'Robert, have you walked all the way?'
'Yes. I came along the Embankment. Such a beautiful evening!'
He slipped his arm inside hers, and they mounted the stairs together. She glanced at him wistfully. She was perfectly aware that these months were to him months of incessant travail of spirit, and she caught at this moment the old strenuous look of eye and brow she knew so well. A year ago, and every thought of his mind had been open to her—and now—she herself had shut them out—but her heart sank within her.
She turned and kissed him. He bent his head fondly over her. But inwardly all the ardour of his mood collapsed at the touch of her. For the protests of a world in arms can be withstood with joy, but the protest that steals into your heart, that takes love's garb and uses love's ways—there is the difficulty!
CHAPTER XXXIII
But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realising any fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad Church vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He undertook some rent-collecting, and some evening lectures on elementary science to boys and men. But after a while he began to feel his position false and unsatisfactory. In truth, his opinions were in the main identical with those of the vicar under whom he was acting. But Mr. Vernon was a Broad Churchman, belonged to the Church Reform movement, and thought it absolutely necessary to 'keep things going,' and by a policy of prudent silence and gradual expansion from within, to save the great 'plant' of the Establishment from falling wholesale into the hands of the High Churchmen. In consequence he was involved, as Robert held, in endless contradictions and practical falsities of speech and action. His large church was attended by a handful of some fifty to a hundred persons. Vernon could not preach what he did believe, and would not preach, more than was absolutely necessary, what he did not believe. He was hard-working and kind-hearted, but the perpetual divorce between thought and action, which his position made inevitable, was constantly blunting and weakening all he did. His whole life, indeed, was one long waste of power, simply for lack of an elementary frankness.
But if these became Robert's views as to Vernon, Vernon's feeling towards Elsmere after six weeks' acquaintance was not less decided. He was constitutionally timid, and he probably divined in his new helper a man of no ordinary calibre, whose influence might very well turn out some day to be of the 'incalculably diffusive' kind. He grew uncomfortable, begged Elsmere to beware of any 'direct religious teaching,' talked in warm praise of a 'policy of omissions,' and in equally warm denunciation of 'anything like a policy of attack.' In short, it became plain that two men so much alike, and yet so different, could not long co-operate.
However, just as the fact was being brought home to Elsmere, a friendly chance intervened.
Hugh Flaxman, the Leyburns' new acquaintance and Lady Helen's brother, had been drawn to Elsmere at first sight; and a meeting or two, now at Lady Charlotte's, now at the Leyburns', had led both men far on the way to a friendship. Of Hugh Flaxman himself more hereafter. At present all that need be recorded is that it was at Mr. Flaxman's house, overlooking St. James's Park, Robert first met a man who was to give him the opening for which he was looking.