"Oh, my beloved!" she cried, under her breath, throwing her arms round him, "if you would but stretch out your hand to the true comfort--the true help--the Lamb of G.o.d sacrificed for us!"
He stroked her hair tenderly.
"My weakness might yield--my true best self never. I know Whom I have believed. Oh, my darling, be content. Your misery, your prayers hold me back from G.o.d--from that truth and that trust which can alone be honestly mine. Submit, my wife! Leave me in G.o.d"s hands."
She raised her head. His eyes were bright with fever, his lips trembling, his whole look heavenly. She bowed herself again with a quiet burst of tears, and an indescribable self-abas.e.m.e.nt. They had had their last struggle, and once more he had conquered! Afterwards the cloud lifted from him. Depression and irritation disappeared. It seemed to her often as though he lay already on the breast of G.o.d; even her wifely love grew timid and awestruck.
Yet he did not talk much of immortality, of reunion. It was like a scrupulous child that dares not take for granted more than its father has allowed it to know. At the same time, it was plain to those about him that the only realities to him in a world of shadows were G.o.d--love--the soul.
One day he suddenly caught Catherine"s hands, drew her face to him, and studied it with his glowing and hollow eyes, as though he would draw it into his soul.
"He made it," he said hoa.r.s.ely, as he let her go--"this love--this yearning. And in life He only makes us yearn that He may satisfy. He cannot lead us to the end and disappoint the craving He Himself set in us. No, no--could you--could I--do it? And He, the source of love, or justice----"
Flaxman arrived a few days afterwards. Edmondson had started for London the night before, leaving Elsmere better again, able to drive and even walk a little, and well looked after by a local doctor of ability. As Flaxman, tramping up behind his carriage, climbed the long hill to El Biar, he saw the whole marvellous place in a white light of beauty--the bay, the city, the mountains, oliveyard and orange-grove, drawn in pale tints on luminous air. Suddenly, at the entrance of a steep and narrow lane, he noticed a slight figure standing--a parasol against the sun.
"We thought you would like to be shown the short cut up the hill," said Rose"s voice, strangely demure and shy. "The man can drive round."
A grip of the hand, a word to the driver, and they were alone in the high-walled lane, which was really the old road up the hill, before the French brought zigzags and civilisation. She gave him news of Robert--better than he had expected. Under the influence of one of the natural reactions that wait on illness, the girl"s tone was cheerful, and Flaxman"s spirits rose. They talked of the splendour of the day, the discomforts of the steamer, the picturesqueness of the landing--of anything and everything but the hidden something which was responsible for the dancing brightness in his eyes, the occasional swift veiling of her own.
Then, at an angle of the lane, where a little spring ran cool and brown into a moss-grown trough, where the blue broke joyously through the gray cloud of olive-wood, where not a sight or sound was to be heard of all the busy life which hides and nestles along the hill, he stopped, his hands seizing hers.
"How long?" he said, flushing, his light overcoat falling back from his strong, well-made frame; "from August to February--how long?"
No more! It was most natural, nay, inevitable. For the moment death stood aside and love a.s.serted itself. But this is no place to chronicle what it said.
And he had hardly asked, and she had hardly yielded, before the same misgiving, the same shrinking, seized on the lovers themselves. They sped up the hill, they crept into the house, far apart. It was agreed that neither of them should say a word.
But, with that extraordinarily quick perception that sometimes goes with such a state as his, Elsmere had guessed the position of things before he and Flaxman had been half an hour together. He took a boyish pleasure in making his friend confess himself, and, when Flaxman left him, at once sent for Catherine and told her.
Catherine, coming out afterwards, met Flaxman in the little tiled hall.
How she had aged and blanched! She stood a moment opposite to him, in her plain long dress with its white collar and cuffs, her face working a little.
"We are so glad!" she said, but almost with a sob--"G.o.d bless you!"
And, wringing his hand, she pa.s.sed away from him, hiding her eyes, but without a sound. When they met again she was quite self-contained and bright, talking much both with him and Rose about the future.
And one little word of Rose"s must be recorded here, for those who have followed her through these four years. It was at night, when Robert, with smiles, had driven them out of doors to look at the moon over the bay, from the terrace just beyond the windows. They had been sitting on the bal.u.s.trade talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had lost her mocking ways; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman felt it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much.
When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little white suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder.
"You won"t--you won"t ever be angry with me for making you wait like that? It was impertinent--it was like a child playing tricks!"
Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He was terribly emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals in the day, and it was clear that his nights were often one long struggle for breath. But his spirits were extraordinarily even, and his days occupied to a point Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven, read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street), write his answers to them--those difficult scrawls are among the treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to itself some of the best life in England--then often fall asleep with fatigue. After food there would come a short drive, or, if the day was very warm, an hour or two of sitting outside, generally his best time for talking. He had a wheeled chair in which Flaxman would take him across to the convent garden--a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy--leaf and blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; underneath a revel of every imaginable flower--narcissus and anemones, geraniums and clematis; and all about, hedges of monthly roses, dark red and pale alternately, making a roseleaf carpet under their feet. Through the tree-trunks shone the white sun-warmed convent, and far beyond were glimpses of downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea.
Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank in beauty and delight; talking, too, whenever it was possible to him, of all things in heaven and earth. Then, when he came home, he would have out his books and fall to some old critical problem--his worn and scored Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then to call Flaxman"s attention to some fresh light on an obscure point--only to relinquish the effort again and again with an unfailing patience.
But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not keep his attention fixed to these things very long. Then it would be the turn of his favourite poets--Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most frequently. Flaxman would read the aeneid aloud to him, Robert following the pa.s.sages he loved best in a whisper, his hand resting the while in Catherine"s. And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie watching her while she played.
"I have had a letter," he said to Flaxman one afternoon, "from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the "absurd and wasteful isolation" of the New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement in East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp letter; I could not help it.
It was borne in on me to tell him that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our time what the law was to the early Christians. We _must_ make up our minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as Paul threw over the law, then we must _fight_ as he did. There is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be cleared; then may come the re-building. Religion itself, the peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or playing the part a.s.signed us."
On another occasion, in the convent garden, he broke out with--
"I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which men become the slaves of some metaphysical word--_personality_, or _intelligence_, or what not! What meaning can they have as applied to _G.o.d_? Herbert Spencer is quite right. We no sooner attempt to define what we mean by a Personal G.o.d than we lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic.
But why attempt it at all? I like that French saying, "_Quand on me demande ce que c"est que Dieu, je l"ignore; quand on ne me le demande pas, je le sais tres-bien!_" No, we cannot realise Him in words--we can only live in Him, and die to Him!"
On another occasion, he said, speaking to Catherine of the squire and of Meyrick"s account of his last year of life--
"How selfish one is, _always_--when one least thinks it! How could I have forgotten him so completely as I did during all that New Brotherhood time? Where, what is he now? Ah! if somewhere, somehow, one could----"
He did not finish the sentence, but the painful yearning of his look finished it for him.
But the days pa.s.sed on, and the voice grew rarer, the strength feebler.
By the beginning of March all coming downstairs was over. He was entirely confined to his room, almost to his bed. Then there came a horrible week, when no narcotics took effect, when every night was a wrestle for life, which it seemed must be the last. They had a good nurse, but Flaxman and Catherine mostly shared the watching between them.
One morning he had just dropped into a fevered sleep. Catherine was sitting by the window gazing out into a dawn-world of sun which reminded her of the summer sunrises at Pet.i.tes Dalles. She looked the shadow of herself. Spiritually, too, she was the shadow of herself. Her life was no longer her own: she lived in him--in every look of those eyes--in every movement of that wasted frame.
As she sat there, her Bible on her knee, her strained unseeing gaze resting on the garden and the sea, a sort of hallucination took possession of her. It seemed to her that she saw the form of the Son of man pa.s.sing over the misty slope in front of her, that the dim majestic figure turned and beckoned. In her half-dream she fell on her knees.
"Master!" she cried in agony, "I cannot leave him! Call me not! My life is here. I have no heart--it beats in his."
And the figure pa.s.sed on, the beckoning hand dropping at its side. She followed it with a sort of anguish, but it seemed to her as though mind and body were alike incapable of moving--that she would not if she could. Then suddenly a sound from behind startled her. She turned, her trance shaken off in an instant, and saw Robert sitting up in bed.
For a moment her lover, her husband, of the early days was before her--as she ran to him. But he did not see her.
An ecstasy of joy was on his face; the whole man bent forward listening.
"_The child"s cry!--thank G.o.d! Oh! Meyrick--Catherine--thank G.o.d!_"
And she knew that he stood again on the stairs at Murewell in that September night which gave them their first-born, and that he thanked G.o.d because her pain was over.
An instant"s strained looking, and, sinking back into her arms, he gave two or three gasping breaths, and died.
Five days later Flaxman and Rose brought Catherine home. It was supposed that she would return to her mother at Burwood. Instead, she settled down again in London, and not one of those whom Robert Elsmere had loved was forgotten by his widow. Every Sunday morning, with her child beside her, she worshipped in the old ways; every Sunday afternoon saw her black-veiled figure sitting motionless in a corner of the Elgood Street Hall. In the week she gave all her time and money to the various works of charity which he had started. But she held her peace. Many were grateful to her; some loved her; none understood her. She lived for one hope only; and the years pa.s.sed all too slowly.
The New Brotherhood still exists, and grows. There are many who imagined that as it had been raised out of the earth by Elsmere"s genius, so it would sink with him. Not so! He would have fought the struggle to victory with surpa.s.sing force, with a brilliancy and rapidity none after him could rival. But the struggle was not his. His effort was but a fraction of the effort of the race. In that effort, and in the Divine force behind it, is our trust, as was his.
"Others, I doubt not, if not we, The issue of our toils shall see; And (they forgotten and unknown) Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead had sown.
THE END