Robert Elsmere Part 64

'What else is there for me to do?' cried Robert, turning upon him, startled by the slow deliberate tone.

'Well, of course, you know that there are many men, men with whom both you and I are acquainted, who hold very much what I imagine your opinions now are, or will settle into, who are still in the Church of England, doing admirable work there!'

'I know,' said Elsmere quickly--'I know; I cannot conceive it, nor could you. Imagine standing up Sunday after Sunday to say the things you do _not_ believe,--using words as a convention which those who hear you receive as literal truth,--and trusting the maintenance of your position either to your neighbour's forbearance or to your own powers of evasion!

With the ideas at present in my head, nothing would induce me to preach another Easter Day sermon to a congregation that have both a moral and a legal right to demand from me an implicit belief in the material miracle!'

'Yes,' said the other gravely--'yes, I believe you are right. It can't be said the Broad Church movement has helped us much! How greatly it promised!--how little it has performed! For the private person, the wors.h.i.+pper, it is different--or I think so. No man pries into our prayers; and to cut ourselves off from common wors.h.i.+p is to lose that fellows.h.i.+p which is in itself a witness and vehicle of G.o.d.'

But his tone had grown hesitating, and touched with melancholy.

There was a moment's silence. Then Robert walked up to him again.

'At the same time,' he said falteringly, standing before the elder man, as he might have stood as an undergraduate, 'let me not be ras.h.!.+ If you think this change has been too rapid to last--if you, knowing me better than at this moment I can know myself--if you bid me wait a while, before I take any overt step, I will wait--oh, G.o.d knows I will wait!--my wife----' and his husky voice failed him utterly.

'Your wife!' cried Mr. Grey, startled. 'Mrs. Elsmere does not know?'

'My wife knows nothing, or almost nothing--and it will break her heart!'

He moved hastily away again, and stood with his back to his friend, his tall narrow form outlined against the window. Mr. Grey was left in dismay, rapidly turning over the impressions of Catherine left on him by his last year's sight of her. That pale distinguished woman with her look of strength and character,--he remembered Langham's a.n.a.lysis of her, and of the silent religious intensity she had brought with her from her training among the northern hills.

Was there a bitterly human tragedy preparing under all this thought-drama he had been listening to?

Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged hand almost timidly upon him.

'Elsmere, it won't break her heart! You are a good man. She is a good woman.' What an infinity of meaning there was in the simple words! 'Take courage. Tell her at once--tell her everything--and let _her_ decide whether there shall be any waiting. I cannot help you there; she can; she will probably understand you better than you understand yourself.'

He tightened his grasp, and gently pushed his guest into a chair beside him. Robert was deadly pale, his face quivering painfully. The long physical strain of the past months had weakened for the moment all the controlling forces of the will. Mr. Grey stood over him--the whole man dilating, expanding, under a tyrannous stress of feeling.

'It is hard, it is bitter,' he said slowly, with a wonderful manly tenderness. 'I know it, I have gone through it. So has many and many a poor soul that you and I have known! But there need be no sting in the wound unless we ourselves envenom it. I know--oh! I know very well--the man of the world scoffs, but to him who has once been a Christian of the old sort, the parting with the Christian mythology is the rending asunder of bones and marrow. It means parting with half the confidence, half the joy, of life! But take heart,' and the tone grew still more solemn, still more penetrating. 'It is the education of G.o.d! Do not imagine it will put you farther from Him! He is in criticism, in science, in doubt, so long as the doubt is a pure and honest doubt, as yours is. He is in all life, in all thought. The thought of man, as it has shaped itself in inst.i.tutions, in philosophies, in science, in patient critical work, or in the life of charity, is the one continuous revelation of G.o.d! Look for Him in it all; see how, little by little, the Divine indwelling force, using as its tools--but _merely_ as its tools!--man's physical appet.i.tes and conditions, has built up conscience and the moral life; think how every faculty of the mind has been trained in turn to take its part in the great work of faith upon the visible world! Love and imagination built up religion,--shall reason destroy it!

No!--reason is G.o.d's like the rest! Trust it,--trust him. The leading strings of the past are dropping from you; they are dropping from the world, not wantonly, or by chance, but in the providence of G.o.d. Learn the lesson of your own pain,--learn to seek G.o.d, not in any single event of past history, _but in your own soul_,--in the constant verifications of experience, in the life of Christian love. Spiritually you have gone through the last wrench; I promise it you! You being what you are, nothing can cut this ground from under your feet. Whatever may have been the forms of human belief, _faith_, the faith which saves, has always been rooted here! All things change,--creeds and philosophies and outward systems,--but G.o.d remains!

'"Life, that in me has rest, As I, undying Life, have power in Thee!"'

The lines dropped with low vibrating force from lips unaccustomed indeed to such an outburst. The speaker stood a moment longer in silence beside the figure in the chair, and it seemed to Robert, gazing at him with fixed eyes, that the man's whole presence, at once so homely and so majestic, was charged with benediction. It was as though invisible hands of healing and consecration had been laid upon him. The fiery soul beside him had kindled anew the drooping life of his own. So the torch of G.o.d pa.s.ses on its way, hand reaching out to hand.

He bent forward, stammering incoherent words of a.s.sent and grat.i.tude, he knew not what. Mr. Grey, who had sunk into his chair, gave him time to recover himself. The intensity of the tutor's own mood relaxed; and presently he began to talk to his guest, in a wholly different tone, of the practical detail of the step before him, supposing it to be taken immediately, discussing the probable att.i.tude of Robert's bishop, the least conspicuous mode of withdrawing from the living, and so on--all with gentleness and sympathy indeed, but with an indefinable change of manner, which showed that he felt it well both for himself and Elsmere to repress any further expression of emotion. There was something, a vein of stoicism perhaps, in Mr. Grey's temper of mind, which, while it gave a special force and sacredness to his rare moments of fervent speech, was wont in general to make men more self-controlled than usual in his presence. Robert felt now the bracing force of it.

'Will you stay with us to dinner?' Mr. Grey asked when at last Elsmere got up to go. 'There are one or two lone Fellows coming--asked before your telegram came, of course. Do exactly as you like.'

'I think not,' said Robert, after a pause. 'I longed to see you, but I am not fit for general society.'

Mr. Grey did not press him. He rose and went with his visitor to the door.

'Good-bye, good-bye! Let me always know what I can do for you. And your wife--poor thing, poor thing! Go and tell her, Elsmere; don't lose a moment you can help. G.o.d help her and you!'

They grasped each other's hands. Mr. Grey followed him down the stairs and along the narrow hall. He opened the hall door, and smiled a last smile of encouragement and sympathy into the eyes that expressed such a young moved grat.i.tude. The door closed. Little did Elsmere realise that never, in this life, would he see that smile or hear that voice again!

CHAPTER XXVIII

In half an hour from the time Mr. Grey's door closed upon him, Elsmere had caught a convenient cross-country train, and had left the Oxford towers and spires, the shrunken summer Isis, and the flat hot river meadows far behind him. He had meant to stay at Merton, as we know, for the night. Now, his one thought was to get back to Catherine. The urgency of Mr. Grey's words was upon him, and love had a miserable pang that it should have needed to be urged.

By eight o'clock he was again at Churton. There were no carriages waiting at the little station, but the thought of the walk across the darkening common through the August moonrise had been a refreshment to him in the heat and crowd of the train. He hurried through the small town, where the streets were full of summer idlers, and the lamps were twinkling in the still balmy air, along a dusty stretch of road, leaving man and his dwellings farther and farther to the rear of him, till at last he emerged on a boundless tract of common, and struck to the right into a cart-track leading to Murewell.

He was on the top of a high sandy ridge, looking west and north, over a wide evening world of heather and wood and hill. To the right, far ahead, across the misty lower grounds into which he was soon to plunge, rose the woods of Murewell, black and ma.s.sive in the twilight distance.

To the left, but on a nearer plane, the undulating common stretching downwards from where he stood rose suddenly towards a height crowned with a group of gaunt and jagged firs--landmarks for all the plain--of which every ghostly bough and crest was now sharply outlined against a luminous sky. For the wide heaven in front of him was still delicately glowing in all its under parts with soft harmonies of dusky red or blue, while in its higher zone the same tract of sky was closely covered with the finest network of pearl-white cloud, suffused at the moment with a silver radiance so intense that a spectator might almost have dreamed the moon had forgotten its familiar place of rising, and was about to mount into a startled expectant west. Not a light in all the wide expanse, and for a while not a sound of human life, save the beat of Robert's step, or the occasional tap of his stick against the pebbles of the road.

Presently he reached the edge of the ridge whence the rough track he was following sank sharply to the lower levels. Here was a marvellous point of view, and the rector stood a moment, beside a bare weather-blasted fir, a ghostly shadow thrown behind him. All around the gorse and heather seemed still radiating light, as though the air had been so drenched in suns.h.i.+ne that even long after the sun had vanished the invading darkness found itself still unable to win firm possession of earth and sky. Every little stone in the sandy road was still weirdly visible; the colour of the heather, now in lavish bloom, could be felt though hardly seen.

Before him melted line after line of woodland, broken by hollow after hollow, filled with vaporous wreaths of mist. About him were the sounds of a wild nature. The air was resonant with the purring of the night-jars, and every now and then he caught the loud clap of their wings as they swayed unsteadily through the furze and bracken. Overhead a trio of wild ducks flew across, from pond to pond, their hoa.r.s.e cry descending through the darkness. The partridges on the hill called to each other, and certain sharp sounds betrayed to the solitary listener the presence of a flock of swans on a neighbouring pool.

The rector felt himself alone on a wide earth. It was almost with a start of pleasure that he caught at last the barking of dogs on a few distant farms, or the dim thunderous rush of a train through the wide wooded landscape beyond the heath. Behind that frowning ma.s.s of wood lay the rectory. The lights must be lit in the little drawing-room; Catherine must be sitting by the lamp, her fine head bent over book or work, grieving for him perhaps, her anxious expectant heart going out to him through the dark. He thinks of the village lying wrapped in the peace of the August night, the lamp rays from shop-front or cas.e.m.e.nt streaming out on to the green; he thinks of his child, of his dead mother, feeling heavy and bitter within him all the time the message of separation and exile.

But his mood was no longer one of mere dread, of helpless pain, of miserable self-scorn. Contact with Henry Grey had brought him that rekindling of the flame of conscience, that medicinal stirring of the soul's waters, which is the most precious boon that man can give to man.

In that sense which attaches to every successive resurrection of our best life from the shades of despair or selfishness, he had that day, almost that hour, been born again. He was no longer filled mainly with the sense of personal failure, with scorn for his own blundering impetuous temper, so lacking in prescience and in balance; or, in respect to his wife, with such an anguished impotent remorse. He was nerved and braced; whatever oscillations the mind might go through in its search for another equilibrium, to-night there was a moment of calm.

The earth to him was once more full of G.o.d, existence full of value.

'The things I have always loved, I love still!' he had said to Mr. Grey.

And in this healing darkness it was as if the old loves, the old familiar images of thought, returned to him new-clad, re-entering the desolate heart in a white-winged procession of consolation. On the heath beside him the Christ stood once more, and as the disciple felt the sacred presence he could bear for the first time to let the chafing pent-up current of love flow into the new channels, so painfully prepared for it by the toil of thought. '_Either G.o.d or an impostor._'

What scorn the heart, the intellect, threw on the alternative! Not in the dress of speculations which represent the product of long past, long superseded looms of human thought, but in the guise of common manhood, laden like his fellows with the pathetic weight of human weakness and human ignorance, the Master moves towards him--

'_Like you, my son, I struggled and I prayed. Like you, I had my days of doubt and nights of wrestling. I had my dreams, my delusions, with my fellows. I was weak; I suffered; I died. But G.o.d was in me, and the courage, the patience, the love He gave to me, the scenes of the poor human life He inspired, have become by His will the world's eternal lesson--man's primer of Divine things, hung high in the eyes of all, simple and wise, that all may see and all may learn. Take it to your heart again--that life, that pain, of mine! Use it to new ends; apprehend it in new ways; but knowledge shall not take it from you; and love, instead of weakening or forgetting, if it be but faithful, shall find ever fresh power of realising and renewing itself._'

So said the vision; and carrying the pa.s.sion of it deep in his heart the rector went his way, down the long stony hill, past the solitary farm amid the trees at the foot of it, across the gra.s.sy common beyond, with its sentinel clumps of beeches, past an ethereal string of tiny lakes just touched by the moonrise, beside some of the first cottages of Murewell, up the hill, with pulse beating and step quickening, and round into the stretch of road leading to his own gate.

As soon as he had pa.s.sed the screen made by the shrubs on the lawn, he saw it all as he had seen it in his waking dream on the common--the lamplight, the open windows, the white muslin curtains swaying a little in the soft evening air, and Catherine's figure seen dimly through them.

The noise of the gate, however--of the steps on the drive--had startled her. He saw her rise quickly from her low chair, put some work down beside her, and move in haste to the window.

'Robert!' she cried in amazement.

'Yes,' he answered, still some yards from her, his voice coming strangely to her out of the moonlit darkness. 'I did my errand early; I found I could get back; and here I am.'

She flew to the door, opened it, and felt herself caught in his arms.

'Robert, you are quite damp!' she said, fluttering and shrinking, for all her sweet habitual gravity of manner--was it the pa.s.sion of that yearning embrace? 'Have you walked?'

'Yes. It is the dew on the common, I suppose. The gra.s.s was drenched.'

'Will you have some food? They can bring back the supper directly.'

'I don't want any food now,' he said, hanging up his hat. 'I got some lunch in town, and a cup of soup at Reading coming back. Perhaps you will give me some tea soon--not yet.'

He came up to her, pus.h.i.+ng back the thick disordered locks of hair from his eyes with one hand, the other held out to her. As he came under the light of the hall lamp she was so startled by the gray pallor of the face that she caught hold of his outstretched hand with both hers. What she said he never knew--her look was enough. He put his arm round her, and as he opened the drawing-room door holding her pressed against him, she felt the desperate agitation in him penetrating, beating against an almost iron self-control of manner. He shut the door behind them.

'Robert, dear Robert!' she said, clinging to him, 'there is bad news,--tell me--there is something to tell me! Oh! what is it--what is it?'