Then he stopped himself.
"Shall I tell you the whole story?" he said kindly; "it has been a tragedy! I won"t give you details if you had rather not."
"Oh no!" she said hurriedly; "no--tell me."
And she forgot to feel any wonder that Flaxman, in his chivalry, should treat her as though she were a girl with nerves.
"Well, it was the surroundings that were so ghastly. When we got to the house an old woman rushed at me--"His wife"s in there, but ye"ll not find her in her senses; she"s been at it from eight o"clock this morning. We"ve took the children away." I didn"t know what she meant exactly till we got into the little front room. There, such a spectacle!
A young woman on a chair by the fire sleeping heavily, dead drunk; the breakfast things on the table, the sun blazing in on the dust and the dirt, and on the woman"s face. I wanted to carry him into the room on the other side--he was unconscious; but a doctor had come up with us, and made us put him down on a bed there was in the corner. Then we got some brandy and poured it down. The doctor examined him, looked at his foot, threw something over it. "Nothing to be done," he said--"internal injuries--he can"t live half an hour." The next minute the poor fellow opened his eyes. They had pulled away the bed from the wall. Your husband was on the farther side, kneeling. When he opened his eyes, clearly the first thing he saw was his wife. He half sprang up--Elsmere caught him--and gave a horrible cry--indescribably horrible. "_At it again, at it again! My G.o.d!_" Then he fell back fainting. They got the wife out of the room between them--a perfect log--you could hear her heavy breathing from the kitchen opposite. We gave him more brandy and he came to again. He looked up in your husband"s face. "She hasn"t broke out for two months," he said, so piteously, "two months--and now--I"m done--I"m done--and she"ll just go straight to the devil!" And it comes out, so the neighbours told us, that for two years or more he had been patiently trying to reclaim this woman, without a word of complaint to anybody, though his life must have been a dog"s life. And now, on his deathbed, what seemed to be breaking his heart was, not that he was dying, but that his task was s.n.a.t.c.hed from him!"
Flaxman paused, and looked away out of window. He told his story with difficulty.
"Your husband tried to comfort him--promised that the wife and children should be his special care, that everything that could be done to save and protect them should be done. And the poor little fellow looked up at him, with the tears running down his cheeks, and--and--blessed him. "I cared about nothing," he said, "when you came. You"ve been--G.o.d--to me--I"ve seen Him--in you." Then he asked us to say something. Your husband said verse after verse of the Psalms, of the Gospels, of St.
Paul. His eyes grew filmy, but he seemed every now and then to struggle back to life, and as soon as he caught Elsmere"s face his look lightened. Towards the last he said something we none of us caught; but your husband thought it was a line from Emily Bronte"s "Hymn," which he said to them last Sunday in lecture."
He looked up at her interrogatively, but there was no response in her face.
"I asked him about it," the speaker went on, "as we came home. He said Grey of St. Anselm"s once quoted it to him, and he has had a love for it ever since."
"Did he die while you were there?" asked Catherine presently after a silence. Her voice was dull and quiet. He thought her a strange woman.
"No," said Flaxman, almost sharply; "but by now it must be over. The last sign of consciousness was a murmur of his children"s names. They brought them in, but his hands had to be guided to them. A few minutes after it seemed to me that he was really gone, though he still breathed.
The doctor was certain there would be no more consciousness. We stayed nearly another hour. Then his brother came, and some other relations, and we left him. Oh, it is over now!"
Hugh Flaxman sat looking out into the dingy bit of London garden.
Penetrated with pity as he was, he felt the presence of Elsmere"s pale, silent, unsympathetic wife an oppression. How could she receive such a story in such a way?
The door opened and Robert came in hurriedly.
"Good-night, Catherine--he has told you?"
He stood by her, his hand on her shoulder, wistfully looking at her, the face full of signs of what he had gone through.
"Yes, it was terrible!" she said, with an effort.
His face fell. He kissed her on the forehead and went away.
When he was gone, Flaxman suddenly got up and leant against the open French window, looking keenly down on his companion. A new idea had stirred in him.
And presently, after more talk of the incident of the afternoon, and when he had recovered his usual manner, he slipped gradually into the subject of his own experiences in North R---- during the last six months. He a.s.sumed all through that she knew as much as there was to be known of Elsmere"s work, and that she was as much interested as the normal wife is in her husband"s doings. His tact, his delicacy, never failed him for a moment. But he spoke of his own impressions, of matters within his personal knowledge. And since the Easter sermon he had been much on Elsmere"s track; he had been filled with curiosity about him.
Catherine sat a little way from him, her blue dress lying in long folds about her, her head bent, her long fingers crossed on her lap. Sometimes she gave him a startled look, sometimes she shaded her eyes, while her other hand played silently with her watch-chain. Flaxman, watching her closely, however little he might seem to do so, was struck by her austere and delicate beauty as he had never been before.
She hardly spoke all through, but he felt that she listened without resistance, nay, at last that she listened with a kind of hunger. He went from story to story, from scene to scene, without any excitement, in his most ordinary manner, making his reserves now and then, expressing his own opinion when it occurred to him, and not always favourably. But gradually the whole picture emerged, began to live before them. At last he hurriedly looked at his watch.
"What a time I have kept you! It has been a relief to talk to you."
"You have not had dinner!" she said, looking up at him with a sudden nervous bewilderment which touched him and subtly changed his impression of her.
"No matter. I will get some at home. Good-night!"
When he was gone she carried the child up to bed; her supper was brought to her solitary in the dining-room; and afterwards in the drawing-room, where a soft twilight was fading into a soft and starlit night, she mechanically brought out some work for Mary, and sat bending over it by the window. After about an hour she looked up straight before her, threw her work down, and slipped on to the floor, her head resting on the chair.
The shock, the storm, had come. There for hours lay Catherine Elsmere weeping her heart away, wrestling with herself, with memory, with G.o.d.
It was the greatest moral upheaval she had ever known--greater even than that which had convulsed her life at Murewell.
CHAPTER XLIII
Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism had lost its charm; his sympathetic interest in Montalembert, Lacordaire, Lamennais, had to be quickened, pumped up again as it were, by great efforts, which were constantly relaxed within him as he sped westwards by the recurrent memory of that miserable room, the group of men, the bleeding hand, the white dying face.
In Madame de Netteville"s drawing-room he found a small number of people a.s.sembled. M. de Querouelle, a middle-sized, round-headed old gentleman of a familiar French type; Lady Aubrey, thinner, more lath-like than ever, clad in some sumptuous mingling of dark red and silver; Lord Rupert, beaming under the recent introduction of a Land Purchase Bill for Ireland, by which he saw his way at last to wash his hands of "a beastly set of tenants"; Mr. Wharncliffe, a young private secretary with a waxed moustache, six feet of height, and a general air of superlativeness which demanded and secured attention; a famous journalist, whose smiling self-repressive look a.s.sured you that he carried with him the secrets of several empires; and one Sir John Headlam, a little black-haired Jewish-looking man with a limp--an ex-Colonial Governor, who had made himself accepted in London as an amusing fellow, but who was at least as much disliked by one half of society as he was popular with the other.
"Purely for talk, you see, not for show!" said Madame de Netteville to Robert, with a little smiling nod round her circle as they stood waiting for the commencement of dinner.
"I shall hardly do my part," he said with a little sigh. "I have just come from a very different scene."
She looked at him with inquiring eyes.
"A terrible accident in the East End," he said briefly. "We won"t talk of it. I only mention it to propitiate you beforehand. Those things are not forgotten at once."
She said no more, but, seeing that he was indeed out of heart, physically and mentally, she showed the most subtle consideration for him at dinner. M. de Querouelle was made to talk. His hostess wound him up and set him going, tune after tune. He played them all, and, by dint of long practice, to perfection, in the French way. A visit of his youth to the island grave of Chateaubriand; his early memories, as a poetical aspirant, of the magnificent flatteries by which Victor Hugo made himself the G.o.d of young romantic Paris; his talks with Montalembert in the days of _L"Avenir_; his memories of Lamennais"s sombre figure, of Maurice de Guerin"s feverish ethereal charm; his account of the opposition _salons_ under the Empire--they had all been elaborated in the course of years, till every word fitted and each point led to the next with the "inevitableness" of true art. Robert, at first silent and _distrait_, found it impossible after a while not to listen with interest. He admired the skill, too, of Madame de Netteville"s second in the duet, the finish, the alternate sparkle and melancholy of it; and at last he too was drawn in, and found himself listened to with great benevolence by the Frenchman, who had been informed about him, and regarded him indulgently, as one more curious specimen of English religious provincialisms. The journalist, Mr. Addlestone, who had won a European reputation for wisdom by a great scantiness of speech in society, coupled with the look of Minerva"s owl, attached himself to them; while Lady Aubrey, Sir John Headlam, Lord Rupert, and Mr.
Wharncliffe made a noisier and more dashing party at the other end.
"Are you still in your old quarters, Lady Aubrey?" asked Sir John Headlam, turning his old roguish face upon her. "That house of Nell Gwynne"s, wasn"t it, in Meade Street?"
"Oh dear no! We could only get it up to May this year, and then they made us turn out for the season, for the first time for ten years. There is a tiresome young heir who has married a wife and wants to live in it.
I could have left a train of gunpowder and a slow match behind, I was so cross!"
"Ah--"Reculer pour mieux _faire_ sauter!"" said Sir John, mincing out his pun as though he loved it.
"Not bad, Sir John," she said, looking at him calmly, "but you have way to make up. You were so dull the last time you took me in to dinner, that positively----"
"You began to wonder to what I owed my paragraph in the _Societe de Londres_," he rejoined, smiling, though a close observer might have seen an angry flash in his little eyes. "My dear Lady Aubrey, it was simply because I had not seen you for six weeks. My education had been neglected. I get my art and my literature from you. The last time but one we met, you gave me the cream of three new French novels and all the dramatic scandal of the period. I have lived on it for weeks. By the way, have you read the _Princesse de----_?"
He looked at her audaciously. The book had affronted even Paris.
"I haven"t," she said, adjusting her bracelets, while she flashed a rapier-glance at him, "but if I had, I should say precisely the same.
Lord Rupert, will you kindly keep Sir John in order?"
Lord Rupert plunged in with the gallant floundering motion characteristic of him, while Mr. Wharncliffe followed like a modern gunboat behind a three-decker. That young man was a delusion. The casual spectator, to borrow a famous Cambridge _mot_, invariably a.s.sumed that all "the time he could spare from neglecting his duties he must spend in adorning his person." Not at all! The _tenue_ of a dandy was never more cleverly used to mask the schemes of a Disraeli or the hard ambition of a Talleyrand than in Master Frederick Wharncliffe, who was in reality going up the ladder hand over hand, and meant very soon to be on the top rungs.
It was a curious party, typical of the house, and of a certain stratum of London. When, every now and then, in the pauses of their own conversation, Elsmere caught something of the chatter going on at the other end of the table, or when the party became fused into one for a while under the genial influence of a good story or the exhilaration of a personal skirmish, the whole scene--the dainty oval room, the lights, the servants, the exquisite fruit and flowers, the gleaming silver, the tapestried walls--would seem to him for an instant like a mirage, a dream, yet with something glittering and arid about it which a dream never has.
The hard self-confidence of these people--did it belong to the same world as that humbling, that heavenly self-abandonment which had shone on him that afternoon from Charles Richards"s begrimed and blood-stained face? "_Blessed are the poor in spirit_," he said to himself once with an inward groan. "Why am I here? Why am I not at home with Catherine?"