But on that last evening he insisted on writing letters to Langham and Newcome.
'I will spare Langham the sight of me' he said, smiling sadly. 'And I will spare myself the sight of Newcome—I could not bear it, I think! But I must say good-bye—for I love them both.'
Next day, two hours after the Elsmeres had left for Dover, a cab drove up to their house in Bedford Square, and Newcome descended from it. 'Gone, sir, two hours ago,' said the housemaid, and the priest turned away with an involuntary gesture of despair. To his dying day the passionate heart bore the burden of that 'too late,' believing that even at the eleventh hour Elsmere would have been granted to his prayers. He might even have followed them, but that a great retreat for clergy he was just on the point of conducting made it impossible.
Flaxman went down with them to Dover. Rose, in the midst of all her new and womanly care for her sister and Robert, was very sweet to him. In any other circumstances, he told himself, he could easily have broken down the flimsy barrier between them, but in those last twenty-four hours he could press no claim of his own.
When the steamer cast loose, the girl, hanging over the side, stood watching the tall figure on the pier against the gray January sky. Catherine caught her look and attitude, and could have cried aloud in her own gnawing pain.
Flaxman got a cheery letter from Edmondson describing their arrival. Their journey had gone well; even the odious passage from Marseilles had been tolerable; little Mary had proved a model traveller; the villa was luxurious, the weather good.
'I have got rooms close by them in the Vice-Consul's cottage,' wrote Edmondson. 'Imagine, within sixty hours of leaving London in a January fog, finding yourself tramping over wild marigolds and mignonette, under a sky and through an air as balmy as those of an English June—when an English June behaves itself. Elsmere's room overlooks the bay, the great plain of the Metidja dotted with villages, and the grand range of the Djurjura, backed by snowy summits one can hardly tell from the clouds. His spirits are marvellous. He is plunged in the history of Algiers, raving about one Fromentin, learning Spanish even! The wonderful purity and warmth of the air seem to have relieved the larynx greatly. He breathes and speaks much more easily than when we left London. I sometimes feel when I look at him as though in this as in all else he were unlike the common sons of men—as though to him it might be possible to subdue even this fell disease.'
Elsmere himself wrote—
'"I had not heard the half"—O Flaxman! An enchanted land—air, sun, warmth, roses, orange blossom, new potatoes, green peas, veiled Eastern beauties, domed mosques and preaching Mahdis—everything that feeds the outer and the inner man. To throw the window open at waking to the depth of sunlit air between us and the curve of the bay, is for the moment heaven! One's soul seems to escape one, to pour itself into the luminous blue of the morning. I am better—I breathe again.