And one little word of Rose's must be recorded here, for those who have followed her through these four years. It was at night, when Robert, with smiles, had driven them out of doors to look at the moon over the bay, from the terrace just beyond the windows. They had been sitting on the balustrade talking of Elsmere. In this nearness to death, Rose had lost her mocking ways; but she was shy and difficult, and Flaxman felt it all very strange, and did not venture to woo her much.
When, all at once, he felt her hand steal trembling, a little white suppliant, into his, and her face against his shoulder.
'You won't—you won't ever be angry with me for making you wait like that? It was impertinent—it was like a child playing tricks!'
Flaxman was deeply shocked by the change in Robert. He was terribly emaciated. They could only talk at rare intervals in the day, and it was clear that his nights were often one long struggle for breath. But his spirits were extraordinarily even, and his days occupied to a point Flaxman could hardly have believed. He would creep downstairs at eleven, read his English letters (among them always some from Elgood Street), write his answers to them—those difficult scrawls are among the treasured archives of a society which is fast gathering to itself some of the best life in England—then often fall asleep with fatigue. After food there would come a short drive, or, if the day was very warm, an hour or two of sitting outside, generally his best time for talking. He had a wheeled chair in which Flaxman would take him across to the convent garden—a dream of beauty. Overhead an orange canopy—leaf and blossom and golden fruit all in simultaneous perfection; underneath a revel of every imaginable flower—narcissus and anemones, geraniums and clematis; and all about, hedges of monthly roses, dark red and pale alternately, making a roseleaf carpet under their feet. Through the tree-trunks shone the white sun-warmed convent, and far beyond were glimpses of downward-trending valleys edged by twinkling sea.
Here, sensitive and receptive to his last hour, Elsmere drank in beauty and delight; talking, too, whenever it was possible to him, of all things in heaven and earth. Then, when he came home, he would have out his books and fall to some old critical problem—his worn and scored Greek Testament always beside him, the quick eye making its way through some new monograph or other, the parched lips opening every now and then to call Flaxman's attention to some fresh light on an obscure point—only to relinquish the effort again and again with an unfailing patience.
But though he would begin as ardently as ever, he could not keep his attention fixed to these things very long. Then it would be the turn of his favourite poets—Wordsworth, Tennyson, Virgil. Virgil perhaps most frequently. Flaxman would read the Æneid aloud to him, Robert following the passages he loved best in a whisper, his hand resting the while in Catherine's. And then Mary would be brought in, and he would lie watching her while she played.
'I have had a letter,' he said to Flaxman one afternoon, 'from a Broad Church clergyman in the Midlands, who imagines me to be still militant in London, protesting against the "absurd and wasteful isolation" of the New Brotherhood. He asks me why instead of leaving the Church I did not join the Church Reform Union, why I did not attempt to widen the Church from within, and why we in Elgood Street are not now in organic connection with the new Broad Church settlement in East London. I believe I have written him rather a sharp letter; I could not help it. It was borne in on me to tell him that it is all owing to him and his brethren that we are in the muddle we are in to-day. Miracle is to our time what the law was to the early Christians. We must make up our minds about it one way or the other. And if we decide to throw it over as Paul threw over the law, then we must fight as he did. There is no help in subterfuge, no help in anything but a perfect sincerity. We must come out of it. The ground must be cleared; then may come the re-building. Religion itself, the peace of generations to come, is at stake. If we could wait indefinitely while the Church widened, well and good. But we have but the one life, the one chance of saying the word or playing the part assigned us.'
On another occasion, in the convent garden, he broke out with—
'I often lie here, Flaxman, wondering at the way in which men become the slaves of some metaphysical word—personality, or intelligence, or what not! What meaning can they have as applied to God? Herbert Spencer is quite right. We no sooner attempt to define what we mean by a Personal God than we lose ourselves in labyrinths of language and logic. But why attempt it at all? I like that French saying, "Quand on me demande ce que c'est que Dieu, je l'ignore; quand on ne me le demande pas, je le sais très-bien!" No, we cannot realise Him in words—we can only live in Him, and die to Him!'