Robert Elsmere Part 74

The war went on practically for years, and while it was still raging the minister of the Unitarian chapel died, and the authorities concerned chose in his place a young fellow, the son of a Bristol minister, a Cambridge man besides, as chance would have it, of brilliant attainments, and unusually commended from many quarters, even including some Church ones of the Liberal kind. This curly-haired youth, as he was then in reality, and as to his own quaint vexation he went on seeming to be up to quite middle age, had the wit to perceive at the moment of his entry on the troubled scene that behind all the mere brutal opposition to the new church, and in contrast with the sheer indifference of three-fourths of the district, there was a small party consisting of an aristocracy of the artisans, whose protest against the Puseyite doings was of a much quieter sterner sort, and amongst whom the uproar had mainly roused a certain crude power of thinking. He threw himself upon this element, which he rather divined than discovered, and it responded.

He preached a simple creed, drove it home by pure and generous living; he lectured, taught, brought down workers from the West End, and before he had been five years in harness had not only made himself a power in R----, but was beginning to be heard of and watched with no small interest by many outsiders.

This was the man on whom Robert had now stumbled. Before they had talked twenty minutes each was fascinated by the other. They said good-bye to their host, and wandered out together into St. James's Park, where the trees were white with frost and an orange sun was struggling through the fog. Here Murray Edwardes poured out the whole story of his ministry to attentive ears. Robert listened eagerly. Unitarianism was not a familiar subject of thought to him. He had never dreamt of joining the Unitarians, and was indeed long ago convinced that in the beliefs of a Channing no one once fairly started on the critical road could rationally stop. That common thinness and aridity, too, of the Unitarian temper had weighed with him. But here, in the person of Murray Edwardes, it was as though he saw something old and threadbare revivified. The young man's creed, as he presented it, had grace, persuasiveness, even unction; and there was something in his tone of mind which was like a fresh wind blowing over the fevered places of the other's heart.

They talked long and earnestly, Edwardes describing his own work, and the changes creeping over the modern Unitarian body, Elsmere saying little, asking much.

At last the young man looked at Elsmere with eyes of bright decision.

'You cannot work with the Church!' he said--'it is impossible. You will only wear yourself out in efforts to restrain what you could do infinitely more good, as things stand now, by pouring out. Come to us!--I will put you in the way. You shall be hampered by no pledges of any sort. Come and take the direction of some of my workers. We have all got our hands more than full. Your knowledge, your experience, would be invaluable. There is no other opening like it in England just now for men of your way of thinking and mine. Come! Who knows what we may be putting our hands to--what fruit may grow from the smallest seed?'

The two men stopped beside the lightly frozen water. Robert gathered that in this soul, too, there had risen the same large intoxicating dream of a reorganised Christendom, a new wide-spreading shelter of faith for discouraged browbeaten man, as in his own. 'I will!' he said briefly, after a pause, his own look kindling--'it is the opening I have been pining for. I will give you all I can, and bless you for the chance.'

That evening Robert got home late after a busy day full of various engagements. Mary, after some waiting up for 'Fader,' had just been carried protesting, red lips pouting, and fat legs kicking, off to bed.

Catherine was straightening the room, which had been thrown into confusion by the child's romps.

It was with an effort--for he knew it would be a shock to her--that he began to talk to her about the breakfast-party at Mr. Flaxman's, and his talk with Murray Edwardes. But he had made it a rule with himself to tell her everything that he was doing or meant to do. She would not let him tell her what he was thinking. But as much openness as there could be between them, there should be.

Catherine listened--still moving about the while--the thin beautiful lips becoming more and more compressed. Yes, it was hard to her, very hard; the people among whom she had been brought up, her father especially, would have held out the hand of fellows.h.i.+p to any body of Christian people, but not to the Unitarian. No real barrier of feeling divided them from any orthodox Dissenter, but the gulf between them and the Unitarian had been dug very deep by various forces--forces of thought originally, of strong habit and prejudice in the course of time.

'He is going to work with them now,' she thought bitterly; 'soon he will be one of them--perhaps a Unitarian minister himself.'

And for the life of her, as he told his tale, she could find nothing but embarra.s.sed monosyllables, and still more embarra.s.sed silences, wherewith to answer him. Till at last he too fell silent, feeling once more the sting of a now habitual discomfort.

Presently, however, Catherine came to sit down beside him. She laid her head against his knee, saying nothing, but gathering his hand closely in both her own.

Poor woman's heart! One moment in rebellion, the next a suppliant. He bent down quickly and kissed her.

'Would you like,' he said presently, after both had sat silent a while in the firelight, 'would you care to go to Madame de Netteville's to-night?'

'By all means,' said Catherine with a sort of eagerness. 'It _was_ Friday she asked us for, wasn't it? We will be quick over dinner, and I will go and dress.'

In that last ten minutes which Robert had spent with the squire in his bedroom, on the Monday afternoon, when they were to have walked. Mr.

Wendover had drily recommended Elsmere to cultivate Madame de Netteville. He sat propped up in his chair, white, gaunt, and cynical, and this remark of his was almost the only reference he would allow to the Elsmere move.

'You had better go there,' he said huskily, 'it will do you good. She gets the first-rate people and she makes them talk, which Lady Charlotte can't. Too many fools at Lady Charlotte's; she waters the wine too much.'

And he had persisted with the subject--using it, as Elsmere thought, as a means of warding off other conversation. He would not ask Elsmere's plans, and he would not allow a word about himself.

There had been a heart attack, old Meyrick thought, coupled with signs of nervous strain and excitement. It was the last ailment which evidently troubled the doctor most. But, behind the physical breakdown, there was to Robert's sense something else, a spiritual something, infinitely forlorn and piteous, which revealed itself wholly against the elder man's' will, and filled the younger with a dumb helpless rush of sympathy. Since his departure Robert had made the keeping up of his correspondence with the squire a binding obligation, and he was to-night chiefly anxious to go to Madame de Netteville's that he might write an account of it to Murewell.

Still the squire's talk, and his own glimpse of her at Murewell, had made him curious to see more of the woman herself. The squire's ways of describing her were always half approving, half sarcastic. Robert sometimes imagined that he himself had been at one time more under her spell than he cared to confess. If so, it must have been when she was still in Paris, the young English widow of a man of old French family, rich, fascinating, distinguished, and the centre of a small _salon_, admission to which was one of the social blue ribbons of Paris.

Since the war of 1870 Madame de Netteville had fixed her headquarters in London, and it was to her house in Hans Place that the squire wrote to her about the Elsmeres. She owed Roger Wendover debts of various kinds, and she had an encouraging memory of the young clergyman on the terrace at Murewell. So she promptly left her cards, together with the intimation that she was at home always on Friday evenings.

'I have never seen the wife,' she meditated, as her delicate jewelled hand drew up the window of the brougham in front of the Elsmeres'

lodgings. 'But if she is the ordinary country clergyman's spouse, the squire of course will have given the young man a hint.'

But whether from oblivion, or from some instinct of grim humour towards Catherine, whom he had always vaguely disliked, the squire said not one word about his wife to Robert in the course of their talk of Madame de Netteville.

Catherine took pains with her dress, sorely wis.h.i.+ng to do Robert credit.

She put on one of the gowns she had taken to Murewell when she married.

It was black, simply made, and had been a favourite with both of them in the old surroundings.

So they drove off to Madame de Netteville's. Catherine's heart was beating faster than usual as she mounted the twisting stairs of the luxurious little house. All these new social experiences were a trial to her. But she had the vaguest, most unsuspicious ideas of what she was to see in this particular house.

A long low room was thrown open to them. Unlike most English rooms, it was barely though richly furnished. A Persian carpet, of a self-coloured grayish blue, threw the gilt French chairs and the various figures sitting upon them into delicate relief. The walls were painted white, and had a few French mirrors and girandoles upon them, half a dozen fine French portraits, too, here and there, let into the wall in oval frames.

The subdued light came from the white sides of the room, and seemed to be there solely for social purposes. You could hardly have read or written in the room, but you could see a beautiful woman in a beautiful dress there, and you could talk there, either _tete-a-tete_, or to the a.s.sembled company, to perfection, so cunningly was it all devised.

When the Elsmeres entered, there were about a dozen people present--ten gentlemen and two ladies. One of the ladies, Madame de Netteville, was lying back in the corner of a velvet divan placed against the wall, a screen between her and a splendid fire that threw its blaze out into the room. The other, a slim woman with closely curled fair hair, and a neck abnormally long and white, sat near her, and the circle of men was talking indiscriminately to both.

As the footman announced Mr. and Mrs. Elsmere, there was a general stir of surprise. The men looked round; Madame de Netteville half rose with a puzzled look. It was more than a month since she had dropped her invitation. Then a flash, not altogether of pleasure, pa.s.sed over her face, and she said a few hasty words to the woman near her, advancing the moment afterwards to give her hand to Catherine.

'This is very kind of you, Mrs. Elsmere, to remember me so soon. I had imagined you were hardly settled enough yet to give me the pleasure of seeing you.'

But the eyes fixed on Catherine, eyes which took in everything, were not cordial, for all their smile.

Catherine, looking up at her, was overpowered by her excessive manner, and by the woman's look of conscious sarcastic strength, struggling through all the outer softness of beauty and exquisite dress.

'Mr. Elsmere, you will find this room almost as hot, I am afraid, as that afternoon on which we met last. Let me introduce you to Count Wielandt--Mr. Elsmere. Mrs. Elsmere, will you come over here, beside Lady Aubrey Willert.'

Robert found himself bowing to a young diplomatist, who seemed to him to look at him very much as he himself might have scrutinised an inhabitant of New Guinea. Lady Aubrey made an imperceptible movement of the head as Catherine was presented to her, and Madame de Netteville, smiling and biting her lip a little, fell back into her seat.

There was a faint odour of smoke in the room. As Catherine sat down, a young exquisite a few yards from her threw the end of a cigarette into the fire with a little sharp decided gesture. Lady Aubrey also pushed away a cigarette case which lay beside her hand.

Everybody there had the air more or less of an _habitue_ of the house; and when the conversation began again, the Elsmeres found it very hard, in spite of certain perfunctory efforts on the part of Madame de Netteville, to take any share in it.

'Well, I believe the story about Desforets is true,' said the fair-haired young Apollo, who had thrown away his cigarette, lolling back in his chair.

Catherine started, the little scene with Rose and Langham in the English rectory garden flas.h.i.+ng incongruously back upon her.

'If you get it from the _Ferret_, my dear Evershed,' said the ex-Tory minister, Lord Rupert, 'you may put it down as a safe lie. As for me, I believe she has a much shrewder eye to the main chance.'

'What do you mean?' said the other, raising astonished eyebrows.

'Well, it doesn't _pay_, you know, to write yourself down a fiend--not quite.'

'What--you think it will affect her audiences? Well, that is a good joke!' and the young man laughed immoderately, joined by several of the other guests.

'I don't imagine it will make any difference to you, my good friend,'

returned Lord Rupert imperturbably; 'but the British public haven't got your nerve. They _may_ take it awkwardly--I don't say they will--when a woman who has turned her own young sister out of doors at night, in St.

Petersburg, so that ultimately as a consequence the girl dies, comes to ask them to clap her touching impersonations of injured virtue.'

'What has one to do with an actress's private life, my dear Lord Rupert?' asked Madame de Netteville, her voice slipping with a smooth clearness into the conversation, her eyes darting light from under straight black brows.

'What indeed!' said the young man who had begun the conversation with a disagreeable enigmatical smile, stretching out his hand for another cigarette, and drawing it back with a look under his drooped eyelids--a look of cold impertinent scrutiny--at Catherine Elsmere.