Robert Elsmere

'But I thought----' began Robert, taken aback.

'You thought,' repeated Flaxman coolly, 'that your two sisters-in-law were going down there with Lady Helen, to meet some musical folk. Well, they are not coming. Miss Leyburn thinks your mother-in-law not very well to-day, and doesn't like to come. And your younger sister prefers also to stay in town. Helen is much disappointed, so am I. But----' And he shrugged his shoulders.

Robert found it difficult to make a suitable remark. His sisters-in-law were certainly inscrutable young women. This Easter party at Greenlaws, Mr. Flaxman's country house, had been planned, he knew, for weeks. And certainly nothing could be very wrong with Mrs. Leyburn, or Catherine would have been warned.

'I am afraid your plans must be greatly put out,' he said, with some embarra.s.sment.

'Of course they are,' replied Flaxman, with a dry smile. He stood opposite Elsmere, his hands in his pockets.

'Will you have a confidence?' the bright eyes seemed to say. 'I am quite ready. Claim it if you like.'

But Elsmere had no intention of claiming it. The position of all Rose's kindred, indeed, at the present moment was not easy. None of them had the least knowledge of Rose's mind. Had she forgotten Langham? Had she lost her heart afresh to Flaxman? No one knew. Flaxman's absorption in her was clear enough. But his love-making, if it was such, was not of an ordinary kind, and did not always explain itself. And, moreover, his wealth and social position were elements in the situation calculated to make people like the Elsmeres particularly diffident and discreet.

Impossible for them, much as they liked him, to make any of the advances!

No, Robert wanted no confidences. He was not prepared to take the responsibility of them. So, letting Rose alone, he took up his visitor's invitation to themselves, and explained the engagement for Easter Eve, which tied them to London.

'Whew!' said Hugh Flaxman, 'but that will be a s.h.i.+ndy worth seeing. I must come!'

'Nonsense!' said Robert, smiling. 'Go down to Greenlaws, and go to church. That will be much more in your line.'

'As for church,' said Flaxman meditatively, 'if I put off my party altogether, and stay in town, there will be this further advantage, that, after hearing you on Sat.u.r.day night, I can, with a blameless impartiality, spend the following day in St. Andrew's, Well Street.

Yes! I telegraph to Helen--she knows my ways--and I come down to protect you against an atheistical mob to-morrow night!'

Robert tried to dissuade him. He did not want Flaxman. Flaxman's Epicureanism, the easy tolerance with which, now that the effervescence of his youth had subsided, the man harboured and dallied with a dozen contradictory beliefs, were at times peculiarly antipathetic to Elsmere.

They were so now, just as heart and soul were nerved to an effort which could not be made at all without the n.o.bler sort of self-confidence.

But Flaxman was determined.

'No,' he said; 'this one day we'll give--to heresy. Don't look so forbidding! In the first place, you won't see me; in the next, if you did, you would feel me as wax in your hands. I am like the man in Sophocles--always the possession of the last speaker! One day I am all for the church. A certain number of chances in the hundred there still are, you will admit, that she is in the right of it. And if so, why should I cut myself off from a whole host of beautiful things not to be got outside her? But the next day--_vive_ Elsmere and the Revolution! If only Elsmere could persuade me intellectually! But I never yet came across a religious novelty that seemed to me to have a leg of logic to stand on!'

He laid his hand on Robert's shoulder, his eyes twinkling with a sudden energy. Robert made no answer. He stood erect, frowning a little, his hands thrust far into the pockets of his light gray coat. He was in no mood to disclose himself to Flaxman. The inner vision was fixed with extraordinary intensity on quite another sort of antagonist, with whom the mind was continuously grappling.

'Ah, well--till to-morrow!' said Flaxman, with a smile, shook hands, and went.

Outside he hailed a cab and drove off to Lady Charlotte's.

He found his aunt and Mr. Wynnstay in the drawing-room alone, one on either side of the fire. Lady Charlotte was reading the latest political biography with an apparent profundity of attention; Mr. Wynnstay was lounging and caressing the cat. But both his aunt's absorption and Mr.

Wynnstay's nonchalance seemed to Flaxman overdone. He suspected a domestic breeze.

Lady Charlotte made him effusively welcome. He had come to propose that she should accompany him the following evening to hear Elsmere lecture.

'I advise you to come,' he said. 'Elsmere will deliver his soul, and the amount of soul he has to deliver in these dull days is astounding. A dowdy dress and a veil, of course. I will go down beforehand and see some one on

'_Really_, Hugh,' cried Lady Charlotte impatiently, 'I think you might take your snubbing with dignity. Her refusal this morning to go to Greenlaws was brusqueness itself. To my mind that young person gives herself airs!' And the Duke of Sedbergh's sister drew herself up with a rustle of all her ample frame.

'Yes, I was snubbed,' said Flaxman, unperturbed; 'that, however, is no reason why she shouldn't find it attractive to go to-morrow night.'

'And you will let her see that, just because you couldn't get hold of her, you have given up your Easter party and left your sister in the lurch?'

'I never had excessive notions of dignity,' he replied composedly. 'You may make up any story you please. The real fact is that I want to hear Elsmere.'

'You had better go, my dear!' said her husband sardonically. 'I cannot imagine anything more piquant than an atheistic slum on Easter Eve.'

'Nor can I!' she replied, her combativeness rousing at once. 'Much obliged to you, Hugh. I will borrow my housekeeper's dress, and be ready to leave here at half-past seven.'

Nothing more was said of Rose, but Flaxman knew that she would be asked, and let it alone.

'Will his wife be there?' asked Lady Charlotte.

'Who? Elsmere's? My dear aunt, when you happen to be the orthodox wife of a rising heretic, your husband's opinions are not exactly the spectacular performance they are to you and me. I should think it most unlikely.'

'Oh, she persecutes him, does she?'

'She wouldn't be a woman if she didn't!' observed Mr. Wynnstay, _sotto voce_. The small dark man was lost in a great armchair, his delicate painter's hands playing with the fur of a huge Persian cat. Lady Charlotte threw him an eagle glance, and he subsided--for the moment.

Flaxman, however, was perfectly right. There had been a breeze. It had been just announced to the master of the house by his spouse that certain Socialist celebrities--who might any day be expected to make acquaintance with the police--were coming to dine at his table, to finger his spoons, and mix their diatribes with his champagne, on the following Tuesday. Overt rebellion had never served him yet, and he knew perfectly well that when it came to the point he should smile more or less affably upon these gentry, as he had smiled upon others of the same sort before. But it had not yet come to the point, and his intermediate state was explosive in the extreme.

Mr. Flaxman dexterously continued the subject of the Elsmeres. Dropping his bantering tone, he delivered himself of a very delicate critical a.n.a.lysis of Catherine Elsmere's temperament and position, as in the course of several months his intimacy with her husband had revealed them to him. He did it well, with acuteness and philosophical relish. The situation presented itself to him as an extremely refined and yet tragic phase of the religious difficulty, and it gave him intellectual pleasure to draw it out in words.

Lady Charlotte sat listening, enjoying her nephew's crisp phrases, but also gradually gaining a perception of the human reality behind this word-play of Hugh's. That 'good heart' of hers was touched; the large imperious face began to frown.

'Dear me!' she said, with a little sigh. 'Don't go on, Hugh! I suppose it's because we all of us believe so little that the poor thing's point of view seems to one so unreal. All the same, however,' she added, regaining her usual role of magisterial common-sense, 'a woman, in my opinion, ought to go with her husband in religious matters.'

'Provided, of course, she sets him at nought in all others,' put in Mr.

Wynnstay, rising and daintily depositing the cat. 'Many men, however, my dear, might be willing to compromise it differently. Granted a certain _modic.u.m_ of worldly conformity, they would not be at all indisposed to a conscience clause.'

He lounged out of the room, while Lady Charlotte shrugged her shoulders with a look at her nephew in which there was an irrepressible twinkle.

Mr. Flaxman neither heard nor saw. Life would have ceased to be worth having long ago had he ever taken sides in the smallest degree in this _menage_.

Flaxman walked home again, not particularly satisfied with himself and his manoeuvres. Very likely it was quite unwise of him to have devised another meeting between himself and Rose Leyburn so soon. Certainly she had snubbed him--there could be no doubt of that. Nor was he in much perplexity as to the reason. He had been forgetting himself, forgetting his role and the whole lie of the situation, and if a man will be an idiot he must suffer for it. He had distinctly been put back a move.

The facts were very simple. It was now nearly three months since Langham's disappearance. During that time Rose Leyburn had been, to Flaxman's mind, enchantingly dependent on him. He had played his part so well, and the beautiful high-spirited child had suited herself so navely to his acting! Evidently she had said to herself that his age, his former marriage, his relation to Lady Helen, his constant kindness to her and her sister, made it natural that she should trust him, make him her friend, and allow him an intimacy she allowed to no other male friend. And when once the situation had been so defined in her mind, how the girl's true self had come out!--what delightful moments that intimacy had contained for him!

He remembered how on one occasion he had been reading some Browning to her and Helen, in Helen's crowded belittered drawing-room, which seemed all piano and photographs and lilies of the valley. He never could exactly trace the connection between the pa.s.sage he had been reading and what happened. Probably it was merely Browning's poignant pa.s.sionate note that had affected her. In spite of all her proud bright reserve, both he and Helen often felt through these weeks that just below this surface there was a heart which quivered at the least touch.

He finished the lines and laid down the book. Lady Helen heard her three-year-old boy crying upstairs, and ran up to see what was the matter. He and Rose were left alone in the scented fire-lit room. And a jet of flame suddenly showed him the girl's face turned away, convulsed with a momentary struggle for self-control. She raised a hand an instant to her eyes, not dreaming evidently that she could be seen in the dimness; and her gloves dropped from her lap.

He moved forward, stooped on one knee, and as she held out her hand for the gloves, he kissed the hand very gently, detaining it afterwards as a brother might. There was not a thought of himself in his mind. Simply he could not bear that so bright a creature should ever be sorry. It seemed to him intolerable, against the nature of things. If he could have procured for her at that moment a coerced and transformed Langham, a Langham fitted to make her happy, he could almost have done it; and, short of such radical consolation, the very least he could do was to go on his knee to her, and comfort her in tender brotherly fas.h.i.+on.

She did not say anything; she let her hand stay a moment, and then she got up, put on her veil, left a quiet message for Lady Helen, and departed. But as he put her into a hansom her whole manner to him was full of a shy shrinking sweetness. And when Rose was shy and shrinking she was adorable.

Well, and now he had never again gone nearly so far as to kiss her hand, and yet because of an indiscreet moment everything was changed between them; she had turned resentful stand-off, nay, as nearly rude as a girl under the restraints of modern manners can manage to be. He almost laughed as he recalled Helen's report of her interview with Rose that morning, in which she had tried to persuade a young person outrageously on her dignity to keep an engagement she had herself spontaneously made.

'I am very sorry, Lady Helen,' Rose had said, her slim figure drawn up so stiffly that the small Lady Helen felt herself totally effaced beside her. 'But I had rather not leave London this week. I think I will stay with mamma and Agnes.'

And nothing Lady Helen could say moved her, or modified her formula of refusal.

'What _have_ you been doing, Hugh?' his sister asked him, half dismayed, half provoked.