Robert sprang up. "When you will," he said. "I am ready to stand by what I have just said in the face of you all, if you care to hear it."
Place and particulars were hastily arranged, subject to the approval of the club committee, and Elsmere"s audience separated in a glow of curiosity and expectation.
"Didn"t I tell ye?" the gasfitter"s snarling friend said to him.
"Scratch him and you find the parson. These upper-cla.s.s folk, when they come among us poor ones, always seem to me just hunting for souls, as those Injuns he was talking about last week hunt for scalps. They can"t get to heaven without a certain number of "em slung about "em."
"Wait a bit!" said the gasfitter, his quick dark eyes betraying a certain raised inner temperature.
Next morning the North R---- Club was placarded with announcements that on Easter Eve next Robert Elsmere, Esq., would deliver a lecture in the Debating Hall on "The Claim of Jesus upon Modern Life"; to be followed, as usual, by general discussion.
CHAPTER x.x.xIX
It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at St.
Paul"s, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had accompanied her. Their midday meal was over, and Robert had been devoting himself to Mary, who had been tottering round the room in his wake, clutching one finger tight with her chubby hand. In particular, he had been coaxing her into friendship with a wooden j.a.panese dragon which wound itself in awful yet most seductive coils round the cabinet at the end of the room. It was Mary"s weekly task to embrace this horror, and the performance went by the name of "kissing the Jabberwock." It had been triumphantly achieved, and, as the reward of bravery, Mary was being carried round the room on her father"s shoulder, holding on mercilessly to his curls, her shining blue eyes darting scorn at the defeated monster.
At last Robert deposited her on the rug beside a fascinating farmyard which lay there spread out for her, and stood looking, not at the child, but at his wife.
"Catherine, I feel so much as Mary did three minutes ago!"
She looked up startled. The tone was light, but the sadness, the emotion of the eyes, contradicted it.
"I want courage," he went on--"courage to tell you something that may hurt you. And yet I ought to tell it."
Her face took the shrinking expression which was so painful to him. But she waited quietly for what he had to say.
"You know, I think," he said, looking away from her to the gray Museum outside, "that my work in R---- hasn"t been religious as yet at all. Oh, of course, I have said things here and there, but I haven"t delivered myself in any way. Now there has come an opening."
And he described to her--while she shivered a little and drew herself together--the provocations which were leading him into a tussle with the North R---- Club.
"They have given me a very civil invitation. They are the sort of men after all whom it pays to get hold of, if one can. Among their fellows, they are the men who think. One longs to help them to think to a little more purpose."
"What have you to give them, Robert?" asked Catherine after a pause, her eyes bent on the child"s stocking she was knitting. Her heart was full enough already, poor soul. Oh, the bitterness of this Pa.s.sion week! He had been at her side often in church, but through all his tender silence and consideration she had divined the constant struggle in him between love and intellectual honesty, and it had filled her with a dumb irritation and misery indescribable. Do what she would, wrestle with herself as she would, there was constantly emerging in her now a note of anger, not with Robert, but, as it were, with those malign forces of which he was the prey.
"What have I to give them?" he repeated sadly. "Very little, Catherine, as it seems to me to-night. But come and see."
His tone had a melancholy which went to her heart. In reality he was in that state of depression which often precedes a great effort. But she was startled by his suggestion.
"Come with you, Robert? To the meeting of a secularist club!"
"Why not? I shall be there to protest against outrage to what both you and I hold dear. And the men are decent fellows. There will be no disturbance."
"What are you going to do?" she asked in a low voice.
"I have been trying to think it out," he said with difficulty. "I want simply, if I can, to transfer to their minds that image of Jesus of Nazareth which thought, and love, and reading have left upon my own. I want to make them realise for themselves the historical character, so far as it can be realised--to make them see for themselves the real figure, as it went in and out amongst men--so far as our eyes can now discern it."
The words came quicker towards the end, while the voice sank--took the vibrating characteristic note the wife knew so well.
"How can that help them?" she said abruptly. "Your historical Christ, Robert, will never win souls. If he was G.o.d, every word you speak will insult him. If he was man, he was not a good man!"
"Come and see," was all he said, holding out his hand to her. It was in some sort a renewal of the scene at Les Avants, the inevitable renewal of an offer he felt bound to make, and she felt bound to resist.
She let her knitting fall and placed her hand in his. The baby on the rug was alternately caressing and scourging a woolly baa-lamb, which was the fetish of her childish worship. Her broken incessant baby-talk, and the ringing kisses with which she atoned to the baa-lamb for each successive outrage, made a running accompaniment to the moved undertones of the parents.
"Don"t ask me, Robert, don"t ask me! Do you want me to come and sit thinking of last year"s Easter Eve?"
"Heaven knows I was miserable enough last Easter Eve," he said slowly.
"And now," she exclaimed, looking at him with a sudden agitation of every feature, "now you are not miserable? You are quite confident and sure? You are going to devote your life to attacking the few remnants of faith that still remain in the world?"
Never in her married life had she spoken to him with this accent of bitterness and hostility. He started and withdrew his hand, and there was a silence.
"I held once a wife in my arms," he said presently with a voice hardly audible, "who said to me that she would never persecute her husband. But what is persecution if it is not the determination not to understand?"
She buried her face in her hands. "I could not understand," she said sombrely.
"And rather than try," he insisted, "you will go on believing that I am a man without faith, seeking only to destroy."
"I know you think you have faith," she answered, "but how can it seem faith to me? "He that will not confess Me before men, him will I also deny before My Father which is in heaven." Your unbelief seems to me more dangerous than these horrible things which shock you. For you can make it attractive, you can make it loved, as you once made the faith of Christ loved."
He was silent. She raised her face presently, whereon were the traces of some of those quiet difficult tears which were characteristic of her, and went softly out of the room.
He stood a while leaning against the mantelpiece, deaf to little Mary"s clamour, and to her occasional clutches at his knees, as she tried to raise herself on her tiny tottering feet. A sense as though of some fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him.
And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalatable truths which the optimist is always much too ready to forget.
Heredity, the moulding force of circ.u.mstance, the iron hold of the past upon the present--a man like Elsmere realises the working of these things in other men"s lives with a singular subtlety and clearness, and is for ever overlooking them, running his head against them, in his own.
He turned and laid his arms on the chimneypiece, burying his head on them. Suddenly he felt a touch on his knee, and, looking down, saw Mary peering up, her ma.s.ses of dark hair streaming back from the straining little face, the grave open mouth, and alarmed eyes.
"Fader, tiss! fader, tiss!" she said imperatively.
He lifted her up and covered the little brown cheeks with kisses. But the touch of the child only woke in him a fresh dread--the like of something he had often divined of late in Catherine. Was she actually afraid now that he might feel himself bound in future to take her child spiritually from her? The suspicion of such a fear in her woke in him a fresh anguish; it seemed a measure of the distance they had travelled from that old perfect unity.
"She thinks I could even become in time her tyrant and torturer," he said to himself with measureless pain, "and who knows--who can answer for himself? Oh, the puzzle of living!"
When she came back into the room, pale and quiet, Catherine said nothing, and Robert went to his letters. But after a while she opened his study door.
"Robert, will you tell me what your stories are to be next week, and let me put out the pictures?"
It was the first time she had made any such offer. He sprang up with a flash in his gray eyes, and brought her a slip of paper with a list. She took it without looking at him. But he caught her in his arms, and for a moment in that embrace the soreness of both hearts pa.s.sed away.
But if Catherine would not go, Elsmere was not left on this critical occasion without auditors from his own immediate circle. On the evening of Good Friday Flaxman had found his way to Bedford Square, and, as Catherine was out, was shown into Elsmere"s study.
"I have come," he announced, "to try and persuade you and Mrs. Elsmere to go down with me to Greenlaws to-morrow. My Easter party has come to grief, and it would be a real charity on your part to come and resuscitate it. Do! You look abominably f.a.gged, and as if some country would do you good."