Catherine Elsmere

“ Never once during those hours did Elsmere’s hand fail to perform its needed service to the faint sleeper beside him, and yet that night was one long dream and strangeness to him, nothing real anywhere but consciousness, and God its source; the soul attacked every now and then by phantom stabs of doubt, of bitter, brief misgiving, as the barriers of sense between it and the eternal enigma grew more and more transparent, wrestling a while, and then prevailing. And each golden moment of certainty, of conquering faith, seemed to Robert in some sort a gift from Catherine’s hand. ”

“ Yes, in these June days Elsmere’s happiness was perhaps nearer wreck than it had ever been. All strong natures grow restless under such a pressure as was now weighing on Catherine. Shock and outburst become inevitable.
So she sat alone this hot afternoon, haunted by presentiments, by vague terror for herself and him; while the child tottered about her, cooing, shouting, kissing, and all impulsively, with a ceaseless energy, like her father.
The outer door opened and she heard Robert’s step and apparently Mr. Flaxman’s also. ”

“ What! Live for thirty years in that great house, and never care whether your tenants and labourers lived like pigs or like men, whether the old people died of damp, or the children of diphtheria, which you might have prevented! Robert's brow grew dark over it.
The click of an opening gate. Catherine shook off her dreaminess at once, and hurried along the path to meet her husband. In another moment Elsmere came in sight, swinging along, a holly stick in his hand, his face aglow with health and exercise and kindling at the sight of his wife. ”

“ A girl, a child of fifteen, from one of the crowded Mile End hovels, had gone at Christmas to a distant farm as servant, and come back a month ago ruined, the victim of an outrage over which Elsmere had ground his teeth in fierce and helpless anger. Catherine had found her a shelter, and was to see her through her ‘trouble;’ the girl, a frail, half-witted creature, who could find no words even to bewail herself, clinging to her the while with the dumbest, pitifulest tenacity. ”

“ Eagerness, indeed, seemed to be the note of the whole man, of the quick eyes and mouth, the flexible hands and energetic movements. Even the straight, stubbly hair, its owner's passing torment, standing up round the high open brow, seemed to help the general impression of alertness and vigour.
'Your mother, I hear, is already there?' said Catherine.
'Yes. My poor mother!' and the young man smiled half sadly. 'It is a curious situation for both of us. This living which has just been bestowed on me is my father's old living. It is in the gift of my cousin, Sir Mowbray Elsmere. ”

“ On the other hand, London is kind to such men as Robert Elsmere. His talk, his writing, were becoming known and relished; and even the most rigid of the old school found it difficult to be angry with him. His knowledge of the poor and of social questions attracted the men of action; his growing historical reputation drew the attention of the men of thought. Most people wished to know him and to talk to him, and Catherine, smiled upon for his sake, and assumed to be his chief disciple, felt herself more and more bewildered and antagonistic as the season rushed on. ”

“ His experience of London clergymen, for instance, had not been particularly favorable, and he had a store of anecdotes on the subject which Robert had heard before, but which now, repeated in Catherine’s presence, seemed to have lost every shred of humor they once possessed. Poor Elsmere tried with all his might to divert the stream, but it showed a tormenting tendency to recur to the same channel. And meanwhile the little spectacled wife, dressed in a high home-made cashmere, sat looking at her husband with a benevolent and smiling admiration. She kept all her eloquence for the poor. ”

“ That young rector might be worth looking after. The dinners in Martin Street were alarmingly in want of fresh blood. As for poor Mr. Bickerton, he had begun to talk hastily to Catherine, with a sense of something tumbling about his ears; while Mr. Longstaffe, eyeglass in hand, surveyed the table with a distinct sense of pleasurable entertainment. He had not seen much of Elsmere yet, but it was as clear as daylight that the man was a firebrand, and should be kept in order. ”

“ Robert dragged it out at last, that struggle, into open view, but with difficulty. The Ritualist may glory in the discomfiture of an Erastian bishop—what Christian dare parade ten years of love to God and man? And presently round Elsmere's lip there dawned a little smile of triumph. Catherine had shaken off her cold silence, her Puritan aloofness, was bending forward eagerly—listening. ”

“ It showed her a new aspect of a man whose intellectual life was becoming plain to her, while his moral life was still something of a mystery. The look in Elsmere's face as he sat bending over the maimed young farmer, the strength and tenderness of the man, the diffidence of the few religious things he said, and yet the reality and force of them, struck her powerfully. He had forgotten her, forgotten everything save the bitter human need, and the comfort it was his privilege to offer. Catherine stood answering Mrs. Tyson at random, the tears rising in her eyes. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Elsmere’s relations with the poor of the parish often made Catherine miserable. She herself had the most angelic pity and tenderness for sorrows and sinners; but sin was sin to her, and when she saw Mrs. Elsmere more than half attracted by the stronger vices, and in many cases more inclined to laugh with what was human in them, than to weep over what was vile, Robert’s wife would go away and wrestle with herself, that she might be betrayed into nothing harsh toward Robert’s mother. ”

“ Clearly nothing but cowardice! He cannot face the intellectual change, and he must, I suppose, dread lest it should affect his work. Good God, what nonsense! As if any one inquired what an English parson believed nowadays, so long as he performs all the usual antics decently!’
And, meanwhile, it never occurred to the Squire that Elsmere had a wife, and a pious one. Catherine had been dropped out of his calculation as to Elsmere’s future, at a very early stage.
The following afternoon Robert, coming home from a round, found Catherine out, and a note awaiting him from the Hall. ”

“ Catherine for some little way walked last of the party, the vicar in front of her. Then Elsmere picked a stonecrop, quarrelled over its precise name with Rose, and waited for Catherine, who had a very close and familiar knowledge of the botany of the district.
‘You have crushed me,’ he said, laughing, as he put the flower carefully into his pocketbook; ‘but it is worth while to be crushed by anyone who can give so much ground for their knowledge. ”

“ The street outside was blocked, men looking dismally into each other's eyes, women weeping, children sobbing for sympathy, all feeling themselves at once shelterless and forsaken. When Elsmere heard the news of it, he turned on his face, and asked even Catherine to leave him for a while.
The preparations were pushed on. The New Brotherhood had just become the subject of an animated discussion in the press, and London was touched by the news of its young founder's breakdown. Catherine found herself besieged by offers of help of various kinds. One offer Flaxman persuaded her to accept. ”

“ Elsmere felt it an unusually interesting moment, so strong had been his sense of attraction at tea; but like the rest of us he could find nothing more telling to start with than a remark about the weather. Catherine in her reply asked him if he were quite recovered from the attack of low fever he was understood to have been suffering from.
‘Oh, yes,’ he said brightly, ‘I am very nearly as fit as I ever was, and more eager than I ever was, to got to work. The idling of it is the worst part of illness. ”

“ I am not somebody else and needn’t earn my bread; and art is not religion; and—’
‘Wheels!’ exclaimed Agnes. ‘Catherine, I suppose, home from Whinborough.’
Rose got up and peered through the rhododendron bushes at the top of the wall which shut them off from the road.
‘Catherine and an unknown. Catherine driving at a foot’s pace, and the unknown walking beside her. Oh, I see, of course—Mr. Elsmere. He will come in to tea, so I’ll go for a cup. It is his duty to call on us to-day.’
When Rose came back in the wake of her mother, Catherine and Robert Elsmere were coming up the drive. ”

“ As the door shut upon him Robert dropped back into his chair, and sat on, his face in his hands, staring dolefully at the fire. It seemed to him the world was going crookedly. A day on which a man of singularly open and responsive temper makes a new enemy, and comes nearer than ever before to losing an old friend, shows very blackly to him in the calendar, and, by way of aggravation, Robert Elsmere says to himself at once that somehow or other there must be fault of his own in the matter.
Rose!—pshaw! Catherine little knows what stuff that cold intangible soul is made of. ”

“ Elsmere sat indoors reading up the history of the parish system of Surrey, or pretending to do so. He sat in a corner of the study, where he and the vicar protected each other against Mrs. Thornburgh. That good woman would open the door once and again in the morning, and put her head through in search of prey; but on being confronted with two studious men instead of one, each buried up to the ears in folios, she would give vent to an irritable cough and retire discomfited. In reality Elsmere was thinking of nothing in the world but what Catherine Leyburn might be doing that morning. ”

“ Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere and Catherine first realized in detail what Elsmere’s act was to mean to them, as husband and wife, in the future. Each left England with the most tender and heroic resolves. And no one who knows anything of life will need to be told that even for these two finely natured people such resolves were infinitely easier to make than to carry out. ”

“ Robert was a great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere’s irrationality was an aversion to doctors, from the point of view of his own ailments. He had an unbounded admiration for them as a class, and would have nothing to say to them as individuals that he could possibly help. Flaxman was sarcastic; Catherine looked imploring in vain. He vowed that he was treating himself with a skill any professional might envy, and went his way. And for a time the stimulus of London and of his work seemed to act favorably upon him. ”

“ Get through the day somehow, with as little harm to yourself and other people as may be; do your duty if you like it, but, for heaven's sake, don't cant about it to other people!'
If the affinities of character count for much, Catherine and Henry Grey should certainly have understood each other. The tutor liked the look of Elsmere's wife. ”

“ Elsmere, whose strange ways of living were more the result of certain longstanding delicacies of health than she had ever allowed anyone to imagine. A few days of acute inflammation of the lungs, borne with a patience and heroism which showed the Irish character at its finest a moment of agonized wrestling with that terror of death which had haunted the keen vivacious soul from its earliest consciousness, ending in a glow of spiritual victory—Robert found himself motherless. He and Catherine had never left her since the beginning of the illness. ”

“ Here we are at his gates—all our people in his power; the comfort, at any rate, of our social life depending on him. And what a strange, unmanageable, inexplicable being!'
Elsmere sighed aloud. Like all quick imaginative natures he was easily depressed, and the squire's sombre figure had for the moment darkened his whole horizon. Catherine laid her cheek against his arm in the darkness, consoling, remonstrating, every other thought lost in her sympathy with Robert's worries. Langham and Rose slipped out of her head ”

“ It is a nation of learned fools, none of whom ever sees an inch beyond his own professorial nose.’
Then he stayed to luncheon, and Catherine, moved by many feelings—perhaps in subtle striving against her own passionate sense of wrong at this man’s hands—was kind to him, and talked and smiled, indeed, so much, that the Squire for the first time in his life took individual notice of her, and as he parted with Elsmere in the hall made the remark that Mrs. Elsmere seemed to like London, to which Robert, busy in an opportune search for his guest’s coat made no reply. ”

“ Grey was left in dismay, rapidly turning over the impressions of Catherine left on him by his last year’s sight of her. That pale distinguished woman with her look of strength and character,—he remembered Langham’s analysis of her, and of the silent religious intensity she had brought with her from her training among the northern hills.
Was there a bitterly human tragedy preparing under all this thought-drama he had been listening to?
Deeply moved, he went up to Robert, and laid his rugged hand almost timidly upon him.
‘Elsmere, it won’t break her heart! You are a good man. ”