goodness, Henry?” she said to him, with the tears in her eyes. “No,”, he said, “no, never. Only it seems to be His Will we should be certain of nothing—but Himself! I ask no more.” I shall never forget the accent of those words: they were the breath of his inmost life. If ever man was Gottbetrunken it was he—and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be true, beyond what the intellect could grasp!’
Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The rain beat down on the black concourse of mourners. But there were blue spaces in the drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light played at intervals over the Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and over the butter-cupped river meadows, where the lush hay-grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his left, the Provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was reading the rest of the service.
As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. ‘My friend, my master,’ cried the yearning filial heart, ‘oh, give me something of yourself to take back into life, something to brace me through this darkness of our ignorance, something to keep hope alive as you kept it to the end!’
And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a last message, words which years before he had found marked in a little book of Meditations borrowed from Grey’s table—words long treasured and often repeated:—
‘Amid a world of forgetfulness and decay, in the sight of his own shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the tomb, he alone who has found his soul in losing it, who in singleness of mind has lived in order to love and understand, will find that the God who is near to him as his own conscience has a face of light and love!’
Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the triumphant outbursts of the Christian service.
‘Man’s hope,’ he thought, ‘has grown humbler than this. It keeps now a more modest mien in the presence of the Eternal Mystery; but is it in truth less real, less sustaining? Let Grey’s trust answer for me.’
He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid street outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round for Langham. Instead, he found Cathcart who had just come up with him.
‘Is Langham behind?’ he asked. ‘I want a word with him before I go.’
‘Is he here?’ asked the other, with a change of expression.
‘But of course! He was in the chapel. How could, you——’
‘I thought he would probably go away,’ said Cathcart, with some bitterness. ‘Grey made many efforts to get him to come and see him before he became so desperately ill. Langham came once. Grey never asked for him again.’
‘It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,’ said Robert, troubled; ‘his dread of being forced to take a line, to face anything certain and irrevocable. I understand. He could not say good-by to a friend to save his life. There is no shirking that! One must either do it or leave it!’
Cathcart shrugged his shoulders, and drew a masterly little picture of Langham’s life in college. He had succeeded by the most adroit devices in completely isolating himself both from the older and the younger men.
‘He attends college-meeting sometimes, and contributes a sarcasm or two on the cramming system of the college. He takes a constitutional to Summertown every day on the least frequented side of the road, that he may avoid being spoken to. And as to his ways of living, he and I happen to have the same scout—old Dobson, you remember? And if I would let him, he would tell me tales by the hour. He is the only man in the University who knows anything about it. I gather from what he says that Langham is becoming a complete valetudinarian. Everything must go exactly by rule—his food, his work, the management of his clothes—and any little contretemps makes him ill. But the comedy is to watch him when there is anything going on in the place that he thinks may lead to a canvass and to any attempt to influence him for a vote. On these occasions he goes off with automatic regularity to an hotel at West Malvern, and only reappears when the “Times” tells him the thing is done with.’
Both laughed. Then Robert sighed. Weaknesses of Langham’s sort may be amusing enough to the contemptuous and unconcerned outsider. But the general result of them, whether for the man himself or those whom he affects, is tragic, not comic; and Elsmere had good reason for knowing it.
Later, after a long talk with the Provost, and meetings with various other old friends, he walked down to the station, under a sky clear from rain, and through a town gay with festal preparations. Not a sign now, in the crowded, bustling streets, of that melancholy pageant of the afternoon. The heroic memory had flashed for a moment like something vivid and gleaming in the sight of all, understanding and ignorant. Now it lay committed to a few faithful hearts, there to become one seed among many of a new religious life in England.
On the platform Robert found himself nervously accosted by a tall shabbily-dressed man.
‘Elsmere, have you forgotten me?’
He turned and recognized a man whom he had last seen as a St. Anselm’s undergraduate—one MacNiell, a handsome rowdy young Irishman, supposed to be clever, and decidedly popular in the college. As he stood looking at him, puzzled by the difference between the old impression and the new, suddenly the man’s story flashed across him; he remembered some disgraceful escapade—an expulsion.
‘You came for the funeral, of course?’ said the other, his face flushing consciously.
‘Yes—and you too?’
The man turned away, and something in his silence led Robert to stroll on beside him to the open end of the platform.
‘I have lost my only friend,’ MacNiell said at last hoarsely. ‘He took me up when my own father would have nothing to say to me. He found me work; he wrote to me; for years he stood between me and perdition. I am just going out to a post in New Zealand he got for me, and next week before I sail-I—I—am to be married—and he was to be there. He was so pleased—he had seen her.’
It was one story out of a hundred like it, as Robert knew very well. They talked for a few minutes, and then the train loomed in the distance.
‘He saved you,’ said Robert, holding out his hand, ‘and at a dark moment in my own life I owed him everything. There is nothing we can do for him in return but—to remember him! Write to me, if you can or will, from New Zealand, for his sake.’
A few seconds later the train sped past the bare little cemetery, which lay just beyond the line. Robert bent forward. In the pale yellow glow of the evening he could distinguish the grave, the mound of gravel, the planks, and some figures moving beside it. He strained his eyes till he could see no more, his heart full of veneration, of memory, of prayer. In himself life seemed so restless and combative. Surely he, more than others, had need of the lofty lessons of death!
CHAPTER XLV.
In the weeks which followed—weeks often of mental and physical depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by the influence of an overworked state he could not be got to admit—Elsmere owed much to Hugh Flaxman’s cheery sympathetic temper, and became more attached to him than ever, and more ready than ever, should the fates deem it so, to welcome him as a brother-in-law. However, the fates for the moment seemed to have borrowed a leaf from Langham’s book, and did not apparently know their own minds. It says volumes for Hugh Flaxman’s general capacities as a human being that at this period he should have had any attention to give to a friend, his position as a lover was so dubious and difficult.
After the evening at the Workmen’s Club, and as a result of further meditation, he had greatly developed the tactics first adopted on that occasion. He had beaten a masterly retreat, and Rose Leyburn was troubled with him no more.
The result was that a certain brilliant young person was soon sharply conscious of a sudden drop in the pleasure of living. Mr. Flaxman had been the Leyburns’ most constant and entertaining visitor. During the whole of May he paid one formal call in Lerwick Gardens, and was then entertained tête-à-tête by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose’s intense subsequent annoyance, who know perfectly well that her mother was incapable of chattering about anything but her daughters.
He still sent flowers, but they came from his head gardener, addressed to Mrs. Leyburn. Agnes put them in water, and Rose never gave them a look. Rose went to Lady Helen’s because Lady Helen made her, and was much too engaging a creature to be rebuffed; but, however merry and protracted the teas in those scented rooms might be, Mr. Flaxman’s step on the stairs, and Mr. Flaxman’s hand on the curtain over the door, till now the feature in the entertainment most to be counted on, were, generally speaking, conspicuously absent.
He and the Leyburns met, of course, for their list of common friends was now considerable; but Agnes, reporting matters to Catherine, could only say that each of these occasions left Rose more irritable and more inclined to say biting things as to the foolish ways in which society takes its pleasures.
Rose certainly was irritable, and at times, Agnes thought, depressed. But as usual she was unapproachable about her own affairs, and the state of her mind could only be somewhat dolefully gathered from the fact that she was much less unwilling to go back to Burwood this summer than had ever been known before.
Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman left certain other people in no doubt as to his intentions.
‘My dear aunt,’ he said calmly to Lady Charlotte, ‘I mean to marry Miss Leyburn if I can at any time persuade her to have me. So much you may take as fixed, and it will be quite waste of breath on your part to quote dukes to me. But the other factor in the problem is by no means fixed. Miss Leyburn won’t have me at present, and as for the future I have most salutary qualms.’
‘Hugh!’ interrupted Lady Charlotte angrily, ‘as if you hadn’t had the mothers of London at your feet for years!’
Lady Charlotte was in a most variable frame of mind; one day hoping devoutly that the Langham affair might prove lasting enough in its effects to tire Hugh out; the next, outraged that a silly girl should waste a thought on such a creature, while Hugh was in her way; at one time angry that an insignificant chit of a schoolmasters daughter should apparently care so little to be the Duke of Sedberg’s niece, and should even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing a Flaxman; at another, utterly skeptical as to any lasting obduracy on the chit’s part, The girl was clearly anxious not to fall too easily, but as to final refusal—pshaw! And it made her mad that Hugh would hold himself so cheap.
Meanwhile, Mr. Flaxman felt himself in no way called upon to answer that remark of his aunt’s we have recorded.
‘I have qualms,’ he repeated, ‘but I mean to do all I know, and you and Helen must help me.’
Lady Charlotte crossed her hands before her.
‘I may be a Liberal and a lion-hunter,’ she said firmly, ‘but I have still conscience enough left not to aid and abet my nephew in throwing himself away.’
She had nearly slipped in ‘again;’ but just saved herself.
‘Your conscience is all a matter of the Duke,’ he told her. ‘Well, if you won’t help me, then Helen and I will have to arrange it by ourselves.’
But this did not suit Lady Charlotte at all. She had always played the part of earthly providence to this particular nephew, and it was abominable to her that the wretch, having refused for ten years to provide her with a love affair to manage, should now manage one for himself, in spite of her.
‘You are such an arbitrary creature!’ she said fretfully: ‘you prance about the world like Don Quixote, and expect me to play Sancho without a murmur.’
‘How many drubbings have I brought you yet?’ he asked her, laughing. He was really very fond of her. ‘It is true there is a point of likeness; I won’t take your advice. But then why don’t you give me better? It is strange,’ he added, musing; ‘women talk to us about love as if we were too gross to understand it; and when they come to business, and they’re not in it themselves, they show the temper of attorneys.’
‘Love!’ cried Lady Charlotte, nettled. ‘Do you mean to tell me, Hugh, that you are really, seriously in love with that girl?’
‘Well, I only know,’ he said, thrusting his hands far into his pockets, ‘that unless things mend I shall go out to California in the autumn and try ranching.’
Lady Charlotte burst into an angry laugh. He stood opposite to her, with his orchid in his buttonhole, himself the fine flower of civilization. Ranching, indeed! However, he had done so many odd things in his life, that, as she knew, it was never quite safe to decline to take him seriously, and he looked at her now so defiantly, his clear greenish eyes so wide open and alert, that her will began to waver under the pressure of his.
‘What do you want me to do, sir?’
His glance relaxed at once, and he laughingly explained to her that what he asked of her was to keep the prey in sight.
‘I can do nothing for myself at present,’ he said; ‘I get on her nerves. She was in love with that black-haired enfant du siècle,—or rather, she prefers to assume that she was—and I haven’t given her time to forget him. A serious blunder, and I deserve to suffer for it. Very well, then, I retire, and I ask you and Helen to keep watch. Don’t let her go. Make yourselves nice to her; and, in fact, spoil me a little now I am on the high rode to forty, as you used to spoil me at fourteen.’
Mr. Flaxman sat down by his aunt and kissed her hand, after which Lady Charlotte was as wax before him. ‘Thank heaven,’ she reflected, ‘in ten days the Duke and all of them go out of town.’ Retribution, therefore, for wrong-doing would be, tardy, if wrongdoing there must be. She could but ruefully reflect that after all the girl was beautiful and gifted; moreover, if Hugh would force her to befriend him in this criminality, there might be a certain joy in thereby vindicating those Liberal principles of hers, in which a scornful family had always refused to believe. So, being driven into it, she would fain have done it boldly and with a dash. But she could not rid her mind of the Duke, and her performance all through, as a matter of fact, was blundering.
However, she was for the time very gracious to Rose, being in truth, really fond of her; and Rose, however high she might hold her little head, could find no excuse for quarrelling either with her or Lady Helen.
Toward the middle of June there was a grand ball given by Lady Fauntleroy at Fauntleroy House, to which the two Miss Leyburns, by Lady Helen’s machinations, were invited. It was to be one, of the events of the season, and when the cards arrived ‘to have the honor of meeting their Royal Highnesses,’ etc., etc., Mrs. Leyburn, good soul, gazed at them with eyes which grew a little moist under her spectacles. She wished Richard could have seen the girls, dressed, ‘just once.’ But Rose treated the cards with no sort of tenderness. ‘If one could put them up to auction,’ she said flippantly, holding them up, ‘how many German opera tickets I should get for nothing! I don’t know what Agnes feels. As for me, I have neither nerve enough for the peoples nor money enough for the toilette.’
However, with eleven o’clock Lady Helen ran in, a fresh vision of blue and white, to suggest certain dresses for the sisters which had occurred to her in the visions of the night, ‘original, adorable,—cost, a mere nothing!’
‘My harpy,’ she remarked, alluding to her dressmaker, ‘would ruin you over them, of course. Your maid’—the Leyburns possessed a remarkably clever one—‘will make them divinely for twopence half-penny. Listen.’
Rose listened; her eye kindled; the maid was summoned; and the invitation accepted in Agnes’s neatest hand. Even Catherine was roused during the following ten days to a smiling indulgent interest in the concerns of the workroom.
The evening came, and Lady Helen fetched the sisters in her carriage. The ball was a magnificent affair. The house was one of historical interest and importance, and all that the ingenuity of the present could do to give fresh life and gayety to the pillared rooms, the carved galleries and stately staircases of the past, had been done. The ball-room, lined with Vandycks and Lelys, glowed softly with electric light; the picture-gallery had been banked with flowers and carpeted with red, and the beautiful dresses of the women trailed up and down it, challenging the satins of the Netschers and the Terburgs on the walls.
Rose’s card was soon full to overflowing. The young men present were of the smartest, and would not willingly have bowed the knee to a nobody, however pretty. But Lady Helen’s devotion, the girl’s reputation as a musician, and her little nonchalant disdainful ways, gave her a kind of prestige, which made her, for the time being at any rate, the equal of anybody. Petitioners came and went away empty. Royalty was introduced and smiled both upon the beauty and the beauty’s delicate and becoming dress; and still Rose, though a good deal more flushed and erect than usual, and though flesh and blood could not resist the contagious pleasure which glistened even in the eyes of that sage Agnes, was more than half-inclined to say with the Preacher, that all was vanity.
Presently, as she stood waiting with her hand on her partner’s arm, before gliding into a waltz, she saw Mr. Flaxman opposite to her, and with him a young débutante, in white tulle—a thin, pretty, undeveloped creature, whose sharp elbows and timid movements, together with the blushing enjoyment glowing so frankly from her face, pointed her out as the school-girl of sweet sixteen, just emancipated, and trying her wings.
‘Ah, there is Lady Florence!’ said her partner, a handsome young Hussar. ‘This ball is in her honor, you know. She comes Out to-night. What, another cousin? Really she keeps too much in the family!’
‘Is Mr. Flaxman a cousin?’
The young man replied that he was, and then, in the intervals of waltzing, went on to explain to her the relationships of many of the people present, till the whole gorgeous affair began to seem to Rose a mere family party. Mr. Flaxman was of it. She was not.
‘Why am I here?’ the little Jacobin said to herself fiercely as she waltzed; ‘it is foolish, unprofitable. I do not belong to them, nor they to me!’
‘Miss Leyburn! charmed to see you!’ cried, Lady Charlotte, stopping her; and then, in a loud whisper in her ear, ‘Never saw you look better. Your taste, or Helen’s, that dress? The roses—exquisite!’
Rose, dropped her a little mock courtesy and whirled on again.
‘Lady Florences are always well dressed,’ thought the child angrily; ‘and who notices it?’
Another turn brought them against Mr. Flaxman and his partner. Mr. Flaxman came at once to greet her with smiling courtesy.
‘I have a Cambridge friend to introduce to you—a beautiful youth. Shall I find you by Helen? Now, Lady Florence, patience a moment. That corner is too crowded. How good that last turn was!’
And bending with a sort of kind chivalry over his partner, who looked at him with the eyes of a joyous, excited child, he led her away. Five minutes later Rose, standing flushed by Lady Helen, saw him coming again toward her, ushering a tall blue-eyed youth, whom he introduced to her as ‘Lord Waynflete.’ The handsome boy looked at her with a boy’s open admiration, and beguiled her of a supper dance, while a group standing near, a mother and three daughters, stood watching with cold eyes and expressions which said plainly to the initiated that mere beauty was receiving a ridiculous amount of attention.
‘I wouldn’t have given it him, but it is rude—it is bad manners, not even to ask!’ the supposed victress was saying to herself, with quivering lips, her eyes following not the Trinity freshman, who was their latest captive, but an older man’s well-knit figure, and a head on which the fair hair was already growing scantily, receding a little from the fine intellectual brows.
An hour later she was again standing by Lady Helen, waiting for a partner, when she saw two persons crossing the room, which was just beginning to fill again for dancing, toward them. One was Mr. Flaxman, the other was a small wrinkled old man, who leant upon his arm, displaying the ribbon of the Garter as he walked.
‘Dear me,’ said Lady Helen, a little fluttered, ‘here is my uncle Sedbergh. I thought they had left town.’
The pair approached, and the old Duke bowed over his niece’s hand, with the manners of a past generation.
‘I made Hugh give me an arm,’ he said quaveringly. ‘These floors are homicidal. If I come down on them I shall bring an action.’
‘I thought you had all left town?’ said Lady Helen.
‘Who can make plans with a Government in power pledged to every sort of villainy and public plunder?’ said the old man testily. ‘I suppose Varley’s there to-night, helping to vote away my property and Fauntleroy’s.’
‘Some of his own, too, if you please!’, said Lady Helen, smiling. ‘Yes, I suppose he is waiting for the division, or he would be here.’
‘I wonder why Providence blessed me with such a Radical crew of relations?’ remarked the Duke. ‘Hugh is a regular Communist. I never heard such arguments in my life. And as for any idea of standing by his order——’ The old man shook his bald head and shrugged his small shoulders with almost French vivacity. He had been handsome once, and delicately featured, but now the left eye drooped, and the face had a strong look of peevishness and ill-health.
‘Uncle,’ interposed Lady Helen, ‘let me introduce you to my two great friends, Miss Leyburn, Miss Rose Leyburn.’
The Duke bowed, looked at them through a pair of sharp eyes, seemed to cogitate inwardly whether such a name had ever been known to him, and turned to his nephew.
‘Get me out of this, Hugh, and I shall be obliged to you. Young people may risk it, but if I broke I shouldn’t mend.’
And still grumbling audibly about the floor, he hobbled off toward the picture gallery. Mr. Flaxman had only time for a smiling backward glance at Rose.
‘Have you given my pretty boy a dance?’
‘Yes,’ she said, but with as much stiffness as she might have shown to his uncle.
‘That’s over,’ said Lady Helen with relief. ‘My uncle hardly meets any of us now without a spar. He has never forgiven my father for going over to the Liberals. And then he thinks we none of us consult him enough. No more we do—except Aunt Charlotte. She’s afraid of him!’
‘Lady Charlotte afraid!’ echoed Rose.
‘Odd, isn’t it? The Duke avenges a good many victims on her, if they only knew!’
Lady Helen was called away, and Rose was left standing, wondering what had happened to her partner.
Opposite, Mr. Flaxman was pushing through a doorway, and Lady Florence was again on his arm. At the same time she became conscious of a morsel of chaperon’s conversation such as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a girl is tolerably sure to bear under similar circumstances.
The débutante’s good looks, Hugh Flaxman’s apparent susceptibility to them, the possibility of results, and the satisfactory disposition of the family goods and chattels that would be brought about, by such a match, the opportunity it would offer the man, too, of rehabilitating himself socially after his first matrimonial escapade—Rose caught fragments of all these topics as they were discussed by two old ladies, presumably also of the family ‘ring,’ who gossiped behind her with more gusto than discretion. Highmindedness, of course, told her to move away; something else held her fast, till her partner came up for her.
Then she floated away into the whirlwind of waltzers. But as she moved round the room on her partners arm, her delicate half-scornful grace attracting look after look, the soul within was all aflame—aflame against the serried ranks and phalanxes of this unfamiliar, hostile world! She had just been reading Trevelyan’s ‘Life of Fox’ aloud to her mother, who liked occasionally to flavor her knitting with literature, and she began now to revolve a passage from it, describing the upper class of the last century, which had struck that morning on her quick retentive memory: “A few thousand people who thought that the world was made for them”-did it not run so?-“and that, all outside their own fraternity were unworthy of notice or criticism, bestowed upon each other an amount of attention quite inconceivable. ... Within the charmed precincts there prevailed an easy and natural mode of intercourse, in some respects singularly delightful.” Such, for instance, as the Duke of Sedbergh was master of! Well, it was worth while, perhaps, to have gained an experience, even at the expense of certain illusions, as to the manners of dukes, and—and—as to the constancy of friends. But never again-never again!’ said the impetuous inner voice. ‘I have my world—they theirs!’
But why so strong a flood of bitterness against our poor upper class, so well intentioned for all its occasional lack of lucidity, should have arisen in so young a breast it is a little difficult for the most conscientious biographer to explain. She had partners to her heart’s desire; young Lord Waynflete used his utmost arts upon her to persuade her that at half a dozen numbers of the regular programme were extras and, therefore at his disposal; and when royalty supped, it was graciously pleased to ordain that Lady Helen and her two companions should sup behind the same folding-doors as itself, while beyond these doors surged the inferior crowd of persons who had been specially invited to ‘meet their Royal Highnesses,’ and had so far been held worthy neither to dance nor to eat in the same room with them. But in vain. Rose still felt herself, for all her laughing outward insouciance, a poor bruised, helpless chattel, trodden under the heel of a world which was intolerably powerful, rich, and self-satisfied, the odious product of ‘family arrangements.’
Mr. Flaxman sat far away at the same royal table as herself. Beside him was the thin tall débutante. ‘She is like one of the Gainsborough princesses,’ thought Rose, studying her with, involuntary admiration. ‘Of course it is all plain. He will get everything he wants, and a Lady Florence into the bargain. Radical, indeed! What nonsense!’
Then it startled her to find that eyes of Lady Florence’s neighbors were, as it seemed, on herself; or was he merely nodding to Lady Helen?—and she began immediately to give a smiling attention to the man on her left.
An hour later she and Agnes and Lady Helen were descending the great staircase on their way to their carriage. The morning light was flooding through the chinks of the carefully veiled windows; Lady Helen was yawning behind her tiny white hand, her eyes nearly asleep. But the two sisters, who had not been up till three, on four preceding nights, like their chaperon, were still as fresh as the flowers massed in the hall below.
‘Ah, there is Hugh!’ cried Lady Helen. ‘How I hope he has found the carriage!’
At that moment Rose slipped on a spray of gardenia, which had dropped from the bouquet of some predecessor. To prevent herself from falling down stairs, she caught hold of the stem of a brazen chandelier fixed in the balustrade. It saved her, but she gave her arm a most painful wrench, and leant limp and white against the railing of the stairs. Lady Helen turned at Agnes’s exclamation, but before she could speak, as it seemed, Mr. Flaxman, who had been standing talking just below them, was on the stairs.
‘You have hurt your arm? Don’t speak—take mine. Let me get you down stairs out of the crush.’
She was too far gone to resist, and when she was mistress of herself again she found herself in the library with some water in her hand which Mr. Flaxman had just put there.
‘Is it the playing hand?’ said Lady Helen anxiously.
‘No,’ said Rose, trying to laugh; ‘the bowing elbow.’ And she raised it but with a contortion of pain.
‘Don’t raise it,’ he said peremptorily. ‘We will have a doctor here in a moment, and have it bandaged.’
He disappeared. Rose tried to sit up, seized with a frantic longing to disobey him, and get off before he returned. Stinging the girl’s mind was the sense that it might, all perfectly well seem to him a planned appeal to his pity.
‘Agnes, help me up,’ she said with a little involuntary groan; ‘I shall be better at home.’
But both Lady Helen and Agnes laughed her to scorn, and she lay back once more, overwhelmed by fatigue and faintness. A few more minutes, and a doctor appeared, caught by good luck in the next street. He pronounced it a severe muscular strain, but nothing more; applied a lotion and improvised a sling. Rose consulted him anxiously, as to the interference with her playing.
‘A week,’ he said; ‘no more, if you are careful.’
Her pale face brightened. Her art had seemed specially dear to her of late.
‘Hugh!’ called Lady Helen, going to the door. ‘Now we are ready for the carriage.’
Rose, leaning on Agnes, walked out into the hall. They found him there waiting.
‘The carriage is here,’ he said, bending toward her with a look and tone which so stirred the fluttered nerves, that the sense of faintness stole back upon her. ‘Let me take you to it.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, coldly, but by a superhuman effort ‘my sister’s help is quite enough.’
He followed them with Lady Helen. At the carriage door the sisters hesitated a moment. Rose was helpless without a right hand. A little imperative movement from behind displaced Agnes, and Rose felt herself hoisted in by a strong arm. She sank into the further corner. The glow of the dawn caught her white delicate features, the curls on her temples, all the silken confusion of her dress. Hugh Flaxman put in Agnes and his sister, said something to Agnes about coming to inquire, and raised his hat. Rose caught the quick force and intensity of his eyes, and then closed her own, lost in a languid swoon of pain, memory, and resentful wonder.
Flaxman walked away down Park Lane through the chill morning quietness, the gathering light striking over the houses beside him on the misty stretches of the Park. His hat was over his eyes, his hands thrust into his pockets; a close observer would have noticed a certain trembling of the lips. It was but a few seconds since her young warm beauty had been for an instant in his arms; his whole being was shaken by it, and by that last look of hers. ‘Have I gone too far?’ he asked himself anxiously. ‘Is it divinely true—already—that she resents being left to herself! Oh! little rebel! You tried your best not to let me see. But you were angry, you were! Now, then, how to proceed? She is all fire, all character; I rejoice in it. She will give me trouble; so much the better. Poor little hurt thing! the fight is only beginning; but I will make her do penance some day for all that loftiness to-night.’
If these reflections betray to the reader a certain masterful note of confidence in Mr. Flaxman’s mind, he will perhaps find small cause to regret that Rose did give him a great deal of trouble.
Nothing could have been more ‘salutary,’ to use his own word, than the dance she led him during the next three weeks. She provoked him indeed at moments so much that he was a hundred times on the point of trying to seize his kingdom of heaven by violence, of throwing himself upon her with a tempest shock of reproach and appeal. But some secret instinct restrained him. She was wilful, she was capricious; she had a real and powerful distraction in her art. He must be patient and risk nothing.
He suspected, too, what was the truth—that Lady Charlotte was doing harm. Rose, indeed, had grown so touchily sensitive that she found offence in almost every word of Lady Charlotte’s about her nephew. Why should the apparently casual remarks of the aunt bear so constantly on the subject of the nephew’s social importance? Rose vowed to herself that she needed no reminder of that station whereunto it had pleased God to call her, and that Lady Charlotte might spare herself all those anxieties and reluctances which the girl’s quick sense detected, in spite of the invitations so freely showered on Lerwick Gardens.
The end of it all was that Hugh Flaxman found himself again driven into a corner. At the bottom of him was still a confidence that would not yield. Was it possible that he had ever given her some tiny involuntary glimpse of it, and that but for that glimpse she would have let him make his peace much more easily? At any rate, now he felt himself at the end of his resources.
‘I must change the venue,’ he said to himself; ‘decidedly I must change the venue.’
So by the end of June he had accepted an invitation to fish in Norway with a friend, and was gone. Rose received the news with a callousness which made even Lady Helen want to shake her.
On the eve of his journey, however, Hugh Flaxman had at last confessed himself to Catherine and Robert. His obvious plight made any further scruples on their part futile, and what they had they gave him in the way of sympathy. Also, Robert, gathering that he already knew much, and without betraying any confidence of Rose’s, gave him a hint or two on the subject of Langham. But more, not the friendliest mortal could do for him, and Flaxman went off into exile announcing to a mocking Elsmere that he should sit pensive on the banks of Norwegian rivers till fortune had had time to change.