Robert Elsmere Part 108

'Yes. He says he goes with you to Algiers. I will come after if you will have me. The climate may do wonders.'

She looked at him with the most heart-rending of smiles.

'Will you go in to Robert? He is in the study.'

He went, in trepidation, and found Robert lying tucked up on the sofa, apparently reading.

'Don't--don't, old fellow,' he said affectionately, as Flaxman almost broke down. 'It comes to all of us sooner or later. Whenever it comes we think it too soon. I believe I have been sure of it for some time. We are such strange creatures! It has been so present to me lately that life was too good to last. You remember the sort of feeling one used to have as a child about some treat in the distance--that it was too much joy--that something was sure to come between you and it? Well, in a sense, I have had my joy, the first-fruits of it at least.'

But as he threw his arms behind his head, leaning back on them, Flaxman saw the eyes darken and the nave boyish mouth contract, and knew that under all these brave words there was a heart which hungered.

'How strange!' Robert went on reflectively; 'yesterday I was travelling, walking like other men, a member of society. To-day I am an invalid; in the true sense, a man no longer. The world has done with me; a barrier I shall never recross has sprung up between me and it.--Flaxman, to-night is the story-telling. Will you read to them? I have the book here prepared--some scenes from David Copperfield. And you will tell them?'

A hard task, but Flaxman undertook it. Never did he forget the scene.

Some ominous rumour had spread, and the New Brotherhood was besieged.

Impossible to give the reading. A hall full of strained upturned faced listened to Flaxman's announcement, and to Elsmere's messages of cheer and exhortation, and then a wild wave of grief spread through the place.

The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each other's eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, all feeling themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When Elsmere heard the news of it, he turned on his face, and asked even Catherine to leave him for a while.

The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood had just become the subject of an animated discussion in the press, and London was touched by the news of its young founder's breakdown. Catherine found herself besieged by offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded her to accept. It was the loan of a villa at El Biar, on the hill above Algiers, belonging to a connection of his own. A resident on the spot was to take all trouble off their hands; they were to find servants ready for them, and every comfort.

Catherine made every arrangement, met every kindness, with a self-reliant calm that never failed. But it seemed to Flaxman that her heart was broken--that half of her, in feeling, was already on the other side of this horror which stared them all in the face. Was it his perception of it which stirred Robert after a while to a greater hopefulness of speech, a constant bright dwelling on the flowery sunshine for which they were about to exchange the fog and cold of London? The momentary revival of energy was more pitiful to Flaxman than his first quiet resignation.

He himself wrote every day to Rose. Strange love-letters! in which the feeling that could not be avowed ran as a fiery under-current through all the sad brotherly record of the invalid's doings and prospects.

There was deep trouble in Long Whindale. Mrs. Leyburn was tearful and hysterical, and wished to rush off to town to see Catherine. Agnes wrote in distress that her mother was quite unfit to travel, showing her own inner conviction, too, that the poor thing would only be an extra burden on the Elsmeres if the journey were achieved. Rose wrote asking to be allowed to go with them to Algiers; and after a little consultation it was so arranged, Mrs. Leyburn being tenderly persuaded, Robert himself writing, to stay where she was.

The morning after the interview with Edmondson, Robert sent for Murray Edwardes. They were closeted together for nearly an hour. Edwardes came out with the look of one who has been lifted into 'heavenly places.'

'I thank G.o.d,' he said to Catherine, with deep emotion, 'that I ever knew him. I pray that I may be found worthy to carry out my pledges to him.'

When Catherine went into the study she found Robert gazing into the fire with dreamy eyes. He started and looked up to her with a smile.

'Murray Edwardes has promised himself heart and soul to the work. If necessary, he will give up his chapel to carry it on. But we hope it will be possible to work them together. What a brick he is! What a blessed chance it was that took me to that breakfast party at Flaxman's!'

The rest of the time before departure he spent almost entirely in consultation and arrangement with Edwardes. It was terrible how rapidly worse he seemed to grow directly the situation had declared itself, and the determination _not_ to be ill had been perforce overthrown. But his struggle against breathlessness and weakness, and all the other symptoms of his state during these last days, was heroic. On the last day of all, by his own persistent wish, a certain number of members of the Brotherhood came to say good-bye to him. They came in one by one, Macdonald first. The old Scotchman, from the height of his sixty years of tough weather-beaten manhood, looked down on Robert with a fatherly concern.

'Eh, Mister Elsmere, but it's a fine place yur gawin' tu, they say.

Ye'll do weel there, sir--ye'll do weel. And as for the wark, sir, we'll keep it oop--we'll not let the Deil mak' hay o' it, if we knaws it--the auld leer!' he added, with a phraseology which did more honour to the Calvinism of his blood than the philosophy of his training.

Lestrange came in, with a pale sharp face, and said little in his ten minutes. But Robert divined in him a sort of repressed curiosity and excitement akin to that of Voltaire turning his feverish eyes towards _le grand secret_. 'You, who preached to us that consciousness, and G.o.d, and the soul are the only realities--are you so sure of it now you are dying, as you were in health? Are your courage, your certainty, what they were?' These were the sort of questions that seemed to underlie the man's spoken words.

There was something trying in it, but Robert did his best to put aside his consciousness of it. He thanked him for his help in the past, and implored him to stand by the young society and Mr. Edwardes.

'I shall hardly come back, Lestrange. But what does one man matter? One soldier falls, another presses forward.'

The watchmaker rose, then paused a moment, a flush pa.s.sing over him.

'We can't stand without you!' he said abruptly; then, seeing Robert's look of distress, he seemed to cast about for something rea.s.suring to say, but could find nothing. Robert at last held out his hand with a smile, and he went. He left Elsmere struggling with a pang of horrible depression. In reality there was no man who worked harder at the New Brotherhood during the months that followed than Lestrange. He worked under perpetual protest from the _frondeur_ within him, but something stung him on--on--till a habit had been formed which promises to be the joy and salvation of his later life. Was it the haunting memory of that thin figure--the hand clinging to the chair--the white appealing look?

Others came and went, till Catherine trembled for the consequences. She herself took in Mrs. Richards and her children, comforting the sobbing creatures afterwards with a calmness born of her own despair. Robson, in the last stage himself, sent him a grimly characteristic message. 'I shall solve the riddle, sir, before you. The doctor gives me three days.

For the first time in my life, I shall know what you are still guessing at. May the blessing of one who never blessed thing or creature before he saw you go with you!'

After it all Robert sank on the sofa with a groan.

'No more!' he said hoa.r.s.ely--'no more! Now for air--the sea! To-morrow, wife, to-morrow! _Cras ingens iterabimus aequor._ Ah me! I leave _my_ new Salamis behind!'

But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham and Newcome.

'I will spare Langham the sight of me' he said, smiling sadly. 'And I will spare myself the sight of Newcome--I could not bear it, I think!

But I must say good-bye--for I love them both.'

Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it.

'Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the housemaid, and the priest turned away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the pa.s.sionate heart bore the burden of that 'too late,' believing that even at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.

Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In any other circ.u.mstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four hours he could press no claim of his own.

When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood watching the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky.

Catherine caught her look and att.i.tude, and could have cried aloud in her own gnawing pain.

Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival.

Their journey had gone well; even the odious pa.s.sage from Ma.r.s.eilles had been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was luxurious, the weather good.

'I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' wrote Edmondson. 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June--when an English June behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the bay, the great plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds.

His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers, raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he were unlike the common sons of men--as though to _him_ it might be possible to subdue even this fell disease.'

Elsmere himself wrote--

'"I had not heard the half"--O Flaxman! An enchanted land--air, sun, warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis--everything that feeds the outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth of sunlit air between us and the curve of the bay, is for the moment heaven! One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous blue of the morning. I am better--I breathe again.

'Mary flourishes exceedingly. She lives mostly on oranges, and has been adopted by sixty nuns who inhabit the convent over the way, and sell us the most delicious b.u.t.ter and cream. I imagine, if she were a trifle older, her mother would hardly view the proceedings of these dear berosaried women with so much equanimity.

'As for Rose, she writes more letters than Clarissa, and receives more than an editor of the _Times_. I have the strongest views, as you know, as to the vanity of letter-writing. There was a time when you shared them, but there are circ.u.mstances and conjunctures, alas! in which no man can be sure of his friend or his friend's principles. Kind friend, good fellow, go often to Elgood Street. Tell me everything about everybody. It is possible, after all, that I may live to come back to them.'

But a week later, alas! the letters fell into a very different strain.

The weather had changed, had turned indeed damp and rainy, the natives of course declaring that such gloom and storm in January had never been known before. Edmondson wrote in discouragement. Elsmere had had a touch of cold, had been confined to bed, and almost speechless. His letter was full of medical detail, from which Flaxman gathered that, in spite of the rally of the first ten days, it was clear that the disease was attacking constantly fresh tissue. 'He is very depressed too,' said Edmondson; 'I have never seen him so yet. He sits and looks at us in the evening sometimes with eyes that wring one's heart. It is as though, after having for a moment allowed himself to hope, he found it a doubly hard task to submit.'

Ah, that depression! It was the last eclipse through which a radiant soul was called to pa.s.s; but while it lasted it was black indeed. The implacable reality, obscured at first by the emotion and excitement of farewells, and then by a brief spring of hope and returning vigour, showed itself now in all its stern nakedness--sat down, as it were, eye to eye with Elsmere--immovable, ineluctable. There were certain features of the disease itself which were specially trying to such a nature. The long silences it enforced were so unlike him, seemed already to withdraw him so pitifully from their yearning grasp! In these dark days he would sit crouching over the wood fire in the little _salon_, or lie drawn to the window looking out on the rainstorms bowing the ilexes or scattering the meshes of clematis, silent, almost always gentle, but turning sometimes on Catherine, or on Mary playing at his feet, eyes which, as Edmondson said, 'wrung the heart.'

But in reality, under the husband's depression, and under the wife's inexhaustible devotion, a combat was going on, which reached no third person, but was throughout poignant and tragic to the highest degree.

Catherine was making her last effort, Robert his last stand. As we know, ever since that pa.s.sionate submission of the wife which had thrown her morally at her husband's feet, there had lingered at the bottom of her heart one last supreme hope. All persons of the older Christian type attribute a special importance to the moment of death. While the man of science looks forward to his last hour as a moment of certain intellectual weakness, and calmly warns his friends beforehand that he is to be judged by the utterances of health and not by those of physical collapse, the Christian believes that on the confines of eternity the veil of flesh shrouding the soul grows thin and transparent, and that the glories and the truths of Heaven are visible with a special clearness and authority to the dying. It was for this moment, either in herself or in him, that Catherine's unconquerable faith had been patiently and dumbly waiting. Either she would go first, and death would wing her poor last words to him with a magic and power not their own; or, when he came to leave her, the veil of doubt would fall away perforce from a spirit as pure as it was humble, and the eternal light, the light of the Crucified, shine through.

Probably, if there had been no breach in Robert's serenity, Catherine's poor last effort would have been much feebler, briefer, more hesitating.

But when she saw him plunged for a short s.p.a.ce in mortal discouragement, in a sombreness that as the days went on had its points and crests of feverish irritation, her anguished pity came to the help of her creed.

Robert felt himself besieged, driven within the citadel, her being urging, grappling with his. In little half-articulate words and ways, in her attempts to draw him back to some of their old religious books and prayers, in those kneeling vigils he often found her maintaining at night beside him, he felt a persistent attack which nearly--in his weakness--overthrew him.

For 'reason and thought grow tired like muscles and nerves.' Some of the greatest and most daring thinkers of the world have felt this pitiful longing to be at one with those who love them, at whatever cost, before the last farewell. And the simpler Christian faith has still to create around it those venerable a.s.sociations and habits which b.u.t.tress individual feebleness and diminish the individual effort.

One early February morning, just before dawn, Robert stretched out his hand for his wife and found her kneeling beside him. The dim mingled light showed him her face vaguely--her clasped hands, her eyes. He looked at her in silence, she at him; there seemed to be a strange shock as of battle between them. Then he drew her head down to him.

'Catherine,' he said to her in a feeble intense whisper, 'would you leave me without comfort, without help, at the end?'