Robert Elsmere

In his Oxford life Robert surrendered himself to the best and most stimulating influences of the place, just as he had done at school. He was a youth of many friends, by virtue...

It was the first of June, and the spell of warmth in which Robert Elsmere had arrived was still maintaining itself. An intelligent foreigner dropped into the flower-sprinkled va...

Mary Backhouse, the girl whom Catherine had been visiting with regularity for many weeks, and whose frail life was this evening nearing a terrible and long-expected crisis, was...

The following morning about noon, Rose, who had been coaxed and persuaded by Catherine, much against her will, into taking a singing class at the school, closed the school door...

Catherine was much perplexed as to how she was to carry out her resolution; she pondered over it through much of the night. She was painfully anxious to make Elsmere understand...

The evening of the Murewell Hall dinner-party proved to be a date of some importance in the lives of two or three persons. Rose was not likely to forget it; Langham carried abou...

Meanwhile the poor poisoned folk at Mile End lived and apparently throve, in defiance of all the laws of the universe. Robert, as soon as he found that radical measures were for...

Meanwhile downstairs a curious little scene was passing, watched by Langham, who, in his usual anti-social way, had retreated into a corner of his own as soon as another visitor...

Naturally, it was during their two months of autumn travel that Elsmere and Catherine first realized in detail what Elsmere’s act was to mean to them, as husband and wife, in th...

The festal tea had begun and Mrs. Thornburgh was presiding. Opposite to her, on the vicar’s left, sat the formidable rector’s wife. Poor Mrs. Thornburgh had said to herself as s...

‘I cannot bear it!’ she said to Robert at night in their room. ‘I cannot bear it! I hear it always in my ears: “What hast thou done with thy sister?” Oh, Robert, don’t mind, dea...

Catherine’s later convalescence dwelt in her mind in after years as a time of peculiar softness and peace. Her baby-girl throve; Robert had driven the Squire and Henslowe out of...

About four o’clock on the afternoon of the day which was to be marked in the annals of Long Whindale as that of Mrs. Thornburgh’s ‘high tea,’ that lady was seated in the vicarag...

After dinner, Lady Charlotte fixed herself at first on Catherine, whose quiet dignity during the somewhat trying ordeal of the dinner had impressed her, but a few minutes’ talk...

‘I saw the president of the club yesterday,’ said Flaxman, looking out. ‘He is an old friend of mine--a most intelligent fanatic--met him on a Madison House Fund committee last...

It was a brilliant afternoon toward the end of May. The spring had been unusually cold and late, and it was evident from the general aspect of the lonely Westmoreland valley of...

The day after Elsmere’s return from Murewell, where he left the Squire still alive (the telegram announcing the death reached Bedford Square a few hours after Robert’s arrival),...

The next morning Catherine, finding that Robert still slept on, after their usual waking time, and remembering his exhaustion of the night before, left him softly, and kept the...

But the problems of these two lives was not solved by a burst of feeling. Without that determining impulse of love and pity in Catherine’s heart the salvation of an exquisite bo...

The scene in which the next act of this unpretending history is to run its course is of a very different kind. In place of the rugged northern nature--a nature wild and solitary...

The next day was Sunday. Langham, who was as depressed and home-sick as ever, with a certain new spice of restlessness, not altogether intelligible to himself, thrown in, could...

It was the afternoon of Good Friday. Catherine had been to church at St. Paul’s, and Robert, though not without some inward struggle, had accompanied her. Their mid-day meal was...

Robert was very nearly reduced to despair by the scene with Catherine we have described. He spent a brooding and miserable hour in the vicar’s study afterward, making up his min...

‘Now, having seen our sight,’ said Robert, as they left the great mass of Murewell behind them, ‘come and see our scandal. Both run by the same proprietor, if you please. There...

He walked on fast toward Beaumont Street, but by the time he reached his destination midnight had struck. He made his way into his room where the fire was still smouldering, and...

But Robert was some time in finding his opening, in realizing any fraction of his dream. At first he tried work under the Broad Church Vicar to whom Grey had introduced him. He...

Robert, tired and sick at heart, felt himself in no mood this evening for a dinner-party in which conversation would be treated more or less as a fine art. Liberal Catholicism h...

Meanwhile, as if to complete the circle of pain with which poor Catherine’s life was compassed, it began to be plain to her that, in spite of the hard and mocking tone Rose gene...

Meanwhile, in defiance of the Inferno outside, festal preparations were being made in a little house on Campden Hill. Lamps were lit; in the drawing-room chairs were pushed back...

It was nothing, however, but the figures of Rose and Langham strolling round the garden. A bystander would have been puzzled by the sudden knitting of Catherine’s brows over it.

The next three months were the bitterest months of Elsmere’s life. They were marked by anguished mental struggle, by a consciousness of painful separation from the soul nearest...

One cold Sunday afternoon, in January, Flaxman, descending the steps of the New Brotherhood, was overtaken by a Dr. Edmondson, an able young physician, just set up for himself a...

‘In the first place, my dear aunt,’ said Mr. Flaxman, throwing himself back in his chair in front of Lady Charlotte’s drawing-room fire, ‘you may spare your admonitions, because...

The next fortnight was a time of truce. Elsmere neither read nor reasoned. He spent his days in the school, in the village, pottering about the Mile End cottages, or the new ins...

As may be imagined, the ‘Churton Advertiser’ did not find its way to Murewell. It was certainly no pressure of social disapproval that made the Squire go down to Mile End in tha...

The next morning after breakfast the Rectory party were in the garden; the gentlemen smoking, Catherine and her sister scrolling arm in arm among the flowers. Catherine’s vague...

In the weeks which followed--weeks often of mental and physical depression, caused by his sense of personal loss and by the influence of an overworked state he could not be got...

In half an hour from the time Mr. Grey’s door closed upon him, Elsmere had caught a convenient cross-country train, and had left the Oxford towers and spires, the shrunken summe...

Before, however, we go on to chronicle the ultimate success or failure of Mrs. Thornburgh as a match-maker, it may be well to inquire a little more closely into the antecedents...

That same afternoon Robert started on a walk to a distant farm, where one of his Sunday-school boys lay recovering from rheumatic fever. The rector had his pocket full of articl...

There were one or two curious points connected with the beginnings of Elsmere’s venture in North R---- one of which may just be noticed here. Wardlaw, his predecessor and collea...

Meanwhile the Leyburns were at Burwood again. Rose’s summer, indeed, was much varied by visits to country houses--many of them belonging to friends and acquaintances of the Flax...

A week later Elsmere was startled to find himself detained, after his story-telling, by a trio of workmen, asking on behalf of some thirty or forty members of the North R---- Cl...

And after this little scene, through the busy exciting weeks of the season which followed, Robert taxed to the utmost on all sides, yielded to the impulse of silence more and more.

Two days later they were in London again. Robert was a great deal better, and beginning to kick against invalid restraints. All men have their pet irrationalities. Elsmere’s irr...

He shut the door softly, and went downstairs again. It was between ten and eleven. The lights in the lower passage were just extinguished; everyone else in the house had gone to...

A hot July had well begun, but still Elsmere was toiling on in Elgood Street, and could not persuade himself to think of a holiday. Catherine and the child he had driven away mo...

The saddest moment in the lives of these two persons whose history we have followed for so long, was over and done with. Henceforward to the end Elsmere and his wife were lovers...

Ten days after Langham’s return to Oxford, Elsmere received a characteristic letter from him, asking whether their friendship was to be considered as still existing or at an end...

It, was the beginning of April. The gorse was fast extending its golden empire over the commons. On the sunny slopes of the copses primroses were breaking through the hazel root...

After the little incident recorded at the end of the preceding chapter, Hugh Flaxman may be forgiven if, as he walked home along the valley that night toward the farmhouse where...