Afterwards Wardlaw, with the brusque remark to Elsmere that 'any fool could see he was getting done up,' insisted on taking the children's class. Catherine, too, had been impressed, as she saw Robert raised a little above her in the glare of many windows, with the sudden perception that the worn, exhausted look of the preceding summer had returned upon him. She held out her hand to Wardlaw with a quick, warm word of thanks. He glanced at her curiously. What had brought her there after all?
Then Robert, protesting that he was being ridiculously coddled, and that Wardlaw was much more in want of a holiday than he, was carried off to the Embankment, and the two spent a happy hour wandering westward, Somerset House, the bridges, the Westminster towers rising before them into the haze of the June afternoon. A little fresh breeze came off the river; that, or his wife's hand on his arm, seemed to put new life into Elsmere. And she walked beside him, talking frankly, heart to heart, with flashes of her old sweet gaiety, as she had not talked for months.
Deep in her mystical sense all the time lay the belief in a final restoration, in an all-atoning moment, perhaps at the very end of life, in which the blind would see, the doubter be convinced. And, meanwhile, the blessedness of this peace, this surrender! Surely the air this afternoon was pure and life-giving for them, the bells rang for them, the trees were green for them!
He had need in the week that followed of all that she had given back to him. For Mr. Grey's illness had taken a dangerous and alarming turn. It seemed to be the issue of long ill-health, and the doctors feared that there were no resources of constitution left to carry him through it. Every day some old St. Anselm's friend on the spot wrote to Elsmere, and with each post the news grew more despairing. Since Elsmere had left Oxford he could count on the fingers of one hand the occasions on which he and Grey had met face to face. But for him, as for many another man of our time, Henry Grey's influence was not primarily an influence of personal contact. His mere life, that he was there, on English soil, within a measurable distance, had been to Elsmere in his darkest moments one of his thoughts of refuge. At a time when a religion which can no longer be believed clashes with a scepticism full of danger to conduct, every such witness as Grey to the power of a new and coming truth holds a special place in the hearts of men who can neither accept fairy tales, nor reconcile themselves to a world without faith. The saintly life grows to be a beacon, a witness. Men cling to it as they have always clung to each other, to the visible and the tangible; as the elders of Miletus, though the Way lay before them, clung to the man who had set their feet therein, 'sorrowing most of all that they should see his face no more.'
The accounts grew worse—all friends shut out, no possibility of last words—the whole of Oxford moved and sorrowing. Then at last, on a Friday, came the dreaded expected letter: 'He is gone! He died early this morning, without pain, conscious almost to the end. He mentioned several friends by name, you among them, during the night. The funeral is to be on Tuesday. You will be here, of course.'
Sad and memorable day! By an untoward chance it fell in Commemoration week, and Robert found the familiar streets teeming with life and noise, under a showery uncertain sky, which every now and then would send the bevies of lightly-gowned maidens, with their mothers and attendant squires, skurrying for shelter, and leave the roofs and pavements glistening. He walked up to St. Anselm's—found, as he expected, that the first part of the service was to be in the chapel, the rest in the cemetery, and then mounted the well-known staircase to Langham's rooms. Langham was apparently in his bedroom. Lunch was on the table—the familiar commons, the familiar toast-and-water. There, in a recess, were the same splendid wall maps of Greece he had so often consulted after lecture. There was the little case of coins, with the gold Alexanders he had handled with so much covetous reverence at eighteen. Outside, the irregular quadrangle with its dripping trees stretched before him; the steps of the new Hall, now the shower was over, were crowded with gowned figures. It might have been yesterday that he had stood in that room, blushing with awkward pleasure under Mr. Grey's first salutation.
The bedroom door opened and Langham came in.
'Elsmere! But of course I expected you.'
His voice seemed to Robert curiously changed. There was a flatness in it, an absence of positive cordiality which was new to him in any greeting of Langham's to himself, and had a chilling effect upon him. The face, too, was changed. Tint and expression were both dulled; its marble-like sharpness and finish had coarsened a little, and the figure, which had never possessed the erectness of youth, had now the pinched look and the confirmed stoop of the valetudinarian.