Robert Elsmere - Mrs. Humphry Ward (read this if TXT) 📗

Houses and the Professors, or mingled with the slowly pacing crowds of Masters; while along the route groups of visitors and merrymakers, young men in flannels or girls in light dresses, stood with suddenly grave faces here and there, caught by the general wave of mourning, and wondering what such a spectacle might mean.

Robert, losing sight of Langham as they left the chapel, found his arm grasped by young Cathcart, his correspondent. The man was a junior Fellow who had attached himself to Grey during the two preceding years with especial devotion. Robert had only a slight knowledge of him, but there was something in his voice and grip which made him feel at once infinitely more at home with him at this moment than he had felt with the old friend of his undergraduate years.

They walked down Beaumont Street together. The rain came on again, and the long black crowd stretched before them was lashed by the driving gusts. As they went along, Cathcart told him all he wanted to know.

'The night before the end he was perfectly calm and conscious. I told you he mentioned your name among the friends to whom he sent his good-by. He thought for everybody. For all those of his house he left the most minute and tender directions. He forgot nothing. And all with such extraordinary simplicity and quietness, like one arranging for a journey! In the evening an old Quaker aunt of his, a North-country woman whom he had been much with as a boy, and to whom he was much attached, was sitting with him. I was there too. She was a beautiful old figure in her white cap and kerchief, and it seemed to please him to lie and look at her. "It'll not be for long, Henry," she said to him once "I'm seventy-seven this spring. I shall come to you soon." He made no reply, and his silence seemed to disturb her. I don't fancy she had known much of his mind of late years. "You'll not be doubting the Lord's goodness, Henry?" she said to him, with the tears in her eyes. "No,", he said, "no, never. Only it seems to be His Will we should be certain of nothing--_but Himself!_ I ask no more." I shall never forget the accent of those words: they were the breath of his inmost life. If ever man was _Gottbetrunken_ it was he--and yet not a word beyond what he felt to be true, beyond what the intellect could grasp!'

Twenty minutes later Robert stood by the open grave. The rain beat down on the black concourse of mourners. But there were blue spaces in the drifting sky, and a wavering rainy light played at intervals over the Wytham and Hinksey Hills, and over the butter-cupped river meadows, where the lush hay-grass bent in long lines under the showers. To his left, the Provost, his glistening white head bare to the rain, was reading the rest of the service.

As the coffin was lowered Elsmere bent over the grave. 'My friend, my master,' cried the yearning filial heart, 'oh, give me something of yourself to take back into life, something to brace me through this darkness of our ignorance, something to keep hope alive as you kept it to the end!'

And on the inward ear there rose, with the solemnity of a last message, words which years before he had found marked in a little book of Meditations borrowed from Grey's table--words long treasured and often repeated:--

'Amid a world of forgetfulness and decay, in the sight of his own shortcomings and limitations, or on the edge of the tomb, he alone who has found his soul in losing it, who in singleness of mind _has lived in order to love and understand_, will find that the God who is near to him as his own conscience has a face of light and love!'

Pressing the phrases into his memory, he listened to the triumphant outbursts of the Christian service.

'Man's hope,' he thought, 'has grown humbler than this. It keeps now a more modest mien in the presence of the Eternal Mystery; but is it in truth less real, less sustaining? Let Grey's trust answer for me.'

He walked away absorbed, till at last in the little squalid street outside the cemetery it occurred to him to look round for Langham. Instead, he found Cathcart who had just come up with him.

'Is Langham behind?' he asked. 'I want a word with him before I go.'

'Is he here?' asked the other, with a change of expression.

'But of course! He was in the chapel. How could, you----'

'I thought he would probably go away,' said Cathcart, with some bitterness. 'Grey made many efforts to get him to come and see him before he became so desperately ill. Langham came once. Grey never asked for him again.'

'It is his old horror of expression, I suppose,' said Robert, troubled; 'his dread of being forced to take a line, to face anything certain and irrevocable. I understand. He could not say good-by to a friend to save his life. There is no shirking that! One must either do it or leave it!'

Cathcart shrugged his shoulders, and drew a masterly little picture of Langham's life in college. He had succeeded by the most adroit devices in completely isolating himself both from the older and the younger men.

'He attends college-meeting sometimes, and contributes a sarcasm or two on the cramming system of the college. He takes a constitutional to Summertown every day on the least frequented side of the road, that he may avoid being spoken to. And as to his ways of living, he and I happen to have the same scout--old Dobson, you remember? And if I would let him, he would tell me tales by the hour. He is the only man in the University who knows anything about it. I gather from what he says that Langham is becoming a complete valetudinarian. Everything must go exactly by rule--his food, his work, the management of his clothes--and any little _contretemps_ makes him ill. But the comedy is to watch him when there is anything going on in the place that he thinks may lead to a canvass and to any attempt to influence him for a vote. On these occasions he goes off with automatic regularity to an hotel at West Malvern, and only reappears when the "Times" tells him the thing is done with.'

Both laughed. Then Robert sighed. Weaknesses of Langham's sort may be amusing enough to the contemptuous and unconcerned outsider. But the general result of them, whether for the man himself or those whom he affects, is tragic, not comic; and Elsmere had good reason for knowing it.

Later, after a long talk with the Provost, and meetings with various other old friends, he walked down to the station, under a sky clear from rain, and through a town gay with festal preparations. Not a sign now, in the crowded, bustling streets, of that melancholy pageant of the afternoon. The heroic memory had flashed for a moment like something vivid and gleaming in the sight of all, understanding and ignorant. Now it lay committed to a few faithful hearts, there to become one seed among many of a new religious life in England.

On the platform Robert found himself nervously accosted by a tall shabbily-dressed man.

'Elsmere, have you forgotten me?'

He turned and recognized a man whom he had last seen as a St. Anselm's undergraduate--one MacNiell, a handsome rowdy young Irishman, supposed to be clever, and decidedly popular in the college. As he stood looking at him, puzzled by the difference between the old impression and the new, suddenly the man's story flashed across him; he remembered some disgraceful escapade--an expulsion.

'You came for the funeral, of course?' said the other, his face flushing consciously.

'Yes--and you too?'

The man turned away, and something in his silence led Robert to stroll on beside him to the open end of the platform.

'I have lost my only friend,' MacNiell said at last hoarsely. 'He took me up when my own father would have nothing to say to me. He found me work; he wrote to me; for years he stood between me and perdition. I am just going out to a post in New Zealand he got for me, and next week before I sail-I--I--am to be married--and he was to be there. He was so pleased--he had seen her.'

It was one story out of a hundred like it, as Robert knew very well. They talked for a few minutes, and then the train loomed in the distance.

'He saved you,' said Robert, holding out his hand, 'and at a dark moment in my own life I owed him everything. There is nothing we can do for him in return but--to remember him! Write to me, if you can or will, from New Zealand, for his sake.'

A few seconds later the train sped past the bare little cemetery, which lay just beyond the line. Robert bent forward. In the pale yellow glow of the evening he could distinguish the grave, the mound of gravel, the planks, and some figures moving beside it. He strained his eyes till he could see no more, his heart full of veneration, of memory, of prayer. In himself life seemed so restless and combative. Surely he, more than others, had need of the lofty lessons of death!


CHAPTER XLV.

In the weeks which followed--weeks often of mental and physical depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by the influence of an overworked state he could not be got to admit--Elsmere owed much to Hugh Flaxman's cheery sympathetic temper, and became more attached to him than ever, and more ready than ever, should the fates deem it so, to welcome him as a brother-in-law. However, the fates for the moment seemed to have borrowed a leaf from Langham's book, and did not apparently know their own minds. It says volumes for Hugh Flaxman's general capacities as a human being that at this period he should have had any attention to give to a friend, his position as a lover was so dubious and difficult.

After the evening at the Workmen's Club, and as a result of further meditation, he had greatly developed the tactics first adopted on that occasion. He had beaten a masterly retreat, and Rose Leyburn was troubled with him no more.

The result was that a certain brilliant young person was soon sharply conscious of a sudden drop in the pleasure of living. Mr. Flaxman had been the Leyburns' most constant and entertaining visitor. During the whole of May he paid one formal call in Lerwick Gardens, and was then entertained tete-a-tete by Mrs. Leyburn, to Rose's intense subsequent annoyance, who know perfectly well that her mother was incapable of chattering about anything but her daughters.

He still sent flowers, but they came from his head gardener, addressed to Mrs. Leyburn. Agnes put them in water, and Rose never gave them a look. Rose went to Lady Helen's because Lady Helen made her, and was much too engaging a creature to be rebuffed; but, however merry and protracted the teas in those scented rooms might be, Mr. Flaxman's step on the stairs, and Mr. Flaxman's hand on the curtain over the door, till now the feature in the entertainment most to be counted on, were, generally speaking, conspicuously absent.

He and the Leyburns met, of course, for their list of common friends was now considerable; but Agnes, reporting matters to Catherine, could only say that each of these occasions left