Robert Elsmere Part 72

CHAPTER x.x.xII

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere and Catherine first realised in detail what Elsmere's act was to mean to them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life will need to be told that even for these two finely-natured people such resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out.

'I will not preach to you--I will not persecute you!' Catherine had said to her husband at the moment of her first shock and anguish. And she did her utmost, poor thing, to keep her word! All through the innumerable bitternesses which accompanied Elsmere's withdrawal from Murewell--the letters which followed them, the remonstrances of public and private friends, the paragraphs which found their way, do what they would, into the newspapers--the pain of deserting, as it seemed to her, certain poor and helpless folk who had been taught to look to her and Robert, and whose bewildered lamentations came to them through young Armitstead--through all this she held her peace; she did her best to soften Robert's grief; she never once reproached him with her own.

But at the same time the inevitable separation of their inmost hopes and beliefs had thrown her back on herself, had immensely strengthened that puritan independent fibre in her which her youth had developed, and which her happy marriage had only temporarily masked, not weakened.

Never had Catherine believed so strongly and intensely as now, when the husband, who had been the guide and inspirer of her religious life, had given up the old faith and practices. By virtue of a kind of nervous instinctive dread, his relaxations bred increased rigidity in her. Often when she was alone--or at night--she was seized with a lonely, an awful sense of responsibility. Oh! let her guard her faith, not only for her own sake, her child's, her Lord's, but for _his_--that it might be given to her patience at last to lead him back.

And the only way in which it seemed to her possible to guard it was to set up certain barriers of silence. She feared that fiery persuasive quality in Robert she had so often seen at work on other people. With him conviction was life--it was the man himself, to an extraordinary degree. How was she to resist the pressure of those new ardours with which his mind was filling--she who loved him!--except by building, at any rate for the time, an enclosure of silence round her Christian beliefs? It was in some ways a pathetic repet.i.tion of the situation between Robert and the squire in the early days of their friendship, but in Catherine's mind there was no troubling presence of new knowledge conspiring from within with the forces without. At this moment of her life she was more pa.s.sionately convinced than ever that the only knowledge truly worth having in this world was the knowledge of G.o.d's mercies in Christ.

So gradually with a gentle persistency she withdrew certain parts of herself from Robert's ken; she avoided certain subjects, or anything that might lead to them; she ignored the religious and philosophical books he was constantly reading; she prayed and thought alone--always for him, of him--but still resolutely alone. It was impossible, however, that so great a change in their life could be effected without a perpetual sense of breaking links, a perpetual series of dumb wounds and griefs on both sides. There came a moment when, as he sat alone one evening in a pine wood above the Lake of Geneva, Elsmere suddenly awoke to the conviction that in spite of all his efforts and illusions, their relation to each other _was_ altering, dwindling, impoverishing; the terror of that summer night at Murewell was being dismally justified.

His own mind during this time was in a state of perpetual discovery, 'sailing the seas where there was never sand'--the vast shadowy seas of speculative thought. All his life, reserve to those nearest to him had been pain and grief to him. He was one of those people, as we know, who throw off readily; to whom sympathy, expansion, are indispensable; who suffer physically and mentally from anything cold and rigid beside them.

And now, at every turn, in their talk, their reading, in many of the smallest details of their common existence, Elsmere began to feel the presence of this cold and rigid something. He was ever conscious of self-defence on her side, of pained drawing back on his. And with every succeeding effort of his at self-repression, it seemed to him as though fresh nails were driven into the coffin of that old free habit of perfect confidence which had made the heaven of their life since they had been man and wife.

He sat on for long, through the September evening, pondering, wrestling.

Was it simply inevitable, the natural result of his own act, and of her antecedents, to which he must submit himself, as to any mutilation or loss of power in the body? The young lover and husband rebelled--the believer rebelled--against the admission. Probably if his change had left him anchorless and forsaken, as it leaves many men, he would have been ready enough to submit, in terror lest his own forlornness should bring about hers. But in spite of the intellectual confusion, which inevitably attends any wholesale reconstruction of a man's platform of action, he had never been more sure of G.o.d, or the Divine aims of the world, than now; never more open than now, amid this exquisite Alpine world, to those pa.s.sionate moments of religious trust which are man's eternal defiance to the iron silences about him. Originally, as we know, he had shrunk from the thought of change in her corresponding to his own; now that his own foothold was strengthening, his longing for a new union was overpowering that old dread. The proselytising instinct may be never quite morally defensible, even as between husband and wife.

Nevertheless, in all strong, convinced, and ardent souls it exists, and must be reckoned with.

At last one evening he was overcome by a sudden impulse which neutralised for the moment his nervous dread of hurting her. Some little incident of their day together was rankling, and it was borne in upon him that almost any violent protest on her part would have been preferable to this constant soft evasion of hers, which was gradually, imperceptibly dividing heart from heart.

They were in a bare attic room at the very top of one of the huge newly-built hotels which during the last twenty years have invaded all the high places of Switzerland. The August which had been so hot in England had been rainy and broken in Switzerland. But it had been followed by a warm and mellow September, and the favourite hotels below a certain height were still full. When the Elsmeres arrived at Les Avants, this scantily furnished garret, out of which some servants had been hurried to make room for them, was all that could be found. They, however, liked it for its s.p.a.ce and its view. They looked sideways from their windows on to the upper end of the lake, three thousand feet below them. Opposite, across the blue water, rose a grandiose rampart of mountains, the stage on which from morn till night the sun went through a long transformation scene of beauty. The water was marked every now and then by pa.s.sing boats and steamers--tiny specks which served to measure the vastness of all around them. To right and left, spurs of green mountains shut out alike the lower lake and the icy splendours of the 'Valais depths profound.' What made the charm of the narrow prospect was, first, the sense it produced in the spectator of hanging dizzily above the lake, with infinite air below him, and, then, the magical effects of dawn and evening, when wreaths of mist would blot out the valley and the lake, and leave the eye of the watcher face to face across the fathomless abyss with the majestic mountain ma.s.s, and its attendant retinue of clouds, as though they and he were alone in the universe.

It was a peaceful September night. From the open window beside him Robert could see a world of high moonlight, limited and invaded on all sides by sharp black ma.s.ses of shade. A few rare lights glimmered on the spreading alp below, and every now and then a breath of music came to them wafted from a military band playing a mile or two away. They had been climbing most of the afternoon, and Catherine was lying down, her brown hair loose about her, the thin oval of her face and clear line of brow just visible in the dim candlelight.

Suddenly he stretched out his hand for his Greek Testament, which was always near him, though there had been no common reading since that bitter day of his confession to her. The mark still lay in the well-worn volume at the point reached in their last reading at Murewell. He opened upon it, and began the eleventh chapter of St. John.

Catherine trembled when she saw him take up the book. He began without preface, treating the pa.s.sage before him in his usual way,--that is to say, taking verse after verse in the Greek, translating and commenting.

She never spoke all through, and at last he closed the little Testament, and bent towards her, his look full of feeling.

'Catherine! can't you let me--will you never let me tell you, now, how that story--how the old things--affect me, from the new point of view?

You always stop me when I try. I believe you think of me as having thrown it all away. Would it not comfort you sometimes, if you knew that although much of the Gospels, this very raising of Lazarus, for instance, seem to me no longer true in the historical sense, still they are always full to me of an ideal, a poetical truth? Lazarus may not have died and come to life, may never have existed; but still to me, now as always, love for Jesus of Nazareth is "resurrection" and "life"?'

He spoke with the most painful diffidence, the most wistful tenderness.

There was a pause. Then Catherine said, in a rigid constrained voice,--

'If the Gospels are not true in fact, as history, as reality, I cannot see how they are true at all, or of any value.'

The next minute she rose, and, going to the little wooden dressing-table, she began to brush out and plait for the night her straight silky veil of hair. As she pa.s.sed him Robert saw her face pale and set.

He sat quiet another moment or two, and then he went towards her and took her in his arms.

'Catherine,' he said to her, his lips trembling, 'am I never to speak my mind to you any more? Do you mean always to hold me at arm's length--to refuse always to hear what I have to say in defence of the change which has cost us both so much?'

She hesitated, trying hard to restrain herself. But it was of no use.

She broke into tears--quiet but most bitter tears.

'Robert, I cannot! Oh! you must see I cannot. It is not because I am hard, but because I am weak. How can I stand up against you? I dare not--I dare not. If you were not yourself--not my husband----'

Her voice dropped. Robert guessed that at the bottom of her resistance there was an intolerable fear of what love might do with her if she once gave it an opening. He felt himself cruel, brutal, and yet an urgent sense of all that was at stake drove him on.

'I would not press or worry you, G.o.d knows!' he said, almost piteously, kissing her forehead as she lay against him. 'But remember, Catherine, I cannot put these things aside. I once thought I could--that I could fall back on my historical work, and leave religious matters alone as far as criticism was concerned. But I cannot. They fill my mind more and more.

I feel more and more impelled to search them out, and to put my conclusions about them into shape. And all the time this is going on, are you and I to remain strangers to one another in all that concerns our truest life--are we, Catherine?'

He spoke in a low voice of intense feeling. She turned her face and pressed her lips to his hand. Both had the scene in the wood-path after her flight and return in their minds, and both were filled with a despairing sense of the difficulty of living, not through great crises, but through the detail of every day.

'Could you not work at other things?' she whispered.

He was silent, looking straight before him into the moonlit shimmer and white spectral hazes of the valley, his arms still round her.

'No!' he burst out at last; 'not till I have satisfied myself. I feel it burning within me, like a command from G.o.d, to work out the problem, to make it clearer to myself--and to others,' he added deliberately.

Her heart sank within her. The last words called up before her a dismal future of controversy and publicity, in which at every step she would be condemning her husband.

'And all this time, all these years, perhaps,' he went on--before, in her perplexity, she could find words,--'is my wife never going to let me speak freely to her? Am I to act, think, judge, without her knowledge?

Is she to know less of me than a friend, less even than the public for whom I write or speak?'

It seemed intolerable to him, all the more that every moment they stood there together it was being impressed upon him that in fact this was what she meant, what she had contemplated from the beginning.

'Robert, I cannot defend myself against you,' she cried, again clinging to him. 'Oh, think for me! You know what I feel; that I dare not risk what is not mine!'

He kissed her again, and then moved away from her to the window. It began to be plain to him that his effort was merely futile, and had better not have been made. But his heart was very sore.

'Do you ever ask yourself,' he said presently, looking steadily into the night--no, I don't think you can, Catherine--what part the reasoning faculty, that faculty which marks us out from the animal, was meant to play in life? Did G.o.d give it to us simply that you might trample upon it and ignore it, both in yourself and me?'

She had dropped into a chair, and sat with clasped hands, her hair falling about her white dressing-gown, and framing the n.o.bly-featured face blanched by the moonlight. She did not attempt a reply, but the melancholy of an invincible resolution, which was, so to speak, not her own doing, but rather was like a necessity imposed upon her from outside, breathed through her silence.

He turned and looked at her. She raised her arms, and the gesture reminded him for a moment of the Donatello figure in the Murewell library--the same delicate austere beauty, the same tenderness, the same underlying reserve. He took her outstretched hands and held them against his breast. His hotly-beating heart told him that he was perfectly right, and that to accept the barriers she was setting up would impoverish all their future life together. But he could not struggle with the woman on whom he had already inflicted so severe a practical trial. Moreover, he felt strangely as he stood there the danger of rousing in her those illimitable possibilities of the religious temper, the dread of which had once before risen spectre-like in his heart.

So once more he yielded. She rewarded him with all the charm, all the delightfulness, of which under the circ.u.mstances she was mistress. They wandered up the Rhone valley, through the St. Gothard, and spent a fortnight between Como and Lugano. During these days her one thought was to revive and refresh him, and he let her tend him, and lent himself to the various heroic futilities by which she would try--as part of her nursing mission--to make the future look less empty and their distress less real. Of course under all this delicate give and take both suffered; both felt that the promise of their marriage had failed them, and that they had come dismally down to a second best. But after all they were young, and the autumn was beautiful--and though they hurt each other, they were alone together and constantly, pa.s.sionately, interested in each other. Italy, too, softened all things--even Catherine's English tone and temper. As long as the delicious luxury of the Italian autumn, with all its primitive pagan suggestiveness, was still round them; as long as they were still among the cities of the Lombard plain--that battle-ground and highway of nations, which roused all Robert's historical enthusiasm, and set him reading, discussing, thinking, in his old impetuous way, about something else than minute problems of Christian evidence,--the new-born friction between them was necessarily reduced to a minimum.

But with their return home, with their plunge into London life, the difficulties of the situation began to define themselves more sharply.

In after years, one of Catherine's dreariest memories was the memory of their first instalment in the Bedford Square house. Robert's anxiety to make it pleasant and homelike was pitiful to watch. He had none of the modern pa.s.sion for upholstery, and probably the vaguest notions of what was aesthetically correct. But during their furnishing days he was never tired of wandering about in search of pretty things--a rug, a screen, an engraving--which might brighten the rooms in which Catherine was to live. He would put everything in its place with a restless eagerness, and then Catherine would be called in, and would play her part bravely.

She would smile and ask questions, and admire, and then when Robert had gone, she would move slowly to the window and look out at the great ma.s.s of the British Museum frowning beyond the little dingy strip of garden, with a sick longing in her heart for the Murewell cornfield, the wood-path, the village, the free air-bathed s.p.a.ces of heath and common.

Oh! this huge London, with its unfathomable poverty and its heartless wealth--how it oppressed and bewildered her! Its mere grime and squalor, its murky poisoned atmosphere, were a perpetual trial to the countrywoman brought up amid the dash of mountain streams and the scents of mountain pastures. She drooped physically for a time, as did the child.

But morally? With Catherine everything really depended on the moral state. She could have followed Robert to a London living with a joy and hope which would have completely deadened all these repulsions of the senses now so active in her. But without this inner glow, in the presence of the profound spiritual difference circ.u.mstance had developed between her and the man she loved, everything was a burden. Even her religion, though she clung to it with an ever-increasing tenacity, failed at this period to bring her much comfort. Every night it seemed to her that the day had been one long and dreary struggle to make something out of nothing; and in the morning the night, too, seemed to have been alive with conflict--_All Thy waves and Thy storms have gone over me!_

Robert guessed it all, and whatever remorseful love could do to soften such a strain and burden he tried to do. He encouraged her to find work among the poor; he tried in the tenderest ways to interest her in the great spectacle of London life which was already, in spite of yearning and regret, beginning to fascinate and absorb himself. But their standards were now so different that she was constantly shrinking from what attracted him, or painfully judging what was to him merely curious and interesting. He was really more and more oppressed by her intellectual limitations, though never consciously would he have allowed himself to admit them, and she was more and more bewildered by what constantly seemed to her a breaking up of principle, a relaxation of moral fibre.

And the work among the poor was difficult. Robert instinctively felt that for him to offer his services in charitable work to the narrow Evangelical, whose church Catherine had joined, would have been merely to invite rebuff. So that even in the love and care of the unfortunate they were separated. For he had not yet found a sphere of work, and, if he had, Catherine's invincible impulse in these matters was always to attach herself to the authorities and powers that be. He could only acquiesce when she suggested applying to Mr. Clarendon for some charitable occupation for herself.