Never had Robert seen him under this aspect. All the despair, all the bitterness hidden under the languid student's exterior of every day, had, as it were, risen to the surface. He stood at bay, against his friend, against himself.
'No!' exclaimed Robert stoutly, 'I do not know you in the sense you mean. I do not know you as the man who could beguile a girl on to a confession of love, and then tell her that for you marriage was too great a burden to be faced!'
Langham started, and then closed his lips in an iron silence. Robert repented him a little. Langham's strange individuality always impressed him against his will.
'I did not come simply to reproach you, Langham,' he went on, 'though I confess to being very hot! I came to try and find out—for myself only, mind—whether what prevents you from following up what I understand happened last night is really a matter of feeling, or a matter of outward circumstance. If, upon reflection, you find that your feeling for Rose is not what you imagined it to be, I shall have my own opinion about your conduct—but I shall be the first to acquiesce in what you have done this morning. If, on the other hand, you are simply afraid of yourself in harness, and afraid of the responsibilities of practical married life, I cannot help begging you to talk the matter over with me, and let us face it together. Whether Rose would ever, under any circumstances, get over the shock of this morning I have not the remotest idea. But'—and he hesitated—'it seems the feeling you appealed to yesterday has been of long growth. You know perfectly well what havoc a thing of this kind may make in a girl's life. I don't say it will. But, at any rate, it is all so desperately serious I could not hold my hand. I am doing what is no doubt wholly unconventional; but I am your friend and her brother; I brought you together, and I ask you to take me into counsel. If you had but done it before!'
There was a moment's dead silence.
'You cannot pretend to believe,' said Langham at last, with the same sombre self-containedness, 'that a marriage with me would be for your sister-in-law's happiness?'
'I don't know what to believe!' cried Robert. 'No,' he added frankly, 'no; when I saw you first attracted by Rose at Murewell I disliked the idea heartily; I was glad to see you separated; à priori, I never thought you suited to each other. But reasoning that holds good when a thing is wholly in the air looks very different when a man has committed himself and another, as you have done.'
Langham surveyed him for a moment, then shook his hair impatiently from his eyes and rose from his bending position by the fire.
'Elsmere, there is nothing to be said! I have behaved as vilely as you please. I have forfeited your friendship. But I should be an even greater fiend and weakling than you think me if, in cold blood, I could let your sister run the risk of marrying me. I could not trust myself—you may think of the statement as you like—I should make her miserable. Last night I had not parted from her an hour before I was utterly and irrevocably sure of it. My habits are my masters. I believe,' he added slowly, his eyes fixed weirdly on something beyond Robert, 'I could even grow to hate what came between me and them!'
Was it the last word of the man's life? It struck Robert with a kind of shiver.