One cold Sunday afternoon in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a young Dr. Edmondson, an able young physician, just set up for himself as a consultant, who had only lately attached himself to Elsmere, and was now helping him with eagerness to organise a dispensary. Young Edmondson and Flaxman exchanged a few words on Elsmere's lecture, and then the doctor said abruptly,—

'I don't like his looks nor his voice. How long has he been hoarse like that?'

'More or less for the last month. He is very much worried by it himself, and talks of clergyman's throat. He had a touch of it, it appears, once in the country.'

'Clergyman's throat?' Edmondson shook his head dubiously. 'It may be. I wish he would let me overhaul him.'

'I wish he would!' said Flaxman devoutly. 'I will see what I can do. I will get hold of Mrs. Elsmere.'

Meanwhile Robert and Catherine had driven home together. As they entered the study she caught his hands, a suppressed and exquisite passion gleaming in her face.

'You did not explain Him! You never will!'

He stood, held by her, his gaze meeting hers. Then in an instant his face changed, blanched before her—he seemed to gasp for breath—she was only just able to save him from falling. It was apparently another swoon of exhaustion. As she knelt beside him on the floor, having done for him all she could, watching his return to consciousness, Catherine's look would have terrified any of those who loved her. There are some natures which are never blind, never taken blissfully unawares, and which taste calamity and grief to the very dregs.

'Robert, to-morrow you will see a doctor?' she implored him when at last he was safely in bed—white, but smiling.

He nodded.

'Send for Edmondson. What I mind most is this hoarseness,' he said, in a voice that was little more than a tremulous whisper.

Catherine hardly closed her eyes all night. The room, the house, seemed to her stifling, oppressive, like a grave. And, by ill luck, with the morning came a long expected letter, not indeed from the squire, but about the squire. Robert had been for some time expecting a summons to Murewell. The squire had written to him last in October from Clarens, on the Lake of Geneva. Since then weeks had passed without bringing Elsmere any news of him at all. Meanwhile the growth of the New Brotherhood had absorbed its founder, so that the inquiries which should have been sent to Murewell had been postponed. The letter which reached him now was from old Meyrick. 'The squire has had another bad attack, and is much weaker. But his mind is clear again, and he greatly desires to see you. If you can, come to-morrow.'

'His mind is clear again!' Horrified by the words and by the images they called up, remorseful also for his own long silence, Robert sprang up from bed, where the letter had been brought to him, and presently appeared downstairs, where Catherine, believing him safely captive for the morning, was going through some household business.

'I must go, I must go!' he said as he handed her the letter. 'Meyrick puts it cautiously, but it may be the end!'

Catherine looked at him in despair.

'Robert, you are like a ghost yourself, and I have sent for Dr. Edmondson.'

'Put him off till the day after to-morrow. Dear little wife, listen; my voice is ever so much better. Murewell air will do me good.' She turned away to hide the tears in her eyes. Then she tried fresh persuasions, but it was useless. His look was glowing and restless. She saw he felt it a call impossible to disobey. A telegram was sent to Edmondson, and Robert drove off to Waterloo.

Out of the fog of London it was a mild, sunny winter's day. Robert breathed more freely with every mile. His eyes took note of every landmark in the familiar journey with a thirsty eagerness. It was a year and a half since he had travelled it. He forgot his weakness, the exhausting pressure and publicity of his new work. The past possessed him, thrust out the present. Surely he had been up to London for the day and was going back to Catherine!

At the station he hailed an old friend among the cabmen.

'Take me to the corner of the Murewell lane, Tom. Then you may drive on my bag to the Hall, and I shall walk over the common.'

The man urged on his tottering old steed with a will. In the streets of the little town Robert saw several acquaintances who stopped and stared at the apparition. Were the houses, the people real, or was it all a hallucination—his flight and his return, so unthought of yesterday, so easy and swift to-day?

By the time they were out on the wild ground between the market town and Murewell, Robert's spirits were as buoyant as thistle-down. He and the driver kept up an incessant gossip over the neighbourhood, and he jumped down from the carriage as the man stopped with the alacrity of a boy.

'Go on, Tom; see if I am not there as soon as you.'

'Looks most uncommon bad,' the man muttered to himself as his horse shambled off. 'Seems as spry as a lark all the same.'

Why, the gorse was out, positively out in January! and the thrushes were singing as though it were March. Robert stopped opposite a bush covered with timid half-opened blooms, and thought he had seen nothing so beautiful since he had last trodden that road in spring. Presently he was in the same cart-track he had crossed on the night of his confession to Catherine; he lingered beside the same solitary fir on the brink of the ridge. A winter world lay before him; soft brown woodland, or reddish heath and fern, struck sideways by the sun, clothing the earth's bareness everywhere—curling mists—blue points of distant hill—a gray luminous depth of sky.

The eyes were moist, the lips moved. There in the place of his old anguish he stood and blessed God!—not for any personal happiness, but simply for that communication of Himself which may make every hour of common living a revelation.

Twenty minutes later, leaving the park gate to his left, he hurried up the lane leading to the vicarage. One look! he might not be able to leave the squire later. The gate of the wood-path was ajar. Surely just inside it he should find Catherine in her garden hat, the white-frocked child dragging behind her! And there was the square stone house, the brown cornfield, the red-brown woods! Why, what had the man been doing with the study? White blinds showed it was a bedroom now. Vandal! Besides, how could the boys have free access except to that ground-floor room? And all that pretty stretch of grass under the acacia had been cut up into stiff little lozenge-shaped beds, filled, he supposed, in summer with the properest geraniums. He should never dare to tell that to Catherine.

He stood and watched the little significant signs of change in this realm, which had been once his own, with a dissatisfied mouth, his undermind filled the while with tempestuous yearning and affection. In that upper room he had lain through that agonised night of crisis; the dawn-twitterings of the summer birds seemed to be still in his ears. And there, in the distance, was the blue wreath of smoke hanging over Mile End. Ah! the new cottages must be warm this winter. The children did not lie in the wet any longer—thank God! Was there time just to run down to Irwin's cottage, to have a look at the Institute?

He had been standing on the farther side of the road from the rectory that he might not seem to be spying out the land and his successor's ways too closely. Suddenly he found himself clinging to a gate near him that led into a field. He was shaken by a horrible struggle for breath. The self seemed to be foundering in a stifling sea, and fought like a drowning thing. When the moment passed, he looked round him bewildered, drawing his hand across his eyes. The world had grown black—the sun seemed to be scarcely shining. Were those the sounds of children's voices on the hill, the rumbling of a cart—or was it all sight and sound alike, mirage and delirium?

With difficulty, leaning on his stick as though he were a man of seventy, he groped his way back to the Park. There he sank down, still gasping, among the roots of one of the great cedars near the gate. After a while the attack passed off and he found himself able to walk on. But the joy, the leaping pulse of half an hour ago, were gone from his veins. Was that the river—the house? He looked at them with dull eyes. All the light was lowered. A veil seemed to lie between him and the familiar things.

However, by the time he reached the door of the Hall will and nature had reasserted themselves, and he knew where he was and what he had to do.

Vincent flung the door open with his old lordly air.

'Why, sir! Mr. Elsmere!'

The butler's voice began on a note of joyful surprise, sliding at once into one of alarm. He stood and stared at this ghost of the old rector.

Elsmere grasped his hand, and asked him to take him into the dining-room and give him some wine before announcing him. Vincent ministered to him with a long face, pressing all the alcoholic resources of the Hall upon him in turn. The squire was much better, he declared, and had been carried down to the library.

'But, lor, sir, there ain't much to be said for your looks neither—seems as if London didn't suit you, sir.'

Elsmere explained feebly that he had been suffering from his throat, and had overtired himself by walking over the common. Then, recognising from a distorted vision of himself in a Venetian mirror hanging by that something of his natural colour had returned to him, he rose and bade Vincent announce him.

'And Mrs. Darcy?' he asked, as they stepped out into the hall again.

'Oh, Mrs. Darcy, sir, she's very well,' said the man, but, as it seemed to Robert, with something of an embarrassed air.

He followed Vincent down the long passage—haunted by old memories, by the old sickening sense of mental anguish—to the curtained door. Vincent ushered him in. There was a stir of feet, and a voice, but at first he saw nothing. The room was very much darkened. Then Meyrick emerged into distinctness.

'Squire, here is Mr. Elsmere! Well, Mr. Elsmere, sir, I'm sure we're very much obliged to you for meeting the squire's wishes so promptly. You'll find him poorly, Mr. Elsmere, but mending—oh yes, mending, sir—no doubt of it.'

Elsmere began to perceive a figure by the fire. A bony hand was advanced to him out of the gloom.

'That'll do, Meyrick. You won't be wanted till the evening.'

The imperious note in the voice struck Robert with a sudden sense of relief. After all, the squire was still capable of trampling on Meyrick.

In another minute the door had closed on the old doctor, and the two men were alone. Robert was beginning to get used to the dim light. Out of it the squire's face gleamed almost as whitely as the tortured marble of the Medusa just above their heads.

'It's some inflammation in the eyes,' the squire explained briefly, 'that's made Meyrick set up all this d—d business of blinds and shutters. I don't mean to stand it much longer. The eyes are better, and I prefer to see my way out of the world, if possible.'

'But you are recovering?' Robert said, laying his hand affectionately on the old man's knee.

'I have added to my knowledge,' said the squire drily. 'Like Heine, I am qualified to give lectures in heaven on the ignorance of doctors on earth. And I am not in bed, which I was last week. For Heaven's sake don't ask questions. If there is a loathsome subject on earth it is the subject of the human body. Well, I suppose my message to you dragged you away from a thousand things you had rather be doing. What are you so hoarse for? Neglecting yourself as usual, for the sake of "the people," who wouldn't even subscribe to bury you? Have you been working up the Apocrypha as I recommended you last time we met?'

Robert smiled.

'For the last four months, Squire, I have been doing two things with neither of which had you much sympathy in old days—holiday-making and "slumming."'

'Oh, I remember,' interrupted the squire hastily. 'I was low last week, and read the Church papers by way of a counter-irritant. You have been starting a new religion, I see. A new religion! Humph!'

The great head fell forward, and through the dusk Robert caught the sarcastic gleam of the eyes.

'You are hardly the man to deny,' he said, undisturbed, 'that the old ones laissent À dÉsirer.'

'Because there are old abuses, is that any reason why you should go and set up a brand-new one—an ugly anachronism besides,' retorted the squire. 'However, you and I have no common ground—never had. I say know, you say feel. Where is the difference, after all, between you and any charlatan of the lot? Well, how is Madame de Netteville?'

'I have not seen her for six months,' Robert replied, with equal abruptness.

The squire laughed a little under his breath.

'What did you think of her?'

'Very much what you told me to think—intellectually,' replied Robert, facing him, but flushing with the readiness of physical delicacy.

'Well, I certainly never told you to think anything—morally,' said the squire. 'The word moral has no relation to her. Whom did you see there?'

The catechism was naturally most distasteful to its object, but Elsmere went through with it, the squire watching him for a while with an expression which had a spark of malice in it. It is not unlikely that some gossip of the Lady Aubrey sort had reached him. Elsmere had always seemed to him oppressively good. The idea that Madame de Netteville had tried her arts upon him was not without its piquancy.

But while Robert was answering a question he was aware of a subtle change in the squire's attitude—a relaxation of his own sense of tension. After a minute he bent forward, peering through the darkness. The squire's head had fallen back, his mouth was slightly open, and the breath came lightly, quiveringly through. The cynic of a moment ago had dropped suddenly into a sleep of more than childish weakness and defencelessness.

Robert remained bending forward, gazing at the man who had once meant so much to him.

Strange white face, sunk in the great chair! Behind it glimmered the Donatello figure, and the divine Hermes, a glorious shape in the dusk, looking scorn on human decrepitude. All round spread the dim walls of books. The life they had nourished was dropping into the abyss out of ken—they remained. Sixty years of effort and slavery to end so—a river lost in the sands!

Old Meyrick stole in again, and stood looking at the sleeping squire.

'A bad sign! a bad sign!' he said, and shook his head mournfully.

After he had made an effort to take some food which Vincent pressed upon him, Robert, conscious of a stronger physical malaise than had ever yet tormented him, was crossing the hall again, when he suddenly saw Mrs. Darcy at the door of a room which opened into the hall. He went up to her with a warm greeting.

'Are you going in to the squire? Let us go together.'

She looked at him with no surprise, as though she had seen him the day before, and as he spoke she retreated a step into the room behind her, a curious film, so it seemed to him, darkening her small gray eyes.

'The squire is not here. He is gone away. Have you seen my white mice? Oh, they are such darlings! Only, one of them is ill, and they won't let me have the doctor.'

Her voice sank into the most pitiful plaintiveness. She stood in the middle of the room, pointing with an elfish finger to a large cage of white mice which stood in the window. The room seemed full besides of other creatures. Robert stood rooted, looking at the tiny withered figure in the black dress, its snowy hair and diminutive face swathed in lace, with a perplexity into which there slipped an involuntary shiver. Suddenly he became aware of a woman by the fire, a decent, strong-looking body in gray, who rose as his look turned to her. Their eyes met; her expression and the little jerk of her head towards Mrs. Darcy, who was now standing by the cage coaxing the mice with the weirdest gestures, were enough. Robert turned, and went out sick at heart. The careful exquisite beauty of the great hall struck him as something mocking and anti-human.

No one else in the house said a word to him of Mrs. Darcy. In the evening the squire talked much at intervals, but in another key. He insisted on a certain amount of light, and, leaning on Robert's arm, went feebly round the bookshelves. He took out one of the volumes of the Fathers that Newman had given him.

'When I think of the hours I wasted over this barbarous rubbish,' he said, his blanched fingers turning the leaves vindictively, 'and of the other hours I maundered away in services and self-examination! Thank Heaven, however, the germ of revolt and sanity was always there. And when once I got to it, I learnt my lesson pretty quick.'

Robert paused, his kind inquiring eyes looking down on the shrunken squire.

'Oh, not one you have any chance of learning, my good friend,' said the other aggressively. 'And after all it's simple. Go to your grave with your eyes open—that's all. But men don't learn it, somehow. Newman was incapable—so are you. All the religions are nothing but so many vulgar anÆsthetics, which only the few have courage to refuse.'

'Do you want me to contradict you?' said Robert, smiling; 'I am quite ready.'

The squire took no notice. Presently, when he was in his chair again, he said abruptly, pointing to a mahogany bureau in the window, 'The book is all there—both parts, first and second. Publish it if you please. If not, throw it into the fire. Both are equally indifferent to me. It has done its work; it has helped me through half a century of living.'

'It shall be to me a sacred trust,' said Elsmere with emotion. 'Of course if you don't publish it, I shall publish it.'

'As you please. Well, then, if you have nothing more rational to tell me about, tell me of this ridiculous Brotherhood of yours.'

Robert, so adjured, began to talk, but with difficulty. The words would not flow, and it was almost a relief when in the middle that strange creeping sleep overtook the squire again.

Meyrick, who was staying in the house, and who had been coming in and out through the evening, eyeing Elsmere, now that there was more light on the scene, with almost as much anxiety and misgiving as the squire, was summoned. The squire was put into his carrying-chair. Vincent and a male attendant appeared, and he was borne to his room, Meyrick peremptorily refusing to allow Robert to lend so much as a finger to the performance. They took him up the library stairs, through the empty book-rooms and that dreary room which had been his father's, and so into his own. By the time they set him down he was quite awake and conscious again.

'It can't be said that I follow my own precepts,' he said to Robert grimly as they put him down. 'Not much of the open eye about this. I shall sleep myself into the unknown as sweetly as any saint in the calendar.'

Robert was going when the squire called him back.

'You'll stay to-morrow, Elsmere?'

'Of course, if you wish it.'

The wrinkled eyes fixed him intently.

'Why did you ever go?'

'As I told you before, Squire, because there was nothing else for an honest man to do.'

The squire turned round with a frown.

'What the deuce are you dawdling about, Benson? Give me my stick and get me out of this.'

By midnight all was still in the vast pile of Murewell. Outside, the night was slightly frosty. A clear moon shone over the sloping reaches of the park; the trees shone silverly in the cold light, their black shadows cast along the grass. Robert found himself quartered in the Stuart room, where James II. had slept, and where the tartan hangings of the ponderous carved bed, and the rose and thistle reliefs of the walls and ceilings, untouched for two hundred years, bore witness to the loyal preparations made by some bygone Wendover. He was mortally tired, but by way of distracting his thoughts a little from the squire, and that other tragedy which the great house sheltered somewhere in its walls, he took from his coat-pocket a French Anthologie which had been Catherine's birthday gift to him, and read a little before he fell asleep.

Then he slept profoundly—the sleep of exhaustion. Suddenly he found himself sitting up in bed, his heart beating to suffocation, strange noises in his ears.

A cry 'Help!' resounded through the wide empty galleries.

He flung on his dressing-gown, and ran out in the direction of the squire's room.

The hideous cries and scuffling grew more apparent as he reached it. At that moment Benson, the man who had helped to carry the squire, ran up.

'My God, sir!' he said, deadly white, 'another attack!'

The squire's room was empty, but the door into the lumber-room adjoining it was open, and the stifled sounds came through it.

They rushed in and found Meyrick struggling in the grip of a white figure, that seemed to have the face of a fiend and the grip of a tiger. Those old bloodshot eyes—those wrinkled hands on the throat of the doctor—horrible!

They released poor Meyrick, who staggered bleeding into the squire's room. Then Robert and Benson got the squire back by main force. The whole face was convulsed, the poor shrunken limbs rigid as iron. Meyrick, who was sitting gasping, by a superhuman effort of will mastered himself enough to give directions for a strong opiate. Benson managed to control the madman while Robert found it. Then between them they got it swallowed.

But nature had been too quick for them. Before the opiate could have had time to work, the squire shrank together like a puppet of which the threads are loosened, and fell heavily sideways out of his captors' hands on to the bed. They laid him there, tenderly covering him from the January cold. The swollen eyelids fell, leaving just a thread of white visible underneath, the clenched hands slowly relaxed; the loud breathing seemed to be the breathing of death.

Meyrick, whose wound on the head had been hastily bound up, threw himself beside the bed. The night-light beyond cast a grotesque shadow of him on the wall, emphasising, as though in mockery, the long straight back, the ragged whiskers, the strange ends and horns of the bandage. But the passion in the old face was as purely tragic as any that ever spoke through the lips of an Antigone or a Gloucester.

'The last—the last!' he said, choked, the tears falling down his lined cheeks on to the squire's hand. 'He can never rally from this. And I was fool enough to think yesterday I had pulled him through!'

Again a long gaze of inarticulate grief; then he looked up at Robert.

'He wouldn't have Benson to-night. I slept in the next room with the door ajar. A few minutes ago I heard him moving. I was up in an instant, and found him standing by that door, peering through, bare-footed, a wind like ice coming up. He looked at me, frowning, all in a flame. "My father," he said—"my father—he went that way—what do you want here? Keep back!" I threw myself on him; he had something sharp which scratched me on the temple; I got that away from him, but it was his hands'—and the old man shuddered. 'I thought they would have done for me before any one could hear, and that then he would kill himself as his father did.'

Again he hung over the figure on the bed—his own withered hand stroking that of the squire with a yearning affection.

'When was the last attack?' asked Robert sadly.

'A month ago, sir, just after they got back. Ah, Mr. Elsmere, he suffered. And he's been so lonely. No one to cheer him, no one to please him with his food—to put his cushions right—to coax him up a bit, and that—and his poor sister too, always there before his eyes. Of course he would stand to it he liked to be alone. But I'll never believe men are made so unlike one to the other. The Almighty meant a man to have a wife or a child about him when he comes to the last. He missed you, sir, when you went away. Not that he'd say a word, but he moped. His books didn't seem to please him, nor anything else. I've just broke my heart over him this last year.'

There was silence a moment in the big room, hung round with the shapes of bygone Wendovers. The opiate had taken effect. The squire's countenance was no longer convulsed. The great brow was calm; a more than common dignity and peace spoke from the long peaked face. Robert bent over him. The madman, the cynic, had passed away: the dying scholar and thinker lay before him.

'Will he rally?' he asked, under his breath.

Meyrick shook his head.

'I doubt it. It has exhausted all the strength he had left. The heart is failing rapidly. I think he will sleep away. And, Mr. Elsmere, you go—go and sleep. Benson and I'll watch. Oh, my scratch is nothing, sir. I'm used to a rough-and-tumble life. But you go. If there's a change we'll wake you.'

Elsmere bent down and kissed the squire's forehead tenderly, as a son might have done. By this time he himself could hardly stand. He crept away to his own room, his nerves still quivering with the terror of that sudden waking, the horror of that struggle.

It was impossible to sleep. The moon was at the full outside. He drew back the curtains, made up the fire, and, wrapping himself in a fur coat which Flaxman had lately forced upon him, sat where he could see the moonlit park, and still be within the range of the blaze.

As the excitement passed away a reaction of feverish weakness set in. The strangest whirlwind of thoughts fled through him in the darkness, suggested very often by the figures on the seventeenth-century tapestry which lined the walls. Were those the trees in the wood-path? Surely that was Catherine's figure, trailing—and that dome—strange! Was he still walking in Grey's funeral procession, the Oxford buildings looking sadly down? Death here! Death there! Death everywhere, yawning under life from the beginning! The veil which hides the common abyss, in sight of which men could not always hold themselves and live, is rent asunder, and he looks shuddering into it.

Then the image changed, and in its stead, that old familiar image of the river of Death took possession of him. He stood himself on the brink; on the other side were Grey and the squire. But he felt no pang of separation, of pain; for he himself was just about to cross and join them! And during a strange brief lull of feeling the mind harboured image and expectation alike with perfect calm.

Then the fever-spell broke—the brain cleared—and he was terribly himself again. Whence came it—this fresh inexorable consciousness? He tried to repel it, to forget himself, to cling blindly, without thought, to God's love and Catherine's. But the anguish mounted fast. On the one hand, this fast-growing certainty, urging and penetrating through every nerve and fibre of the shaken frame; on the other, the ideal fabric of his efforts and his dreams, the New Jerusalem of a regenerate faith; the poor, the loving, and the simple walking therein!

'My God! my God! no time, no future!'

In his misery he moved to the uncovered window, and stood looking through it, seeing and not seeing. Outside, the river, just filmed with ice, shone under the moon; over it bent the trees, laden with hoar-frost. Was that a heron, rising for an instant, beyond the bridge, in the unearthly blue?

And quietly—heavily—like an irrevocable sentence, there came, breathed to him as it were from that winter cold and loneliness, words that he had read an hour or two before, in the little red book beside his hand—words in which the gayest of French poets has fixed, as though by accident, the most tragic of all human cries—

'Quittez le long espoir, et les vastes pensÉes.'

He sank on his knees, wrestling with himself and with the bitter longing for life, and the same words rang through him, deafening every cry but their own.

'Quittez—quittez—le long espoir et les vastes pensÉes!'