One cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a young Dr. Edmondson, an able young physician, just set up for himself as a consultant, who had only lately attached himself to Elsmere, and was now helping him with eagerness to organise a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman exchanged a few words on Elsmere"s lecture, and then the doctor said abruptly,--
"I don"t like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been hoa.r.s.e like that?"
"More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself, and talks of clergyman"s throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once in the country."
"Clergyman"s throat?" Edmondson shook his head dubiously. "It may be. I wish he would let me overhaul him."
"I wish he would!" said Flaxman devoutly. "I will see what I can do. I will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere."
Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. As they entered the study she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite pa.s.sion gleaming in her face.
"You did not explain Him! You never will!"
He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his face changed, blanched before her--he seemed to gasp for breath--she was only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine"s look would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste calamity and grief to the very dregs.
"Robert, to-morrow you _will_ see a doctor?" she implored him when at last he was safely in bed--white, but smiling.
He nodded.
"Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoa.r.s.eness," he said, in a voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.
Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by ill luck, with the morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the squire, but about the squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to Murewell. The squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had pa.s.sed without bringing Elsmere any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was from old Meyrick. "The squire has had another bad attack, and is _much_ weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you.
If you can, come to-morrow."
"_His mind is clear again!_" Horrified by the words and by the images they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently appeared downstairs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for the morning, was going through some household business.
"I _must_ go, I _must_ go!" he said as he handed her the letter.
"Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!"
Catherine looked at him in despair.
"Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr.
Edmondson."
"Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good." She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions, but it was useless. His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt it a call impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and Robert drove off to Waterloo.
Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter"s day. Robert breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year and a half since he had travelled it. He forgot his weakness, the exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day and was going back to Catherine!
At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.
"Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then you may drive on my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common."
The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a hallucination--his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so easy and swift to-day?
By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and Murewell, Robert"s spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighbourhood, and he jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a boy.
"Go on, Tom; see if I am not there as soon as you."
"Looks most uncommon bad," the man muttered to himself as his horse shambled off. "Seems as spry as a lark all the same."
Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered with timid half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth"s bareness everywhere--curling mists--blue points of distant hill--a gray luminous depth of sky.
The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old anguish he stood and blessed G.o.d!--not for any personal happiness, but simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of common living a revelation.
Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up the lane leading to the vicarage. One look! he might not be able to leave the squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal!
Besides, how could the boys have free access except to that ground-floor room? And all that pretty stretch of gra.s.s under the acacia had been cut up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to Catherine.
He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In that upper room he had lain through that agonised night of crisis; the dawn-twitterings of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not lie in the wet any longer--thank G.o.d! Was there time just to run down to Irwin"s cottage, to have a look at the Inst.i.tute?
He had been standing on the farther side of the road from the rectory that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor"s ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath.
The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a drowning thing. When the moment pa.s.sed, he looked round him bewildered, drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black--the sun seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds of children"s voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart--or was it all sight and sound alike, mirage and delirium?
With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man of seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank down, still gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars near the gate. After a while the attack pa.s.sed off and he found himself able to walk on. But the joy, the leaping pulse of half an hour ago, were gone from his veins. Was that the river--the house? He looked at them with dull eyes.
All the light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the familiar things.
However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will and nature had rea.s.serted themselves, and he knew where he was and what he had to do.
Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.
"Why, sir! _Mr._ Elsmere!"
The butler"s voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding at once into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of the old rector.
Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the dining-room and give him some wine before announcing him. Vincent ministered to him with a long face, pressing all the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon him in turn. The squire was much better, he declared, and had been carried down to the library.
"But, lor, sir, there ain"t much to be said for your looks neither--seems as if London didn"t suit you, sir."
Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his throat, and had overtired himself by walking over the common. Then, recognising from a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror hanging by that something of his natural colour had returned to him, he rose and bade Vincent announce him.
"And Mrs. Darcy?" he asked, as they stepped out into the hall again.
"Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she"s very well," said the man, but, as it seemed to Robert, with something of an embarra.s.sed air.
He followed Vincent down the long pa.s.sage--haunted by old memories, by the old sickening sense of mental anguish--to the curtained door.
Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir of feet, and a voice, but at first he saw nothing. The room was very much darkened. Then Meyrick emerged into distinctness.
"Squire, here _is_ Mr. Elsmere! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I"m sure we"re very much obliged to you for meeting the squire"s wishes so promptly.
You"ll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but mending--oh yes, mending, sir--no doubt of it."
Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand was advanced to him out of the gloom.
"That"ll do, Meyrick. You won"t be wanted till the evening."
The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden sense of relief. After all, the squire was still capable of trampling on Meyrick.
In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and the two men were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to the dim light. Out of it the squire"s face gleamed almost as whitely as the tortured marble of the Medusa just above their heads.
"It"s some inflammation in the eyes," the squire explained briefly, "that"s made Meyrick set up all this d--d business of blinds and shutters. I don"t mean to stand it much longer. The eyes are better, and I prefer to see my way out of the world, if possible."