* * * * *

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 last, 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 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 afterwards, 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 honourably 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 crowd 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-bye. 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-bye 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 these 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 recognised 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, 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 pleasures 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 tete-a-tete by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose's intense subsequent annoyance, who knew 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 schoolmaster's daughter should apparently care so little to be the Duke of Sedbergh's niece, and should even dare to allow herself the luxury of snubbing a Flaxman; at another, utterly sceptical 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 civilisation. 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 siecle,—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 road 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 wrong-doing 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.

Towards 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 honour 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 but 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 people, 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-halfpenny. 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 gaiety 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 debutante 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 seventeen, just emancipated, and trying her wings.

'Ah, there is Lady Florence!' said her partner, a handsome young Hussar. 'This ball is in her honour, 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 curtsey 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 towards 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, towards 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 towards 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 chaperons' conversation such as, by the kind contrivances of fate, a girl is tolerably sure to hear under similar circumstances.

The debutante'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 partner's 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 flavour 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 least 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 debutante. '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 the eyes of Lady Florence's neighbour 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 almost 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 downstairs, 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 downstairs 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 towards 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 farther 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 to 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.



BOOK VII

GAIN AND LOSS



CHAPTER XLVI

A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine and the child he had driven away more than once, but the claims upon himself were becoming so absorbing he did not know how to go even for a few weeks. There were certain individuals in particular who depended on him from day to day. One was Charles Richards's widow. The poor desperate creature had put herself abjectly into Elsmere's hands. He had sent her to an asylum, where she had been kindly and skilfully treated, and after six weeks' abstinence she had just returned to her children, and was being watched by himself and a competent woman neighbour, whom he had succeeded in interesting in the case.

Another was a young 'secret springer,' to use the mysterious terms of the trade—Robson by name—whom Elsmere had originally known as a clever workman belonging to the watchmaking colony, and a diligent attendant from the beginning on the Sunday lectures. He was now too ill to leave his lodgings, and his sickly pessimist personality had established a special hold on Robert. He was dying of tumour in the throat, and had become a torment to himself and a disgust to others. There was a spark of wayward genius in him, however, which enabled him to bear his ills with a mixture of savage humour and clear-eyed despair. In general outlook he was much akin to the author of the City of Dreadful Night, whose poems he read; the loathsome spectacles of London had filled him with a kind of sombre energy of revolt against all that is. And now that he could only work intermittently, he would sit brooding for hours, startling the fellow-workmen who came in to see him with ghastly Heine-like jokes on his own hideous disease, living no one exactly knew how, though it was supposed on supplies sent him by a shopkeeper uncle in the country, and constantly on the verge, as all his acquaintances felt, of some ingenious expedient or other for putting an end to himself and his troubles. He was unmarried, and a misogynist to boot. No woman willingly went near him, and he tended himself. How Robert had gained any hold upon him no one could guess. But from the moment when Elsmere, struck in the lecture-room by the pallid ugly face and swathed neck, began regularly to go and see him, the elder man felt instinctively that virtue had gone out of him, and that in some subtle way yet another life had become pitifully, silently dependent on his own stock of strength and comfort.

His lecturing and teaching work also was becoming more and more the instrument of far-reaching change, and therefore more and more difficult to leave. The thoughts of God, the image of Jesus, which were active and fruitful in his own mind, had been gradually passing from the one into the many, and Robert watched the sacred transforming emotion, once nurtured at his own heart, now working among the crowd of men and women his fiery speech had gathered round him, with a trembling joy, a humble prostration of the soul before the Eternal Truth, no words can fitly describe. With an ever-increasing detachment of mind from the objects of self and sense, he felt himself a tool in the Great Workman's hand. 'Accomplish Thy purposes in me,' was the cry of his whole heart and life; 'use me to the utmost; spend every faculty I have, O "Thou who mouldest men"!'

But in the end his work itself drove him away. A certain memorable Saturday evening brought it about. It had been his custom of late to spend an occasional evening hour after his night-school work in the North R—— Club, of which he was now by invitation a member. Here, in one of the inner rooms, he would stand against the mantelpiece chatting, smoking often with the men. Everything came up in turn to be discussed; and Robert was at least as ready to learn from the practical workers about him as to teach. But in general these informal talks and debates became the supplement of the Sunday lectures. Here he met Andrews and the Secularist crew face to face; here he grappled in Socratic fashion with objections and difficulties, throwing into the task all his charm and all his knowledge, a man at once of no pretensions and of unfailing natural dignity. Nothing, so far, had served his cause and his influence so well as these moments of free discursive intercourse. The mere orator, the mere talker, indeed, would never have gained any permanent hold; but the life behind gave weight to every acute or eloquent word, and importance even to those mere sallies of a boyish enthusiasm which were still common enough in him.

He had already visited the club once during the week preceding this Saturday. On both occasions there was much talk of the growing popularity and efficiency of the Elgood Street work, of the numbers attending the lectures, the story-telling, the Sunday school, and of the way in which the attractions of it had spread into other quarters of the parish, exciting there, especially among the clergy of St. Wilfrid's, an anxious and critical attention. The conversation on Saturday night, however, took a turn of its own. Robert felt in it a new and curious note of responsibility. The men present were evidently beginning to regard the work as their work also, and its success as their interest. It was perfectly natural, for not only had most of them been his supporters and hearers from the beginning, but some of them were now actually teaching in the night-school or helping in the various branches of the large and overflowing boys' club. He listened to them for a while in his favourite attitude, leaning against the mantelpiece, throwing in a word or two now and then as to how this or that part of the work might be amended or expanded. Then suddenly a kind of inspiration seemed to pass from them to him. Bending forward as the talk dropped a moment, he asked them, with an accent more emphatic than usual, whether in view of this collaboration of theirs, which was becoming more valuable to him and his original helpers every week, it was not time for a new departure.

'Suppose I drop my dictatorship,' he said, 'suppose we set up parliamentary government, are you ready to take your share? Are you ready to combine, to commit yourselves? Are you ready for an effort to turn this work into something lasting and organic?'

The men gathered round him smoked on in silence for a minute. Old Macdonald, who had been sitting contentedly puffing away in a corner peculiarly his own, and dedicated to the glorification—in broad Berwickshire—of the experimental philosophers, laid down his pipe and put on his spectacles, that he might grasp the situation better. Then Lestrange, in a dry cautious way, asked Elsmere to explain himself further.

Robert began to pace up and down, talking out his thought, his eye kindling.

But in a minute or two he stopped abruptly, with one of those striking rapid gestures characteristic of him.

'But no mere social and educational body, mind you!' and his bright commanding look swept round the circle. 'A good thing surely, "yet is there better than it." The real difficulty of every social effort—you know it and I know it—lies, not in the planning of the work, but in the kindling of will and passion enough to carry it through. And that can only be done by religion—by faith.'

He went back to his old leaning attitude, his hands behind him. The men gazed at him—at the slim figure, the transparent changing face—with a kind of fascination, but were still silent, till Macdonald said slowly, taking off his glasses again and clearing his throat—

'You'll be aboot starrtin' a new church, I'm thinkin', Misther Elsmere?'

'If you like,' said Robert impetuously. 'I have no fear of the great words. You can do nothing by despising the past and its products; you can also do nothing by being too much afraid of them, by letting them choke and stifle your own life. Let the new wine have its new bottles if it must, and never mind words. Be content to be a new "sect," "conventicle," or what not, so long as you feel that you are something with a life and purpose of its own, in this tangle of a world.'

Again he paused with knit brows, thinking. Lestrange sat with his elbows on his knees studying him, the spare gray hair brushed back tightly from the bony face, on the lips the slightest Voltairean smile. Perhaps it was the coolness of his look which insensibly influenced Robert's next words.

'However, I don't imagine we should call ourselves a church! Something much humbler will do, if you choose ever to make anything of these suggestions of mine. "Association," "society," "brotherhood," what you will! But always, if I can persuade you, with something in the name, and everything in the body itself, to show that for the members of it life rests still, as all life worth having has everywhere rested on trust and memory!—trust in the God of experience and history; memory of that God's work in man, by which alone we know Him and can approach Him. Well, of that work—I have tried to prove it to you a thousand times—Jesus of Nazareth has become to us, by the evolution of circumstance, the most moving, the most efficacious of all types and epitomes. We have made our protest—we are daily making it—in the face of society, against the fictions and overgrowths which at the present time are excluding him more and more from human love. But now, suppose we turn our backs on negation, and have done with mere denial! Suppose we throw all our energies into the practical building of a new house of faith, the gathering and organising of a new Company of Jesus!'

Other men had been stealing in while he was speaking. The little room was nearly full. It was strange, the contrast between the squalid modernness of the scene, with its incongruous sights and sounds, the Club-room, painted in various hideous shades of cinnamon and green, the smoke, the lines and groups of working-men in every sort of working dress, the occasional rumbling of huge waggons past the window, the click of glasses and cups in the refreshment bar outside, and this stir of spiritual passion which any competent observer might have felt sweeping through the little crowd as Robert spoke, connecting what was passing there with all that is sacred and beautiful in the history of the world.

After another silence a young fellow, in a shabby velvet coat, stood up. He was commonly known among his fellow-potters as 'the hartist,' because of his long hair, his little affectations of dress, and his aesthetic susceptibilities generally. The wits of the Club made him their target, but the teasing of him that went on was more or less tempered by the knowledge that in his own queer way he had brought up and educated two young sisters almost from infancy, and that his sweetheart had been killed before his eyes a year before in a railway accident.

'I dun know,' he said in a high treble voice, 'I dun know whether I speak for anybody but myself—very likely not; but what I do know,' and he raised his right hand and shook it with a gesture of curious felicity, 'is this—what Mr. Elsmere starts I'll join; where he goes I'll go; what's good enough for him's good enough for me. He's put a new heart and a new stomach into me, and what I've got he shall have, whenever it pleases 'im to call for it! So if he wants to run a new thing against or alongside the old uns, and he wants me to help him with it—I don't know as I'm very clear what he's driving at, nor what good I can do 'im—but when Tom Wheeler's asked for he'll be there!'

A deep murmur, rising almost into a shout of assent ran through the little assembly. Robert bent forward, his eye glistening, a moved acknowledgment in his look and gesture. But in reality a pang ran through the fiery soul. It was 'the personal estimate,' after all, that was shaping their future and his and the idealist was up in arms for his idea, sublimely jealous lest any mere personal fancy should usurp its power and place.

A certain amount of desultory debate followed as to the possible outlines of a possible organisation, and as to the observances which might be devised to mark its religious character. As it flowed on the atmosphere grew more and more electric. A new passion, though still timid and awestruck, seemed to shine from the looks of the men standing or sitting round the central figure. Even Lestrange lost his smile under the pressure of that strange subdued expectancy about him; and when Robert walked homeward, about midnight, there weighed upon him an almost awful sense of crisis, of an expanding future.

He let himself in softly and went into his study. There he sank into a chair and fainted. He was probably not unconscious very long, but after he had struggled back to his senses, and was lying stretched on the sofa among the books with which it was littered, the solitary candle in the big room throwing weird shadows about him, a moment of black depression overtook him. It was desolate and terrible, like a prescience of death. How was it he had come to feel so ill? Suddenly, as he looked back over the preceding weeks, the physical weakness and disturbance which had marked them, and which he had struggled through, paying as little heed as possible, took shape, spectre-like, in his mind.

And at the same moment a passionate rebellion against weakness and disablement arose in him. He sat up dizzily, his head in his hands.

'Rest—strength,' he said to himself, with strong inner resolve, 'for the work's sake!'

He dragged himself up to bed and said nothing to Catherine till the morning. Then, with boyish brightness, he asked her to take him and the babe off without delay to the Norman coast, vowing that he would lounge and idle for six whole weeks if she would let him. Shocked by his looks, she gradually got from him the story of the night before. As he told it, his swoon was a mere untoward incident and hindrance in a spiritual drama, the thrill of which, while he described it, passed even to her. The contrast, however, between the strong hopes she felt pulsing through him, and his air of fragility and exhaustion, seemed to melt the heart within her, and make her whole being, she hardly knew why, one sensitive dread. She sat beside him, her head laid against his shoulder, oppressed by a strange and desolate sense of her comparatively small share in this ardent life. In spite of his tenderness and devotion, she felt often as though he were no longer hers—as though a craving hungry world, whose needs were all dark and unintelligible to her, were asking him from her, claiming to use as roughly and prodigally as it pleased the quick mind and delicate frame.

As to the schemes developing round him, she could not take them in whether for protest or sympathy. She could think only of where to go, what doctor to consult, how she could persuade him to stay away long enough.

There was little surprise in Elgood Street when Elsmere announced that he must go off for a while. He so announced it that everybody who heard him understood that his temporary withdrawal was to be the mere preparation for a great effort—the vigil before the tourney; and the eager friendliness with which he was met sent him off in good heart.

* * * * *

Three or four days later he, Catherine and Mary were at Petites Dalles, a little place on the Norman coast, near Fecamp, with which he had first made acquaintance years before, when he was at Oxford.

Here all that in London had been oppressive in the August heat suffered 'a sea change,' and became so much matter for physical delight. It was fiercely hot indeed. Every morning, between five and six o'clock, Catherine would stand by the little white-veiled window, in the dewy silence, to watch the eastern shadows spreading sharply already into a blazing world of sun, and see the tall poplar just outside shooting into a quivering changeless depth of blue. Then, as early as possible, they would sally forth before the glare became unbearable. The first event of the day was always Mary's bathe, which gradually became a spectacle for the whole beach, so ingenious were the blandishments of the father who wooed her into the warm sandy shallows, and so beguiling the glee and pluck of the two-year-old English bebe. By eleven the heat out of doors grew intolerable, and they would stroll back—father and mother and trailing child—past the hotels on the plage, along the irregular village lane, to the little house where they had established themselves, with Mary's nurse and a French bonne to look after them; would find the green wooden shutters drawn close; the dejeuner waiting for them in the cool bare room; and the scent of the coffee penetrating from the kitchen, where the two maids kept up a dumb but perpetual warfare. Then afterwards Mary, emerging from her sun-bonnet, would be tumbled into her white bed upstairs, and lie, a flushed image of sleep, till the patter of her little feet on the boards which alone separated one storey from the other, warned mother and nurse that an imp of mischief was let loose again. Meanwhile Robert, in the carpetless salon, would lie back in the rickety armchair which was its only luxury, lazily dozing and dreaming, Balzac, perhaps, in his hand, but quite another comedie humaine unrolling itself vaguely meanwhile in the contriving optimist mind.

Petites Dalles was not fashionable yet, though it aspired to be; but it could boast of a deputy, and a senator, and a professor of the College de France, as good as any at Etretat, a tired journalist or two, and a sprinkling of Rouen men of business. Robert soon made friends among them, more suo, by dint of a rough-and-ready French, spoken with the most unblushing accent imaginable, and lounged along the sands through many an amusing and sociable hour with one or other of his new acquaintances.

But by the evening husband and wife would leave the crowded beach, and mount by some tortuous dusty way on to the high plateau through which was cleft far below the wooded fissure of the village. Here they seemed to have climbed the beanstalk into a new world. The rich Normandy country lay all round them—the cornfields, the hedgeless tracts of white-flowered lucerne or crimson clover, dotted by the orchard trees which make one vast garden of the land as one sees it from a height. On the fringe of the cliff, where the soil became too thin and barren even for French cultivation, there was a wild belt, half heather, half tangled grass and flower-growth, which the English pair loved for their own special reasons. Bathed in light, cooled by the evening wind, the patches of heather glowing, the tall grasses swaying in the breeze, there were moments when its wide, careless, dusty beauty reminded them poignantly, and yet most sweetly, of the home of their first unclouded happiness, of the Surrey commons and wildernesses.

One evening they were sitting in the warm dusk by the edge of a little dip of heather sheltered by a tuft of broom, when suddenly they heard the purring sound of the night-jar, and immediately after the bird itself lurched past them, and as it disappeared into the darkness they caught several times the characteristic click of the wing.

Catherine raised her hand and laid it on Robert's. The sudden tears dropped on to her cheeks.

'Did you hear it, Robert?'

He drew her to him. These involuntary signs of an abiding pain in her always smote him to the heart.

'I am not unhappy, Robert,' she said at last, raising her head. 'No; if you will only get well and strong. I have submitted. It is not for myself, but——'

For what then? Merely the touchingness of mortal things as such?—of youth, of hope, of memory?

Choking down a sob, she looked seaward over the curling flame-coloured waves, while he held her hand close and tenderly. No—she was not unhappy. Something, indeed, had gone for ever out of that early joy. Her life had been caught and nipped in the great inexorable wheel of things. It would go in some sense maimed to the end. But the bitter self-torturing of that first endless year was over. Love, and her husband, and the thousand subtle forces of a changing world had conquered. She would live and die steadfast to the old faiths. But her present mind and its outlook was no more the mind of her early married life than the Christian philosophy of to-day is the Christian philosophy of the Middle Ages. She was not conscious of change, but change there was. She had, in fact, undergone that dissociation of the moral judgment from a special series of religious formulae which is the crucial, the epoch-making fact of our day. 'Unbelief,' says the orthodox preacher, 'is sin, and implies it': and while he speaks, the saint in the unbeliever gently smiles down his argument, and suddenly, in the rebel of yesterday men see the rightful heir of to-morrow.



CHAPTER XLVII

Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose's summer, indeed, was much varied by visits to country houses—many of them belonging to friends and acquaintances of the Flaxman family—by concerts, and the demands of several new and exciting artistic friendships. But she was seldom loth to come back to the little bare valley and the gray-walled house. Even the rain which poured down in August, quite unabashed by any consciousness of fine weather elsewhere, was not as intolerable to her as in past days.

The girl was not herself; there was visible in her not only that general softening and deepening of character which had been the consequence of her trouble in the spring, but a painful ennui she could hardly disguise, a longing for she knew not what. She was beginning to take the homage paid to her gift and her beauty with a quiet dignity, which was in no sense false modesty, but implied a certain clearness of vision, curious and disquieting in so young and dazzling a creature. And when she came home from her travels she would develop a taste for long walks, breasting the mountains in rain or sun, penetrating to their austerest solitudes alone, as though haunted by that profound saying of Obermann, 'Man is not made for enjoyment only—la tristesse fait aussi partie de ses vastes besoins.'

What, indeed, was it that ailed her? In her lonely moments, especially in those moments among the high fells, beside some little tarn or streamlet, while the sheets of mist swept by her, or the great clouds dappled the spreading sides of the hills, she thought often of Langham—of that first thrill of passion which had passed through her, delusive and abortive, like one of those first thrills of spring which bring out the buds, only to provide victims for the frost. Now with her again 'a moral east wind was blowing.' The passion was gone. The thought of Langham still roused in her a pity that seemed to strain at her heartstrings. But was it really she, really this very Rose, who had rested for that one intoxicating instant on his breast? She felt a sort of bitter shame over her own shallowness of feeling. She must surely be a poor creature, else how could such a thing have befallen her and have left so little trace behind?

And then, her hand dabbling in the water, her face raised to the blind friendly mountains, she would go dreaming far afield. Little vignettes of London would come and go on the inner retina; smiles and sighs would follow one another.

'How kind he was that time! how amusing this!'

Or, 'How provoking he was that afternoon! how cold that evening!'

Nothing else—the pronoun remained ambiguous.

'I want a friend!' she said to herself once as she was sitting far up in the bosom of High Fell, 'I want a friend badly. Yet my lover deserts me, and I send away my friend!'

One afternoon Mrs. Thornburgh, the vicar, and Rose were wandering round the churchyard together, enjoying a break of sunny weather after days of rain. Mrs. Thornburgh's personal accent, so to speak, had grown perhaps a little more defined, a little more emphatic even, than when we first knew her. The vicar, on the other hand, was a trifle grayer, a trifle more submissive, as though on the whole, in the long conjugal contest of life, he was getting clearly worsted as the years went on. But the performance through which his wife was now taking him tried him exceptionally, and she only kept him to it with difficulty. She had had an attack of bronchitis in the spring, and was still somewhat delicate—a fact which to his mind gave her an unfair advantage of him. For she would make use of it to keep constantly before him ideas which he disliked, and in which he considered she took a morbid and unbecoming pleasure. The vicar was of opinion that when his latter end overtook him he should meet it on the whole as courageously as other men. But he was altogether averse to dwelling upon it, or the adjuncts of it, beforehand. Mrs. Thornburgh, however, since her illness had awoke to that inquisitive affectionate interest in these very adjuncts which many women feel. And it was extremely disagreeable to the vicar.

At the present moment she was engaged in choosing the precise spots in the little churchyard where it seemed to her it would be pleasant to rest. There was one corner in particular which attracted her, and she stood now looking at it with measuring eyes and dissatisfied mouth.

'William, I wish you would come here and help me!'

The vicar took no notice, but went on talking to Rose.

'William!' imperatively.

The vicar turned unwillingly.

'You know, William, if you wouldn't mind lying with your feet that way, there would be just room for me. But, of course, if you will have them the other way——' The shoulders in the old black silk mantle went up, and the gray curls shook dubiously.

The vicar's countenance showed plainly that he thought the remark worse than irrelevant.

'My dear,' he said crossly, 'I am not thinking of those things, nor do I wish to think of them. Everything has its time and place. It is close on tea, and Miss Rose says she must be going home.'

Mrs. Thornburgh again shook her head, this time with a disapproving sigh.

'You talk, William,' she said severely, 'as if you were a young man, instead of being turned sixty-six last birthday.'

And again she measured the spaces with her eye, checking the results aloud. But the vicar was obdurately deaf. He strolled on with Rose, who was chattering to him about a visit to Manchester, and the little church gate clicked behind them. Hearing it, Mrs. Thornburgh relaxed her measurements. They were only really interesting to her after all when the vicar was by. She hurried after them as fast as her short squat figure would allow, and stopped midway to make an exclamation.

'A carriage!' she said, shading her eyes with a very plump hand, 'stopping at Greybarns!'

The one road of the valley was visible from the churchyard, winding along the bottom of the shallow green trough, for at least two miles. Greybarns was a farmhouse just beyond Burwood, about half a mile away.

Mrs. Thornburgh moved on, her matronly face aglow with interest.

'Mary Jenkinson taken ill!' she said. 'Of course, that's Doctor Baker! Well, it's to be hoped it won't be twins this time. But, as I told her last Sunday, "It's constitutional, my dear." I knew a woman who had three pairs! Five o'clock now. Well, about seven it'll be worth while sending to inquire.'

When she overtook the vicar and his companion, she began to whisper certain particulars into the ear that was not on Rose's side. The vicar, who, like Uncle Toby, was possessed of a fine natural modesty, would have preferred that his wife should refrain from whispering on these topics in Rose's presence. But he submitted lest opposition should provoke her into still more audible improprieties; and Rose walked on a step or two in front of the pair, her eyes twinkling a little. At the vicarage gate she was let off without the customary final gossip. Mrs. Thornburgh was so much occupied in the fate hanging over Mary Jenkinson that she, for once, forgot to catechise Rose as to any marriageable young men she might have come across in a recent visit to a great country-house of the neighbourhood; an operation which formed the invariable pendant to any of Rose's absences.

So, with a smiling nod to them both, the girl turned homewards. As she did so she became aware of a man's figure walking along the space of road between Greybarns and Burwood, the western light behind it.

Dr. Baker? But even granting that Mrs. Jenkinson had brought him five miles on a false alarm, in the provoking manner of matrons, the shortest professional visit could not be over in this time.

She looked again, shading her eyes. She was nearing the gate of Burwood, and involuntarily slackened step. The man who was approaching, catching sight of the slim girlish figure in the broad hat and pink and white cotton dress, hurried up. The colour rushed to Rose's cheek. In another minute she and Hugh Flaxman were face to face.

She could not hide her astonishment.

'Why are you not in Scotland?' she said after she had given him her hand. 'Lady Helen told me last week she expected you in Ross-shire.'

Directly the words left her mouth she felt she had given him an opening. And why had Nature plagued her with this trick of blushing?

'Because I am here!' he said smiling, his keen dancing eyes looking down upon her. He was bronzed as she had never seen him. And never had he seemed to bring with him such an atmosphere of cool pleasant strength. 'I have slain so much since the first of July that I can slay no more. I am not like other men. The Nimrod in me is easily gorged, and goes to sleep after a while. So this is Burwood?

He had caught her just on the little sweep leading to the gate, and now his eye swept quickly over the modest old house, with its trim garden, its overgrown porch and open casement windows. She dared not ask him again why he was there. In the properest manner she invited him 'to come in and see mamma.'

'I hope Mrs. Leyburn is better than she was in town? I shall be delighted to see her. But must you go in so soon? I left my carriage half a mile below, and have been revelling in the sun and air. I am loth to go indoors yet awhile. Are you busy? Would it trouble you to put me in the way to the head of the valley? Then, if you will allow me, I will present myself later.'

Rose thought his request as little in the ordinary line of things as his appearance. But she turned and walked beside him, pointing out the crags at the head, the great sweep of High Fell, and the pass over to Ullswater, with as much sangfroid as she was mistress of.

He, on his side, informed her that on his way to Scotland he had bethought himself that he had never seen the Lakes, that he had stopped at Whinborough, was bent on walking over the High Fell pass to Ullswater, and making his way thence to Ambleside, Grasmere, and Keswick.

'But you are much too late to-day to get to Ullswater?' cried Rose incautiously.

'Certainly. You see my hotel,' and he pointed, smiling, to a white farmhouse standing just at the bend of the valley, where the road turned towards Whinborough. 'I persuaded the good woman there to give me a bed for the night, took my carriage a little farther, then, knowing I had friends in these parts, I came on to explore.'

Rose angrily felt her flush getting deeper and deeper.

'You are the first tourist,' she said coolly, 'who has ever stayed in Whindale.'

'Tourist! I repudiate the name. I am a worshipper at the shrine of Wordsworth and Nature. Helen and I long ago defined a tourist as a being with straps. I defy you to discover a strap about me, and I left my Murray in the railway carriage.'

He looked at her laughing. She laughed too. The infection of his strong sunny presence was irresistible. In London it had been so easy to stand on her dignity, to remember whenever he was friendly that the night before he had been distant. In these green solitudes it was not easy to be anything but natural—the child of the moment!

'You are neither more practical nor more economical than when I saw you last,' she said demurely. 'When did you leave Norway?'

They wandered on past the vicarage talking fast. Mr. Flaxman, who had been joined for a time, on his fishing tour, by Lord Waynflete, was giving her an amusing account of the susceptibility to titles shown by the primitive democrats of Norway. As they passed a gap in the vicarage hedge, laughing and chatting. Rose became aware of a window and a gray head hastily withdrawn. Mr. Flaxman was puzzled by the merry flash, instantly suppressed, that shot across her face.

Presently they reached the hamlet of High Close, and the house where Mary Backhouse died, and where her father and the poor bedridden Jim still lived. They mounted the path behind it, and plunged into the hazel plantation which had sheltered Robert and Catherine on a memorable night. But when they were through it, Rose turned to the right along a scrambling path leading to the top of the first great shoulder of High Fell. It was a steep climb, though a short one, and it seemed to Rose that when she had once let him help her over a rock her hand was never her own again. He kept it an almost constant prisoner on one pretext or another till they were at the top.

Then she sank down on a rock out of breath. He stood beside her, lifting his brown wideawake from his brow. The air below had been warm and relaxing. Here it played upon them both with a delicious life-giving freshness. He looked round on the great hollow bosom of the fell, the crags buttressing it on either hand, the winding greenness of the valley, the white sparkle of the river.

'It reminds me a little of Norway. The same austere and frugal beauty—the same bare valley floors. But no pines, no peaks, no fiords!'

'No!' said Rose scornfully, 'we are not Norway, and we are not Switzerland. To prevent disappointment, I may at once inform you that we have no glaciers, and that there is perhaps only one place in the district where a man who was not an idiot could succeed in killing himself.'

He looked at her, calmly smiling.

'You are angry,' he said, 'because I make comparisons. You are wholly on a wrong scent. I never saw a scene in the world that pleased me half as much as this bare valley, that gray roof'—and he pointed to Burwood among its trees—'and this knoll of rocky ground.'

His look travelled back to her, and her eyes sank beneath it. He threw himself down on the short grass beside her.

'It rained this morning,' she still had the spirit to murmur under her breath.

He took not the smallest heed.

'Do you know,' he said—and his voice dropped—'can you guess at all why I am here to-day?'

'You had never seen the Lakes,' she repeated in a prim voice, her eyes still cast down, the corners of her mouth twitching. 'You stopped at Whinborough, intending to take the pass over to Ullswater, thence to make your way to Ambleside and Keswick—or was it to Keswick and Ambleside?'

She looked up innocently. But the flashing glance she met abashed her again.

'Taquine!' he said, 'but you shall not laugh me out of countenance. If I said all that to you just now, may I be forgiven. One purpose, one only, brought me from Norway, forbade me to go to Scotland, drew me to Whinborough, guided me up your valley—the purpose of seeing your face!'

It could not be said at that precise moment that he had attained it. Rather she seemed bent on hiding that face quite away from him. It seemed to him an age before, drawn by the magnetism of his look, her hands dropped, and she faced him, crimson, her breath fluttering a little. Then she would have spoken, but he would not let her. Very tenderly and quietly his hand possessed itself of hers as he knelt beside her.

'I have been in exile for two months—you sent me. I saw that I troubled you in London. You thought I was pursuing you—pressing you. Your manner said "Go!" and I went. But do you think that for one day, or hour, or moment I have thought of anything else in those Norway woods but of you and of this blessed moment when I should be at your feet, as I am now?'

She trembled. Her hand seemed to leap in his. His gaze melted, enwrapped her. He bent forward. In another moment her silence would have so answered for her that his covetous arms would have stolen about her for good and all. But suddenly a kind of shiver ran through her—a shiver which was half memory, half shame. She drew back violently, covering her eyes with her hand.

'Oh no, no!' she cried, and her other hand struggled to get free, 'don't, don't talk to me so—I have a—a—confession.'

He watched her, his lips trembling a little, a smile of the most exquisite indulgence and understanding dawning in his eyes. Was she going to confess to him what he knew so well already? If he could only force her to say it on his breast.

But she held him at arm's length.

'You remember—you remember Mr. Langham?'

'Remember him!' echoed Mr. Flaxman fervently.

'That thought-reading night at Lady Charlotte's, on the way home, he spoke to me. I said I loved him. I did love him; I let him kiss me!'

Her flush had quite faded. He could hardly tell whether she was yielding or defiant as the words burst from her.

An expression, half trouble, half compunction, came into his face.

'I knew,' he said very low; 'or rather, I guessed.' And for an instant it occurred to him to unburden himself, to ask her pardon for that espionage of his. But no, no; not till he had her safe. 'I guessed, I mean, that there had been something grave between you. I saw you were sad. I would have given the world to comfort you.'

Her lip quivered childishly.

'I said I loved him that night. The next morning he wrote to me that it could never be.'

He looked at her a moment embarrassed. The conversation was not easy. Then the smile broke once more.

'And you have forgotten him as he deserved. If I were not sure of that I could wish him all the tortures of the Inferno! As it is, I cannot think of him; I cannot let you think of him. Sweet, do you know that ever since I first saw you the one thought of my days, the dream of my nights, the purpose of my whole life, has been to win you? There was another in the field; I knew it. I stood by and waited. He failed you—I knew he must in some form or other. Then I was hasty, and you resented it. Little tyrant, you made yourself a Rose with many thorns! But, tell me, tell me, it is all over—your pain, my waiting. Make yourself sweet to me! unfold to me at last?'

An instant she wavered. His bliss was almost in his grasp. Then she sprang up, and Flaxman found himself standing by her, rebuffed and surprised.

'No, no!' she cried, holding out her hands to him though all the time. 'Oh, it is too soon! I should despise myself, I do despise myself. It tortures me that I can change and forget so easily; it ought to torture you. Oh, don't ask me yet to—to——'

'To be my wife,' he said calmly, his cheek a little flushed, his eye meeting hers with a passion in it that strove so hard for self-control it was almost sternness.

'Not yet!' she pleaded, and then, after a moment's hesitation, she broke into the most appealing smiles, though the tears were in her eyes, hurrying out the broken, beseeching words. 'I want a friend so much—a real friend. Since Catherine left I have had no one. I have been running riot. Take me in hand. Write to me, scold me, advise me, I will be your pupil, I will tell you everything. You seem to me so fearfully wise, so much older. Oh, don't be vexed. And—and—in six months——'

She turned away, rosy as her name. He held her still, so rigidly, that her hands were almost hurt. The shadow of the hat fell over her eyes; the delicate outlines of the neck and shoulders in the pretty pale dress were defined against the green hill background. He studied her deliberately, a hundred different expressions sweeping across his face. A debate of the most feverish interest was going on within him. Her seriousness at the moment, the chances of the future, her character, his own—all these knotty points entered into it, had to be weighed and decided with lightning rapidity. But Hugh Flaxman was born under a lucky star, and the natal charm held good.

At last he gave a long breath; he stooped and kissed her hands.

'So be it. For six months I will be your guardian, your friend, your teasing implacable censor. At the end of that time I will be—well, never mind what. I give you fair warning.'

He released her. Rose clasped her hands before her and stood drooping. Now that she had gained her point, all her bright mocking independence seemed to have vanished. She might have been in reality the tremulous timid child she seemed. His spirits rose; he began to like the role she had assigned to him. The touch of unexpectedness, in all she said and did, acted with exhilarating force on his fastidious romantic sense.

'Now, then,' he said, picking up her gloves from the grass, 'you have given me my rights; I will begin to exercise them at once. I must take you home, the clouds are coming up again, and on the way will you kindly give me a full, true, and minute account of these two months during which you have been so dangerously left to your own devices?'

She hesitated, and began to speak with difficulty, her eyes on the ground. But by the time they were in the main Shanmoor path again, and she was not so weakly dependent on his physical aid, her spirits too returned. Pacing along with her hands behind her, she began by degrees to throw into her accounts of her various visits and performances plenty of her natural malice.

And after a bit, as that strange storm of feeling which had assailed her on the mountain-top abated something of its bewildering force, certain old grievances began to raise very lively heads in her. The smart of Lady Fauntleroy's ball was still there; she had not yet forgiven him all those relations; and the teasing image of Lady Florence woke up in her.