Robert Elsmere

'A letter for you, Miss,' said the maid.

Rose took it--glanced at the handwriting. A bright flush--a surrept.i.tious glance at Catherine who sat absorbed in a wandering letter from Mrs. Darcy. Then the girl carried her prize to the window and opened it.

Catherine read on, gathering up the Murewell names and details as some famished gleaner might gather up the scattered ears on a plundered field. At last something in the silence of the room, and of the other inmate in it, struck her.

'Rose,' she said, looking up, 'was that some one brought you a note?'

The girl turned with a start--a letter fell to the ground. She made a faint ineffectual effort to pick it up, and sank into a chair.

'Rose--darling!' cried Catherine, springing up, 'are you ill?'

Rose looked at her with a perfectly colourless fixed face, made a feeble negative sign, and then laying her arms on the breakfast-table in front of her, let her head fall upon them.

Catherine stood over her aghast. 'My darling--what is it? Come and lie down--take this water.'

She put some close to her sister's hand, but Rose pushed it away. 'Don't talk to me,' she said with difficulty.

Catherine knelt beside her in helpless pain and perplexity, her cheek resting against her sister's shoulder as a mute sign of sympathy. What could be the matter? Presently her gaze travelled from Rose to the letter on the floor. It lay with the address uppermost, and she at once recognised Langham's handwriting. But before she could combine any rational ideas with this quick perception, Rose had partially mastered herself. She raised her head slowly and grasped her sister's arm.

'I was startled,' she said, a forced smile on her white lips. 'Last night Mr. Langham asked me to marry him--I expected him here this morning to consult with mamma and you. That letter is to inform me that--he made a mistake--and he is very sorry! So am I! It is so--so--bewildering!'

She got up restlessly and went to the fire as though s.h.i.+vering with cold. Catherine thought she hardly knew what she was saying. The elder sister followed her, and throwing an arm round her, pressed the slim irresponsive figure close. Her eyes were bright with anger, her lips quivering.

'That he should _dare_!' she cried. 'Rose--my poor little Rose.'

'Don't blame him!' said Rose, crouching down before the fire, while Catherine fell into the armchair again. 'It doesn't seem to count, from you--you have always been so ready to blame him!'

Her brow contracted; she looked frowning into the fire, her still colourless mouth working painfully.

Catherine was cut to the heart. 'Oh, Rose!' she said, holding out her hands, 'I will blame no one, dear. I seem hard--but I love you so. Oh, tell me--you would have told me everything once!'

There was the most painful yearning in her tone. Rose lifted a listless right hand and put it into her sister's outstretched palms. But she made no answer, till suddenly, with a smothered cry, she fell towards Catherine.

'Catherine! I cannot bear it. I said I loved him--he kissed me--I could kill myself and him.'

Catherine never forgot the mingled tragedy and domesticity of the hour that followed--the little familiar morning sounds in and about the house, maids running up and down stairs, tradesmen calling, bells ringing,--and here, at her feet, a spectacle of moral and mental struggle which she only half understood, but which wrung her inmost heart. Two strains of feeling seemed to be present in Rose--a sense of shock, of wounded pride, of intolerable humiliation, and a strange intervening pa.s.sion of pity, not for herself but for Langham, which seemed to have been stirred in her by his letter. But though the elder questioned, and the younger seemed to answer, Catherine could hardly piece the story together, nor could she find the answer to the question filling her own indignant heart, 'Does she love him?'

At last Rose got up from her crouching position by the fire and stood, a white ghost of herself, pus.h.i.+ng back the bright encroaching hair from eyes that

'If I could only be angry--downright angry,' she said, more to herself than Catherine, 'it would do one good.'

'Give others leave to be angry for you!' cried Catherine.

'Don't!' said Rose, almost fiercely, drawing herself away. 'You don't know. It is a fate. Why did we ever meet? You may read his letter; you must--you misjudge him--you always have. No, no'--and she nervously crushed the letter in her hand--'not yet. But you shall read it some time--you and Robert too. Married people always tell one another. It is due to him, perhaps due to me too,' and a hot flush transfigured her paleness for an instant. 'Oh, my head! Why does one's mind affect one's body like this? It shall not--it is humiliating! "Miss Leyburn has been jilted and cannot see visitors,"--that is the kind of thing. Catherine, when you have finished that doc.u.ment, will you kindly come and hear me practise my last Raff--I am going. Good-bye.'

She moved to the door, but Catherine had only just time to catch her, or she would have fallen over a chair from sudden giddiness.

'Miserable!' she said, das.h.i.+ng a tear from her eyes, 'I must go and lie down then in the proper missish fas.h.i.+on. Mind, on your peril, Catherine, not a word to any one but Robert. I shall tell Agnes. And Robert is not to speak to me! No, don't come--I will go alone.'

And warning her sister back, she groped her way upstairs. Inside her room, when she had locked the door, she stood a moment upright with the letter in her hand,--the blotted incoherent scrawl, where Langham had for once forgotten to be literary, where every pitiable half-finished sentence pleaded with her--even in the first smart of her wrong--for pardon, for compa.s.sion, as towards something maimed and paralysed from birth, unworthy even of her contempt. Then the tears began to rain over her cheeks.

'I was not good enough--I was not good enough--G.o.d would not let me!'

And she fell on her knees beside the bed, the little bit of paper crushed in her hands against her lips. Not good enough for what? _To save?_

How lightly she had dreamed of healing, redeeming, changing! And the task is refused her. It is not so much the cry of personal desire that shakes her as she kneels and weeps, nor is it mere wounded woman's pride. It is a strange stern sense of law. Had she been other than she is--more loving, less self-absorbed, loftier in motive--he could not have loved her so, have left her so. Deep undeveloped forces of character stir within her. She feels herself judged,--and with a righteous judgment--issuing inexorably from the facts of life and circ.u.mstance.

Meanwhile Catherine was shut up downstairs with Robert, who had come over early to see how the household fared.

Robert listened to the whole luckless story with astonishment and dismay. This particular possibility of mischief had gone out of his mind for some time. He had been busy in his East End work. Catherine had been silent. Over how many matters they would once have discussed with open heart was she silent now?

'I ought to have been warned,' he said with quick decision, 'if you knew this was going on. I am the only man among you, and I understand Langham better than the rest of you. I might have looked after the poor child a little.'

Catherine accepted the reproach mutely as one little smart the more.

However, what had she known? She had seen nothing unusual of late, nothing to make her think a crisis was approaching. Nay, she had flattered herself that Mr. Flaxman, whom she liked, was gaining ground.

Meanwhile Robert stood pondering anxiously what could be done. Could anything be done?

'I must go and see him,' he said presently. 'Yes, dearest, I must.

Impossible the thing should be left so! I am his old friend,--almost her guardian. You say she is in great trouble--why, it may shadow her whole life! No--he must explain things to us--he is bound to--he shall. It may be something comparatively trivial in the way after all--money or prospects or something of the sort. You have not seen the letter, you say? It is the last marriage in the world one could have desired for her--but if she loves him, Catherine, if she loves him----'

He turned to her--appealing, remonstrating. Catherine stood pale and rigid. Incredible that he should think it right to intermeddle--to take the smallest step towards reversing so plain a declaration of G.o.d's will! She could not sympathise--she would not consent. Robert watched her in painful indecision. He knew that she thought him indifferent to her true reason for finding some comfort even in her sister's trouble--that he seemed to her mindful only of the pa.s.sing human misery, indifferent to the eternal risk.

They stood sadly looking at one another. Then he s.n.a.t.c.hed up his hat.

'I must go,' he said in a low voice; 'it is right.'

And he went--stepping, however, with the best intentions in the world, into a blunder.

Catherine sat painfully struggling with herself after he had left her.

Then some one came into the room--some one with pale looks and flas.h.i.+ng eyes. It was Agnes.

'She just let me in to tell me, and put me out again,' said the girl--her whole, even, cheerful self one flame of scorn and wrath. 'What are such creatures made for, Catherine--why do they exist?'

Meanwhile, Robert had trudged off through the frosty morning streets to Langham's lodgings. His mood was very hot by the time he reached his destination, and he climbed the staircase to Langham's room in some excitement. When he tried to open the door after the answer to his knock bidding him enter, he found something barring the way. 'Wait a little,'

said the voice inside, 'I will move the case.'

With difficulty the obstacle was removed and the door opened. Seeing his visitor, Langham stood for a moment in sombre astonishment. The room was littered with books and packing-cases with which he had been busy.

'Come in,' he said, not offering to shake hands.

Robert shut the door, and, picking his way among the books, stood leaning on the back of the chair Langham pointed out to him. Langham paused opposite to him, his waving jet-black hair falling forward over the marble pale face which had been Robert's young ideal of manly beauty.

The two men were only six years distant in age, but so strong is old a.s.sociation that Robert's feeling towards his friend had always remained in many respects the feeling of the undergraduate towards the don. His sense of it now filled him with a curious awkwardness.

'I know why you are come,' said Langham slowly, after a scrutiny of his visitor.